habeas schmabeas

i know that i have been waxing political as of late in my bulletins & blogs, but i cannot help it. we are living in a turnstyle time.

when i am forty, the world will have changed drastically. from the looks of south america and the renationalizing of gas & telecom companies, there will be a new hybrid breed of capitalism. the gap between the economies of china & the states will have either lengthened or closed (due to outright merger) at the expense of our local economies.

when i am sixty there will be a generation of americans my age who fought in the iraq war & are missing limbs, suffering from ptsd, etc. it will be a strange time.

so, listen to this edition of this american life. it is free to download & discusses gitmo & habeas corpus. it is important to be informed to how the people we have "elected" are running the so-called show. i had to stop listening to the program at one point because i was so upset.

just think of how it is going to take us as a community to fill in the grave george bush, jr. has been digging for america.

[also, i found out about this cool site www.densho.org that has an archive of all the internment camp papers from japanese communities during wwii. check it out.]

The right of habeas corpus has been a part of our country's legal tradition longer than we've actually been a country. It means that our government has to explain why it's holding a person in custody. But now, the War on Terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that prisoners should not be covered by habeas—or even by the Geneva Conventions—because they're the most fearsome enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes?

Prologue.

Joseph Margulies, a lawyer for one of the detainees at Guantanamo, explains how the detention facility there was created to be an ideal interrogation facility. Any possible comfort, such as water or natural light, is controlled entirely by the interrogators. (3 minutes)

Act One.There's No U.S. in Habeas.

Jack Hitt explains how President Bush's War on Terror changed the rules for prisoners of war and how it is that under those rules, it'd be possible that someone whose classified file declares that they pose no threat to the United States could still be locked up indefinitely—potentially forever!—at Guantanamo. (24 minutes).

Act Two. September 11th, 1660.

Habeas corpus began in England. And recently, 175 members of the British parliament filed a "friend of the court" brief in one of the U.S. Supreme Court cases on habeas and Guantanamo—apparently, the first time in Supreme Court history that's happened. In their brief, the members of Parliament warn about the danger of suspending habeas: "During the British Civil War, the British created their own version of Guantanamo Bay and dispatched undesirable prisoners to garrisons off the mainland, beyond the reach of habeas corpus relief." In London, reporter Jon Ronson, author of Them: Adventures with Extremists, goes in search of what happened. (6 minutes)

Act Three. We Interrogate the Detainees.

Although more than 200 prisoners from the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay have been released, few of them have ever been interviewed on radio or on television in America. Jack Hitt conducts rare and surprising interviews with two former Guantanamo detainees about life in Guantanamo. (20 minutes)

Song: "The Clash," Know Your Rights