My mom wasn't a big fan of Ronald Reagan (nominee for understatement of the year), but one of his judicial appointees might pass even her scrutiny. From Lex Alexander's Blog on the Run I found this post about the sentencing of the "Millenium bomber" Ahmed Ressam by District Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee.
He then posts an excerpt that you can read from the original remarks posted on Crooks and Liars. Here's the most important part of the quote:
Despite the fact that Mr. Ressam is not an American citizen and despite the fact that he entered this country intent upon killing American citizens, he received an effective, vigorous defense, and the opportunity to have his guilt or innocence determined by a jury of 12 ordinary citizens.
Most importantly, all of this occurred in the sunlight of a public trial. There were no secret proceedings, no indefinite detention, no denial of counsel.
The tragedy of September 11th shook our sense of security and made us realize that we, too, are vulnerable to acts of terrorism. Unfortunately, some believe that this threat renders our Constitution obsolete. This is a Constitution for which men and women have died and continue to die and which has made us a model among nations. If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won.
I think the policy that he is alluding to is one of the things that has bothered me most about the Bush administration. Their tendency to aggressively change the rules to serve their short term purposes is a long term fiasco. I'm sure they think it's necessary for security reasons or whatever, but I'm also sure that many bad things have been done for seemingly good reasons.
Many of my more conservative friends and colleagues perceive any condemnation or critique of the administration's policies towards the terrorists or "enemy combatants" to be a "liberal" tendency towards softness. Well, I can't think of anything I've heard or read from the "liberal" side that indicates that they want to be soft on the terrorists. No, they want justice as much as the conservatives do, but they don't want us to sacrifice our scruples in the process.
One of the reasons that America's system of due process has been held up as an ideal is that it compensates for the universally human habit of making mistakes. How often are people arrested because they were mistakenly identified by an eyewitness only to be cleared later by physical evidence? The system, while not perfect, provides for the opportunity to right the mistakes that we will inevitably make.
In the case of our round up and detention of suspected terrorists we need only look at the recent shooting of a misidentified suspect in London as evidence that there is a very good likelihood that we've nabbed a few innocent people. Of course I could be wrong, but without due process it becomes much harder to know.
On the practical level the administration's secrecy also denies us the true reward of our justice system, namely the ability to clearly define what is right and what is wrong, and what the penalties are for those who do wrong. In other words we aren't able to make an example out of those who are guilty because we can't prove to the world through the application of our system of justice that these men are evil. We can only ask the world to take our word for it, which just isn't good enough.
Finally the current policy also harms us in our relations with other countries. We look like we're willing to "talk the talk" as it relates to democratic ideals of justice, but we're not willing to "walk the walk." Or more specifically we look like we're willing to "walk the walk" only when the path is paved, but not when it's rocky.
