A police officer responds to a post on Glenn Greenwald's blog concerning the detention of Jose Padilla. I have not heard this argument put any better.
What strikes me in reading the account of Jose Padilla's maltreatment at the hands of the government is the contrast with what I experience as a municipal police officer. The seizure of a human being is often underappreciated by those who have never experienced it and by those who carry it out. However, even the basic act of confinement by the government is a profound act of power that can easily be trivialized when the one confined is presumed to be guilty.
I and my fellow officers work in an environment that constantly reinforces the fact that when we arrest someone we assume a responsibility for their welfare for the duration of the time we hold them. As one can imagine, some prisoners will act in ways while confined that requires the use of force against them and thus worsen their experience. However, even the vast majority who are compliant during their confinement cannot properly be viewed as anything other than someone who has been placed into a radically different realm of human experience even though they have some access to the outside world and avenues to gain their release prior to the initiation of court proceedings.
To find oneself in the situation of Mr. Padilla with no contact and no assurance of any aspect whatsoever of your future is something that isn't even known by the most closely confined inmates in a super-max prison where their guilt has already been adjudicated. Even those inmates have access to the judicial system. To defend even the basic character of Mr. Padilla's confinement absolutely requires that the defender assume that Mr. Padilla is guilty even if they are unwilling to acknowledge that belief. To allow the executive branch, on its own initiative, to operate on this basis is something that I, who routinely deal with those accused of crimes, can scarcely imagine exists outside of the pages of 1984.
Regardless of Mr. Padilla's genuine guilt or innocence of any act, the bare facts of his confinement make an absolute mockery of the death of every soldier, sailor, airman or police officer who has ever been killed in the performance of their duties. To retort that this raw power is necessary to "protect Americans" is to assume that there is nothing in being a citizen of this nation for any of us beyond the mere fact of being alive. My own judgment is that this is not what the signers of the Declaration of Independence had in mind when they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the task of creating the United States of America and it horrifies me that those who have taken oaths to defend the Constitution view their fellow citizens as having no greater aspirations as Americans than craven physical safety.
If they are right and I am wrong then being American is little more than being situated in a certain place on the globe with no claim to moral authority beyond what can be enforced through bullets and bombs. Then we are little more than a street gang with assertions of control over our turf. Then we are truly lost.
Diana Powe | 10.10.06 - 6:25 pm | # Original comment
Our Congress just made the indefinite detention and torture of American Citizens on American soil without charge or judicial review/redress the legal authority of the President of the United States. The government at of the Soviet Union had an excellent track record against terrorism. I hardly think the U.S.S.R. should be our model.