Boumedienne v. United States

The shame of the Lakhdar Boumedienne case—no doubt the first of many that will emerge from the Guantánamo dungeons—is not merely that an innocent man was subjected to grostesquely inhumane treatment.

The truly criminal behavior is not what was done to him by the thugs representing the U.S. government during his pointless seven-year detention. No, that an employee of the Bosnian equivalent of the Red Cross was picked up by American intelligence agents and flown to Cuba to be tortured and abused for seven years based on zero evidence is just the back story.

The real headliner is how our supposedly civilized society, from justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, past the legislative branch and down through a very substantial portion of public opinion, went along with it every step of the way. And continues to do so.

Unproven allegations about plans to attack a U.S. embassy were enough to drag Boumedienne, an Algerian relief worker living in a war zone, into open-ended custody while the entire American political class actively conspired to dismantle our treasured individual protections against the crushing power of the state. Centuries of distaste for the cruel procedures of the Star Chamber and the Inquisition went out the window as Bush, Cheney and half of Congress babbled on about ‘the worst of the worst’ and ‘terrorists’ conspiring against our safety. Evidence was not required.

Few dared to raise the question of whether, among the hundreds swept up in hasty dragnets during a war, some might be innocent.

The Boumedienne case led to two historic Supreme Court decisions in which a 5-4 majority defended the habeas corpus concept against the Bushite monarchy. What moral depravity could be operating in the mind of a Justice Scalia as he voted against Boumedienne’s right to a review of the evidence against him, adding inflammatory warnings about how the ruling in the prisoner’s favor would ‘cause more Americans to be killed’, as if Mr Boumedienne were a priori responsible for that by the fact of his arrest?

However, I see from the comments section following many of the news reports on the case that the utter lack of evidence against this man has no impact on the many true believers who object to the ‘constant criticism’ of our fighting men and ABC’s ‘sensationalism’. Ah well.