Keep my family safe--screw everyone else

The most glaring omission in the rhetoric coming from President Obama justifying his about-face on Guantámano (which utilized, as The Daily Show demonstrated last week, many of Bush’s exact phrases) is any recognition that some of the individuals held there might be innocent.

What a sorry commentary on the state of our nation and our fading civil libertarian traditions that the great liberal icon of the age can wax on about his ferocious determination to protect ‘the American people’ as a collectivity, while refusing protection to individuals facing false accusations. While ignoring the rule of law and the presumption of innocence, he dares to declare that certain unjudged, untried prisoners are dangers to the populace simply because he says so. (W at least heard it directly from God.)

Last week, as Obama rationalized his continuation of the Bush-era disdain for habeus corpus, a 43-year-old convicted child rapist won a new trial after an appellate court found that his 1985 conviction was flawed. Bernard Baran was the first victim of the notorious ‘child care sex abuse’ witchhunts, but his case is less well-known than that of the Los Angeles McMartins. He almost certainly never laid a finger on any of the children in his care, but being a gay high school dropout with no money, he couldn’t resist the judicial lynching he was subjected to at age 19. [Image: Baran leaving jail in 2007]

Baran then spent 22 years in prison, and as an accused child molester that turned out to be not so nice. He was raped on his fourth day of incarceration and over his two decades locked up suffered numerous broken bones and other injuries. Some of his original accusers, including children of violent parents with drug addiction problems, immediately recanted, but as in the McMartin case, those denials were not taken seriously—only the accusations. An openly homophobic prosecutor led the charge and, according to Baran’s defense committee, promised child witnesses a trip to Macdonalds if they said yes to all his questions.

The Christian-led sex panic and anti-gay crusade brought about these horrific abuses, but instead of reminding us that mass political and religious hysteria can lead to gross injustices that require an iron commitment to due process, Obama is ceding the moral high ground to right-wing screech radio and the basest, most selfish instincts of our society. And he does so while standing in front of the Constitution, a document increasingly more revered than heeded.

[Baran, 19, at the time of his arrest.]