As I so often do, I find myself in the wee hours of the morning contemplating the way things is, and I started ruminating on the old standby topics of torture, spying, the Constitution. You know, all of that good stuff.
The good people of Reddit often give me inspiration, and in this case it was by pointing me to an article over on Sadly, No! which eviscerates a Newsweek writer for suggesting that the President should give everyone involved with illegal detainee treatment a pass. Nestled in between a lot of vulgarities and shouting is one of those golden little phrases that got the wheels in my head turning like mad:
Question: why did we ever develop the Geneva Conventions in the first place? Why does the Constitution ban cruel and unusual punishment? Hell, for that matter, why did we ever sign the goddamn Magna Carta*?
That is a good question.
It’s often a point of great annoyance to liberals and other loonies that the President is continually finding loopholes and catches in the wording of various laws (or using his surrogates to make the claim that he can sidestep them) in order to conduct business in a way that any decent human being would find downright reprehensible. Ignoring the pleas of Congress, spying on people with no oversight, allowing cruel treatment of detainees, the list goes on.
Bush uses his executive privilege and signing statements to ensure that Congress does not overstep the separation of powers. He as implicit ability to use spying methods in order to conduct the war. If enemies are not on U.S. soil or enemy combatants then they’re subject to neither the Constitution nor the Geneva Conventions.
What gets forgotten in the midst of all of it is just what Brad as SN! wrote: why did our country initially agree to all of these things?
Every single person reading this should, right now, stop for a moment and place yourself in the shoes of a founding father of this country. Imagine that you are drafting out the Bill of Rights, and placing in clauses such as protection from unwarranted search and seizure, cruel and unusual punishment, and trial by a jury of your peers. What you need to ask yourself is why you’re doing that, and what worldview you would have in order to inspire such a thing.
Ignoring the obvious comments of “they kinda ignored women, blacks, non-landowners, and Indians”, the fact is that their intentions were not exclusive. There is not one rational person who could claim that when the founders of the United States wrote of life and liberty and protections from dictators, it was an exclusive club.
Folks, America was not meant to be a secret treehouse club. The idea wasn’t that all the members got these special privileges and the heck with everyone else. Jefferson, Franklin, Mason, Washington and the others felt that the world needed an overhaul. People, not just Americans, deserve protection from invasion by their leaders, from torture, from indefinite imprisonment without charge. These guys didn’t want America to be a fortress that left those outside to fend off the wolves.
This is why it becomes downright painful to hear people say that “X don’t deserve our protections because they aren’t Americans.” While it’s true that they aren’t included in our Constitution, this is a literal interpretation that bends over and takes a shit on the legacies of the founders and their vision. Theirs was an idea of humanity, not just Americans.
I’m not talking about “living document” interpretations, that’s a different school of thought entirely. All I’m asking is that we realize that those men signed the document because they felt that all people deserved something better, not to give themselves an exclusive club.
