WASHINGTON — If you stand on the edge of the waterfront, you can peer across the river and see battle scars on the world’s largest office building; no amount of plastic surgery will ever return the Pentagon to its pre-Sept. 11, 2001 appearance.
But compared to the World Trade Center, the government structure is as pristine as one of Saddam Hussein’s decadent presidential palaces.
Slamming American Airlines Flight 77 into the symbol of American military power may well have been an act of war; it was, after all, an attack on the United States’ armed forces. But crashing American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 into the twin towers was an act of terrorism.
Yet liberals seem to have had their memories cleansed in sync with Ground Zero. Tie-dye organizations like Amnesty International are protesting the treatment of terrorist prisoners at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, alleging that detainees should either be treated as proper members of an army or as American citizens but, surely not as the despicable terrorists they truly are.
When al Qaeda members targeted the New York landmarks they forfeited any appearances of being a dignified foreign military and instead showed their real faces, those of a bunch of rogue thugs whose understanding of the Koran is about as sound as Howard Dean’s comprehension of the Deep South.
In terms of international law, detainees at Camp X-Ray have no standing, either. Part III, Section I, Article 17 of the Geneva Convention states, “Every prisoner of war, when questioned on the subject, is bound to give only his surname, first names and rank, date of birth and army, regimental, personal or serial number, or failing this, equivalent information.” Now blame Osama’s personnel secretary if you will, but none of these men have a rank or serial number; baseball teams have a more complex identification system than al Qaeda (“Jeter, Derek; Short Stop; June 26, 1974; New York Yankees; no. 2”).
Realizing al Qaeda to be about as credible a military as the French Army, the case for offering posh privileges to Guantanamo prisoners becomes confined to the U.S. Constitution.
But, unfortunately for liberals, the U.S. Constitution only extends its protections to citizens. So while John Walker Lindh is given a plethora of civil rights, those non-Americans who swore allegiance to Mr. bin Laden have no similar entitlements. (Incidentally, the affording of such rights to Mr. Lindh is actually proof that al Qaeda is not a genuine military organization, since taking up of arms with a foreign army at war with the United States is an automatic forfeiture of citizenship.)
Furthermore, for those mindlessly yelling that holding prisoners without trial is an unprecedented act of anti-Americanism, the assertion is simply untrue. In 1869, William McCardle, a resident and citizen of the United States, was jailed indefinitely — and denied a writ of habeas corpus — for writing a series of editorials which took issue with the Reconstruction Acts. He was gaining enough support to overturn the Reconstruction Act and potentially destroy the union.
Consider the precedent: McCardle used non-violent means to protest United States law; Camp X-Ray’s residents used violent means to protest the entire United States. (And after recent reports of further traitorous acts, let’s not even pretend that these people are innocent; the “not guilty” chorus line in “Chicago” is more convincing than this bunch of jihadists.)
And the McCardle standard is essential to understanding the motives for keeping these prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. The only reason the 19th century writer was denied various rights was because he would have used them as a tool in the destruction of the very union they were meant to preserve; indeed, America was in a fragile and volatile state as slavery was becoming a thing of the past, and states which had recently seceded were reentering the Union.
America is once again vulnerable, with blood having recently been shed on our own soil, and al Qaeda would love nothing more than to use American rights as a means of mocking and destroying the nation on which radical Islam has sworn terror. To see the nauseating feasibility of this tactic, one needn’t look further than the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the “20th Hijacker,” where the French national has used the Sixth Amendment, which provides for the questioning of witnesses, to question the detainees at Guantanamo Bay as well as our other detainees at undisclosed locations around the world with the seemingly sole purpose of compromising U.S. intelligence and pitting the courts against the CIA.
But, thankfully, unlike Moussaoui, the Camp X-Ray prisoners were not detained in the United States but, rather, in rogue pockets of Afghanistan. To paraphrase “Law & Order,” if you’re going to play hardball in the United States, you had better learn American rules.
Mac VerStandig ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in rhetoric.