It was in January of this year that I received a letter from the executive director of Amnesty International saying, “This is one of the most important letters I have ever written.”  Recalling how for many years I wrote postcards to help free “prisoners of conscience” all over the world, I wondered what Amnesty was now concerned about.

 

Amnesty believes that the Congress must act quickly and decisively to reverse the United States’ course on human rights, presently and regrettably symbolized by (1) the abuses at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, (2) the practice of “extraordinary rendition” under which the United States transfers individuals for interrogation to countries with a record of using torture, and (3) the denial at military facilities like Guantanamo Bay of the right of detainees to file habeas corpus petitions with federal courts.

 

The restoration of habeas corpus rights in these cases would seem to address all three of these concerns. This principle – that all prisoners and detainees can challenge the fairness of their detention in front of an independent court – has been a cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon legal systems for 800 years. The protection of habeas corpus by the Congress in respect to detainees suspected of terrorist activities would send an unmistakable signal to the world that the U.S. has firmly righted itself on the issue of human rights in wartime.

 

What is habeas corpus?  It is a court proceeding by which the lights of a jail are turned on and the jailer is forced to show why the person is imprisoned. It could be that the person is in jail because he is a danger and a threat. In that case, the court would return the person to jail for further proceedings. 

 

But it could be (and in the case of many of the detainees at Guantanamo) that the detainee is in jail by mistake (has the same name as a dangerous ‘someone’). Or the detainee is in jail by fraud (was sold for bounty). Or the detainee was tortured into “confessing” something he did not do. Habeas corpus is the procedure that can uncover the mistake, detect the fraud, and expose the torture.

 

There are close to a thousand practicing attorneys in Bucks County.  Surely they learned about habeas corpus in law school. Why are they not loudly protesting the denial of this ancient principle in respect to detainees?

 

Our senator, Arlen Specter, is the sponsor of the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007 (S.185).  He should be applauded for this initiative.  Senator Bob Casey has not yet signed up as a co-sponsor.  Representative Patrick Murphy, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, should be urged to be a co-sponsor of the parallel House legislation (H.R. 1416).  As their constituents we should ask that they set aside the possible national embarrassment of having imprisoned hundreds of men for years without justice.

 

Larry Miller

New Britain, PA