Against The Use Of Detention Without Trial On The Us War On Terror

The Patriot Act reduced civil liberties in the US after 9/11. The act, a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, broadened the discretion of law enforcement and immigration authorities in detaining and deporting immigrants suspected of terrorism-related acts. The act also expanded the definition of terrorism to include domestic terrorism, thus enlarging the number of activities to which the Act's expanded law enforcement powers can be applied. Guantanamo Bay continues to be the loophole in the US's promise to never ratify detention without trial and torture on US soil; In parallel, Saudi Arabia and the UK have, in recent weeks, extended their detention without trial periods to extensive times (several months). On May 26, 2011, President Barack Obama signed a four-year extension of three key provi-sions in the USA Patriot Act: roving wiretaps, searches of business records and conducting surveillance of "lone wolves" - individuals suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to terrorist groups.

The Ineffective Mindset of Elimination of Freedoms

Rights can only be limited when there is objectively a very good reason to do so: i.e. one has either offended, or there exists evidence that has the potential to legally stand in court, in contrast with hearsay suspicions. If not so, then governments fuel anti-western ideologies, punish innocents and are subject to authoritarianism. The current mindset seems to be that at every occasion of a potential threat, rights must be removed from citizens. However, those rights are universal and should be treated as such, so as to maintain the basic democratic principles of individual sovereignty, justice and freedom which the western world stands on. Governments should take those rights for granted, as they do for their own citizens, and find other ways (more advanced intelligence services, etc.) to deal with potential threats. In the developed world, the right to Habeas Corpus and to defend accusations in an open court is sacrosanct. In the case of detention without trial, this right is lost, given that there are no official accusations in the first place. Hence, there is no way to prove innocence, or even unlawful charging. In effect, the existence of rights in our society does not originate from a need to protect or define the capacities or limitations placed upon individuals who are extremely singular in their capacity as citizens. These kinds of rights, which revolve around civil liberties and the protection of one's own sovereignty exist specifically to shelter and protect people of the general populace. In terms of detention without trial, the right to habeas corpus particularly revolves around protecting the anonymous stereotyped dark foreigner walking down the street, the foreigner about whom one does not know anything other than his looking "suspicious". This man's right to defend himself as well as the requirement of some degree of certainty before imprisonment is actually a question of real proportionality between the rights of everybody in society and a need to be able to have effective questioning of suspects. Yet, questioning obtained through detention without trial has hardly been reliable or even effective in terms of combating terrorism. Wikileaks documents published in April 2011 reveal that out of 270 prisoners kept in the detention camp, 26 were deemed to be of medium risk to public security, while only 7 appeared to be of high-risk. The rest were said to be of low-level risk or of "no foreseeable risk", and their reason for continued detention has been "anti-American sentiment". Hence, innocent people are detained under insupportable conditions and treated inhumanely for literally no reason other than the groundless suspicion of an officer of the law, who may be as arbitrary as he wishes in his decision to detain an individual. Even in the cases of higher threat assessment, the threat presented is estimated through incessant interrogations and quasi-torture acts which psychologically mutilate the detainee, making it impossible to attain credible accounts of terrorist activities, and thus to determine innocence or lack thereof. It is because of this treatment that often evidence attained through Guantanamo Bay detainees has been discredited in Higher Courts, dismissed as unreliable testimonies resulting from extreme sensory deprivation and psychological trauma.

The Accordance of Too Much Power to Governments

Detention without trial, and generally the loss of liberties, theoretically makes the state safer. However, in making the limiting or even total elimination of freedoms and sovereignty acceptable practice, this attempt at safety endangers citizens and their own autonomy. Rights are a fundamental safeguard against unlimited state authority and brutality; Habeas Corpus itself was passed in order for the King in the UK to not arbitrarily jail people for so-perceived treason (there is even some level of parallel here; terrorism is equally ill-defined and abstract as a threat). When the right to defend oneself from accusations is recognized as paramount to individual liberty, abusive states are not able to remove citizens from the map or commit abuses if they want to. Such latent authoritarian tendencies become an issue in countries like China and Saudi Arabia, where people are serially abused and deprived of their rights, and are even said to disappear without a trace. In recent years the USA has followed this path in Guantanamo, strengthening the security-at-all-costs effort with a more general disrespect for liberties. This is even more problematic, since the US is able to hide its brutality under the facade of "democratic rule", committing the atrocities usually related to detention without trial outside US soil. It also becomes apparent that giving states what is essentially carte blanche to disregard sovereign rights at will and under very hazy justification dangerously leads to the accumulation of excessive power at the hands of the government. The state exists to represent its citizens; should it gather too much control over them, it lets go of its role as a guide towards wellbeing and becomes an oppressive regime. A system of checks and balances, apart from elections, has to exist to moderate the state's capacity to abuse its power. Fundamental human rights such as the freedom of choice and individual autonomy are such safeguards, and allowing governments to disregard these at will sets a very dark tone for the evolution of the role of the state in the future. Especially in countries who already exhibit totalitarian leanings, such as China, continuing to allow the wavering of rights without evidence constitutes an open invitation for governments to take advantage of their powers and inflict them senselessly, endangering social equity and citizen autonomy and freedom. Finally, another evil of the war on terror is that it never ends. Hence, detention without trial is at this time not a merely a temporary suspension of safeguards from abusive authorities; it is permanent.

Strengthening Extremism

Detention without trial buys into the terrorist rhetoric and strengthens it from within. By denying people their liberty on the basis of fallacy and suspicion we as the developed world lose the moral high ground. In this spirit, recognizing the capacity to weaken the terrorist ideology of oppressed masses under the west's sphere of influence, the US has declared a hearts and minds campaign in Afghanistan. Refusing to treat individuals as equal on the basis of race or ethnicity makes terrorists seem as if they are fighting against a dictatorial regime, and hence legitimizes their rationale. By treating suspects as legal entities in possession of the same inalienable rights citizens are accorded with, a government denies terrorism the opportunity to present the East as martyrs and thus to rally support against the West. After all, it bears mentioning that Guantanamo has been a top recruiting tool for the discriminated-against minorities were treated as criminals on vague or inexistent suspicions, and denied the right to defend themselves in open court. Hence, even if security of people was the guiding force for every decision -however arbitrary- made by the government, it is not achieved with detention without trial whose net effect it to further enflame the anti-western ideology and add validity to terrorist recruitment tactics and justification.