The Men Without A Country

This is a couple of days old, but it's an unbelievable reminder of the debased state of American moral clarity. From The LA TImes:

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a long-shot appeal filed on behalf of two Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay while the U.S. government tries to find a country to take them.

The men's plight has posed a dilemma for courts and a public relations problem for the Bush administration.

A federal judge said the detention of the ethnic Uighurs at the military prison in Cuba was unlawful but there was nothing courts could do. Without comment, the justices declined to consider an unusual direct appeal of that decision.

The men (Abu Bakker Qassim and A'Del Abdu Al-Hakim) were captured in 2001 in Pakistan. The next year, the U.S. military shipped them to Guantanamo along with hundreds of other suspected terrorists.

The military decided that the two men and 36 others — of more than 550 prisoners — were not "enemy combatants." The standard procedure is to send those people home. But Qassim and Al-Hakim could not be returned to China after last year's vindication because the United States suspects they would be tortured or killed.

Gee, if only the President had an audience with the Premier of China, say today, for example, to receive assurances that these Uighurs wouldn't be killed...

Here's the problem. We've now placed people in a Phantom Zone. We can't keep them in custody because they've done nothing wrong and they aren't a threat to us. We can't send them home because it would be a death sentence. We can't send them to any other country because they won't be accepted. So they sit in Guantanamo, four years after their capture. This is in the greatest democracy on the planet, where the rule of law is sacred. We've literally consigned innocent people to a life of detention.

Digby writes:

Guantanamo is a vivid example of what happens when governments panic and make errors out of hubris, rage, greed and opportunism and refuse to right their wrongs after the fact. We have created a Kafka-esque nightmare that, unless we return to the rule of law very quickly, is going to be embedded in our system, ready to be exploited by any tyrannical figure who can trump up an emergency for political gain.

Don't the Republicans see how dangerous this is? It isn't a matter of partisanship. Any shallow reading of history shows that bad people can emerge from any movement, ideology, religion or party. That's why we have the rule of law --- so that our system doesn't depend upon the good-will of whomever is holding the office.

I'm disgusted that we've now created cracks through which innocent people can fall, that anyone can be detained without being charged basically in perpetuity. And the President is somehow lecturing China in public speeches about human rights. Of course, after the female journalist and Falun Gong member started heckling Hu Jintao, Bush apologized. These two heads of state both know that they should not be embarrassed by the voices of dissent. In essence we have more in common with China than I even imagined.