It's Thanksgiving in the U.S. and it is so refreshing to see the Union begin to recover its moral balance. From Harpers magazine to The New York Times, writers are cheering on the Barack Obama camp for his overtures that rule of law will soon be reinstated. So while Canada is focused on the economy's demise, America discovers its better angels.
Times pundit Roger Cohen writes, "But back to the law, which is what defines the U.S., for it is a nation of laws. Or was until Bush, in the aftermath of 9/11, unfurled what the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called `the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.'
"There is no need to rehearse here the whole sordid history of the Bush administration's work or Vice President Dick Cheney's `dark side': the `enhanced' interrogation techniques in `black sites' outside the United States justified by invocation of a `new paradigm' that rendered the Geneva Conventions `quaint.' When governments veer on to the dark side, language always goes murky. Direct speech makes dirty deeds too clear. A new paradigm sounds bland enough. What it meant was trashing habeas corpus."
Earlier this month, almost seven years after detainees began arriving at Guantanamo Bay on Jan. 11, 2002, a verdict was handed down in the first hearing on the U.S. government's evidence for holding so-called unlawful enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba without trial. Ordering the release of five Algerian men unlawfully held at Guantanamo, Judge Richard Leon of Federal District Court, said: "Seven years of waiting for our legal system to give them an answer to a question so important is, in my judgment, more than plenty."
Of the 770 Guantanamo detainees, only 23 were charged with a crime. Of the more than 500 so far released, none has received an apology or compensation.
What I find so disturbing here is that the media in Canada have gone silent on Omar Khadr and his "unlawful," immoral detainment in Guantanamo. After six years of judicial abuse by the Bush administration, Prime Minister Stephen Harper still refuses to adhere to international laws on detaining underage soldiers of war. It seems his desire to placate the Bush cabal has clouded his vision, blinding him to our country's moral responsibility to the rule of law.
So while Americans emerge from the Bush reign of darkness, we are still clinging to a plan that diminishes us, and not just to the world at large, but to the new Obama administration. Bush will soon be gone but here in Canada we are still on the wrong side of the law.
Shame on Harper and shame on the press in this country for the silence they are entrusted to break. Who would have thought Canada would be looking to the U.S. press for its moral clarity?
Ron McAllister, Toronto
