Wed, Oct 15 2008
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Published July 04, 2008 10:57 am - As we recover from stuffing ourselves with too many hot dogs and late-night fireworks displays, I’d like to explore a topic that should be at the forefront of the celebration of our nation’s birth: freedom. Anne E. Kettenbrink: Basic liberties should apply to all As we recover from stuffing ourselves with too many hot dogs and late-night fireworks displays, I’d like to explore a topic that should be at the forefront of the celebration of our nation’s birth: freedom.
I write not of freedom of the press, or freedom of religion, or freedom to govern ourselves as we see fit. No, the freedom of which I write is the basic freedom, to be unencumbered, unrestrained, uninhibited by our government without due cause. Last month, there was much controversy over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Military Commissions Act of 2006. That act prevented any “alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination” from receiving habeas corpus, which requires legal justification for a person’s detention. That is just a fancy way of saying we thought we could hold foreign prisoners indefinitely without actually telling them why we were holding them, or proving to them that we had the right. Honestly, I can’t believe that we as a nation would allow such a thing to occur. I believe in defending our country from terrorists and keeping our citizens safe, but I find it hypocritical to think that we have been granted basic liberties that others have not, just because we live in a certain place. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” — Declaration of Independence When our forefathers wrote that “all men” had an unalienable right to liberty, do you think they actually meant “all men who reside within or were born within the borders of the United States”? How can they have meant that? How can they have fought so long and so hard to protect a right that they didn’t think should be applied to every single person on the planet? When they said, in the Fifth Amendment, that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” did they forget the clause that left out people accused of terrible crimes? I think not. As people who were at odds with a reigning superpower at the time, and who were considered rebels and criminals, they had a unique understanding of the unfairness of being held prisoner by someone who didn’t recognize your rights. Most of the people being held at Guantanamo Bay probably are terrorists. The government calls them terrorists. But if we remove the safeguard of having some sort of evidence to prove it before holding people indefinitely, we can’t know that we aren’t holding innocent people. And those innocent people could be our brothers, our sisters, our grandpas or our fathers. 
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