“The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.”
– Winston Churchill on November 21, 1943o·di·ous adj.
Arousing or meriting strong dislike, aversion, or intense displeasure. See Synonyms at hateful.
Placing an innocent man behind bars for years without a charge has been an easy thing for powerful men to do throughout history. Free societies run by representative governments made it difficult to get away with. An evolutionary story of how human beings came to reject such tyranny can be tracked over the past century, with certain parts of the world today still representing examples of our own pre-history.
So for over a century, those people who suffered in a country like this looked towards America with hope. Some made it, and raised American children who were told of how papa and his papa before him suffered very much for the freedom they were born with. There’s a story about an uncle who was snatched up by the government and never heard from again. Another about their great-grandmother who was gang raped to atone for crimes her husband committed. Today these things happen in places like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
If you’re a Somali in Saudi Arabia charged with theft, you might spend 10 years in jail only to be executed on the day you should have been released. If you’re an effective political activist in Egypt, you might wake up one day in a cell and never see the sun again. If you were an innocent Afghani farmer, you might have been fingered by a crooked warlord for a cash reward, then handed over to the United States. You might sleep on a dirty floor behind bars, 36 months later, without a clue of where you are or why.
These people eventually end up dead like the rest of us, but their stories never die. In far off lands or perhaps the place they’d always been and always will be, the descendants of these martyrs retell the story forever. Some stories spread like wildfire across civilization, and millions of people might pray to the heavens in the name of this person forever. From beyond the grave their legacy can enact change that wouldn’t have been impossible otherwise.
The United States government is doing secret things in secret prisons across the globe, and with this revelation our hopes of a peaceful future may very well hang in the balance. These crimes we commit, the uncertain brutality our leaders condone, will never go away or be forgiven. We will ignore the natural side effects of such actions, and sometime in the future a legacy will emerge.
We congratulate ourselves for wisdom that does not exist. Words like ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ provide us false comfort, as does the idea that danger worth fearing only comes in the form of a weapon. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fear not a terrorist as strongly as you fear the legacies of nameless men in nameless prisons, most of which we’ll know nothing of until someday payback shows up on our TV screens.
It is preferable to place the “guilty” behind bars, but as we know many of them are walking the streets.
Many of the “innocent” are walking around their jail cells. It’s not a ‘cost of doing business’ I’m comfortable with. When you take a man’s freedom, you’d better know you’re doing the right thing!