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Greetings, "Enemy Combatants" and Liberty

Greetings. As a new member of the Liberty and Power group blog, please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Anthony Gregory, and I am a Research Assistant at The Independent Institute, primarily working at its Center on Peace and Liberty as an assistant to Ivan Eland.

I also write regularly for LewRockwell.com (where I am also a frequent blogger), the Future of Freedom Foundation (where I am a Policy Advisor), and Strike-the-Root (where I am a Guest Editor); and have written for such publications as Antiwar.com, The Libertarian Enterprise, Rational Review, Liberty Magazine. I graduated from U.C. Berkeley in May, 2003, with a bachelors degree in history, specifically American history and the history of science. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the Waco massacre of 1993 and government-media relations surrounding that atrocity. While I was at Berkeley I was active for four years and president for two in the campus student group, the Cal Libertarians. I’ve been a self-described libertarian since I was about fourteen years old, although I only became a full-blown market anarchist in college. I also love movies, fiction, and music (I’m in a rock band, for which I compose music, play bass and sing; and I play keyboards and guitar—however, aside from rock, I also much appreciate classical, romantic, Baroque and jazz music).

I must say I am quite eager and happy to be invited to this wonderful forum, where many modern intellectual heroes of mine share their insights, commentaries and views with the world. I've been a fan of this site for a couple years, and am thrilled to be a part of it.

For my first substantive contribution, I would like to draw attention to Ivan Eland’s last column, ”Three Strikes for Empire,” especially Eland’s mention of one unsettling and recurrent theme in the “War on Terror”:

[A] seemingly unrelated development to the Bush administration's brand of modern day imperialism may have the most consequence: the indefinite detention of a German man, Murat Kurnaz, by a kangaroo U.S. military tribunal on the basis of flimsy secret evidence that he is a member of al Qaeda. Yet that evidence shows that U.S. intelligence and German law enforcement agencies had concluded that Kurnaz had no connections to al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. So the U.S. government has known for two years that it was incarcerating an innocent man. The Kurnaz case reinforces a U.S. district judge's opinion that the military tribunals are illegal, unconstitutional, and unfairly prejudicial against those being held in prison.

Detaining people indefinitely without a jury trial, and instead using a military tribunal that allows secret evidence and no legal representation for the defendant, may be normal practice in authoritarian regimes (such as Pakistan) but should not be used in the “home of the free and the brave.”

Now, I agree with this, and I wonder: what has become of our country concerning these “enemy combatant” indefinite detentions? There is precedent in American history for this, and nearly every instance I can recollect of such blatant disregard for procedural and habeas corpus rights and civil liberties—from Lincoln’s arrest of war dissenters without trial to Wilson’s incarceration of those who violated the ridiculous Espionage Act—has since been widely discredited and frowned upon. They often teach undergrads about these nightmares as historical aberrations from which we’ve since learned lessons about the frailty of liberty at wartime. In the years since 9/11, however, I’ve noticed an entire new re-revisionism emerge, where pundits and even scholars attempt to look at these past attacks on liberty as positive precedents for today’s war, as opposed to atrocities to be condemned and avoided.

In particular, I have seen many conservatives and “libertarians,” relatively reliable allies against police-state abuses only five years ago, turn into today’s greatest defenders of such grotesque legislation as the PATRIOT Act. I wonder, are there really that many people who believe that the government can’t be trusted to protect the environment and set wage rates, but can—indeed, must—be trusted with the power to detain people indefinitely without trial or due process? It seems to me that a government that has such power is only distinct from totalitarianism in how much its potential abuses fail to manifest themselves into real ones—a difference in degree, not in kind, meaning we are only spared the liberties the state cannot get away with assaulting. And, it also seems to me, the only way to prevent it from getting away with true totalitarian-level violations of our freedom is an outraged public, jealous of its freedom. Ironically, given this, the more people are willing to agree that it “can’t happen here,” the greater the possibility that it will.

Posted on Tuesday, March 29, 2005 at 7:44 PM | Comments (25) | Return

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