Shredding the Constitution; America’s Muslim Problem

We are at a point in our history where killing an American by Presidential order, without Due Process of the law, without charges or trial, fails to even elicit a yawn from the American people. It should come as no shock to people that this has happened and is still on the table as desirable and lawful…AND that the targets of such action are Muslims.

It is one thing for someone, US citizen or not, to be killed in the heat of a battle, where gunfire is being exchanged. But to have a US citizen…to have anybody… killed by Presidential fiat, flies in the face of the US constitution and every law of the land, it is nothing less than murder.

• Article III of the constitution requires that the trials of ALL crimes (except impeachment) shall be by Jury, in open court.
• Article V of the Bill of Rights requires that no person shall be held for “a capital or otherwise infamous crime” except by indictment by a Grand Jury and that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of the law“.
• Article VI of the Bill of Rights requires that a person be accused of a crime and then be confronted by evidence and witnesses against him in open court.

Article II of the US constitution, Section I, Clause VIII gives the exact words of the Presidential Oath of Office:

“I do solemnly Swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and I will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States“.

Pretty simple wording that makes it clear that the US constitution is the supreme law of the land with no exceptions.

Anwar Al-Awlaki was an American citizen living in Yemen. He is accused of exhorting people to take up arms against America through his speeches and his magazine, “Inspire”. In September 2011, the President of the United States ordered that Al-Awlaki be killed by a drone attack and he was. The same Drone attack killed Al-Awlaki’s magazine editor Samir Khan, also a US
citizen. The President then had Al-Awlaki’s son killed in another drone attack  although the Administration denies targeting him. In all so far, the US has admitted to killing four Americans by their drone attacks while insisting that all by Al-Awlaki, were “not specifically targeted”. Probably emboldened by the lack of American reaction, the Administration is now  planning yet another killing of another American citizen, this time, in Pakistan…another Muslim, of course.

Regardless of how awful the crimes they may be accused of, at no time, have any official charges been leveled against any of the murdered Americans, there have been no trials, not even the kangaroo court, Gitmo-type “tribunals” (which are unconstitutional in themselves). No, these Americans have never had a chance to defend themselves in any US court. By any measure, their deaths were pure and clear murders ordered by Obama, the President of the United States.

Someone once said, “The constitution does not exist to limit the people, it exists to limit the government “. This is probably why most governments all over the world, continue to undermine and destroy their constitutions in order to further their own designs.

Tragically, the US is no exception to this rule..

American governments have long been trying to do extra-constitutional things but secretly, silently and in a way that people would not know about it…a wink and a nod and whatever they were doing was swept under the rug.

Then came the 9-11 Tragedy and that formed the very foundation of every brutality our government can perpetrate on nations “over there” and on “suspects” right here; the law is cast aside because of course, we must ensure “the security of our nation”…God! how many times have I heard exhortations for the “solidarity and security of our country” as an excuse to brutally suppress people on my Old Country, Pakistan! People have been imprisoned without charges or trials, people have been tortured, people have been disappeared and even killed at the orders of senior Government officials and nobody has ever been taken to task or held responsible for anything.

While the above is true for Pakistan, it breaks my heart yet again, to acknowledge that it has happened and it IS happening right here, in the US, the much-touted, most Democratic country on Earth. The differences between countries such as Saddam’s Iraq, Gadhafi’s Libya, Pakistan etc., on one hand and the United states on the other, are slim enough to not even be noticed.

This is where our most patriotic, REAL Americans stand up in righteous wrath and start telling us how many people Saddam, Gadhafi, Pakistani ;leaders etc., have killed…their own people! and how dare I draw comparisons to such despicable people! Indeed, if I were a White, “Judeo-Christian” American, I too, would outraged at my statements, but I am not a white, “Judeo-Christian” American, I am a Brown Muslim, the Target-du Jour of every Law-enforcement Officer and agent who has been trained to see me as The Enemy, and of every member of the US military who has been trained to see me as The Enemy…and yes, I AM an American, not that it matters for those who treat us Muslims as terrorists or suspects. Because of the heavy emphases on Muslims and Islam, every time something terrible is done by a Muslim and the ignoring of the perpetrator’s faith if he is not Muslim, Americans have been subconsciously programmed to overlook acts of bias or inhumanity against Muslims…even more so, if the Muslim is some faceless unfortunate overseas.

The 9-11 Tragedy took the lives of about 3000 people of whom, about 10% were Muslims, going about their business until their lives were extinguished by the mindless killers, just like the 2700 other victims. Still, I have never heard any acknowledgement of the Muslim victims, only of the Jews and Christians, as if our lives were not worthy of being recognized, even contemporary cartoons ignored the Muslim victims of 9-11. But the numbers are important, every time, someone rips off the scab of the 9-11 Tragedy, they refer to the 3000 victims and these days, they even refer to them as all AMERICANS, ignoring the fact that many were not US citizens, they were either Permanent Residents or even Undocumented Residents.

Post-9-11, America is responsible for the deaths of over two million Muslims just in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan (including the Iraq Sanctions), the numbers tortured by US Forces or at America’s behest, are beyond any reasonable estimation. At some point the Obama Administration ordered a halt to all tortures but exempted Special Forces and Ghost Prisons (that we don’t even know exist) from the order. Then again, we get into the delicate parsing of the word “torture”…SUCH a terrible word! “Enhanced Interrogation” or, “Robust Interrogation” much more palatable to the American people! “Withholding Treatment” when someone is in agony may not be direct torture, but ask the victim of s-he think they are being tortured. Keeping someone in a very cold cell without warm coverings or sometimes, with any clothing is also re-translated as not being torture as are “Stress Positions”; tying someone down in a position where his limbs suffer pain and stiffness. During the Bush Era, the White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales re-defined torture as when, “The pain suffered is equivalent to someone suffering massive organ failure and even then, it may only be defined as “torture” if the person inflicting it, intends to torture“.

Thus, we can allow Afghans to torture people we suspect and declare with wide-eyed innocence that Afghanistan is a sovereign nation and we have no control over what they do…when our soldiers are guarding the very cells and prisons where this is happening. In some cases, the lines of jurisdiction are so indistinguishable that one part of a prison is Afghan while another is American.

Thousands of Muslims in America, have been imprisoned for indefinite periods, without charges or trials, simply for the crime of being Muslim. Muslims have been sent to foreign countries for “enhanced interrogation”, simply because someone suspected them of having “terrorist sympathies”. Muslims have been arbitrarily added to the list of people on the “No Fly list” (now almost a million strong) from which there are no avenues available to get out. Laws are being debated and have been passed in many states, to prevent Muslims from using their faith-driven laws for family matters between consenting partners, the excuse being to act against the use of “foreign laws” in the US, which may contravene the US constitution, something that is illegal in the first place. The map of the US below, shows the states as of March 2012, that have considered or passed such laws although by this time, more states have been added to this list of infamy.

The US Congress has gone even further. It added a section (1021) in the annual Defense Appropriations bills (NDAA), an annual bill that authorizes defense expenditures that allows people to be imprisoned by the US military, without charges or trials, “until the end of hostilities” ( the so-called, “War on Terror”). When examined, its language is so narrow that just about the only people falling in the definition of those who may be so imprisoned, are…Muslim!

• “who was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners”, and anyone who commits a “belligerent act” against the United States or its coalition allies in aid of such enemy forces, under the law of war, “without trial, until the end of the hostilities authorized by the [AUMF]”. The text authorizes trial by military tribunal, or “transfer to the custody or control of the person’s country of origin”, or transfer to “any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity”.

Muslims are increasingly regarded as “Not American”, the fiction being spread is that one cannot be a Muslim and still be an American. The level of this propaganda is so strong, backed by so much money, that it is becoming the “New Truth” accepted by a growing number of sincere, if ignorant, Americans.

In spite of Article IV of the Bill of Rights (in favor of the right to personal privacy) Muslims are under increasing surveillance simply because they are Muslims and such action is less and less of a concern even to the American Judicial System.  On February 20th, 2014 a Federal Judge, reviewing a case brought by some Muslims who were being targeted for surveillance by the New York Police, dismissed the case as baseless on grounds that the Police have a right “to locate budding terrorist conspiracies” and the the targeted Muslims were not in any way damaged until the facts of the surveillance were exposed by a reporter. In effect, ignorance of harm is lawful bliss and anyone reporting harm is himself to be held responsible for the harm.

Shall we extend this argument to cases of fraud and other crimes?

In the past, the United States has taken extreme steps against many of its minorities. Starting with the Native Americans and then on to Africans kidnapped into slavery, the Freed African Americans (right up to the 1970s), Hispanic Americans, Japanese Americans, the Chinese and the South Asians. Today, we hope for a better America only to be faced with an America that is once again exercising its bigotries against yet another minority, the Muslims. Historically, oppression against any minority stopped only when the minority gained a political clout in this country. Today’s American Muslims are just beginning to show Awareness and assertiveness against the abuses from the Administration and other public leaders.

 

Nevertheless, Muslims are still a long way away from showing the common front that is imperative if we are to be relieved of the oppression aimed at us in America.