Dear Editor,
Your editorial of Tuesday, March 27, 2007, headlined ‘Predicting the Past’, observ-ed among other things that “In a crucial sense, once you cede the moral high ground in order to pursue a gang of stateless thugs, you may win all the battles but you can never win the war”. I would argue that once you cede the moral high ground in your pursuit of any kind of thuggery, you become no different than those of whom you are in pursuit. In matters of law enforcement, of the rule of law, of due process what you refer to in the editorial as “re-interpreting the past to make it justify illegal acts in the present many might deem expedient” might pass muster among the choir. But it casts a permanent stain on the character of any nation where it happens to occur, whether that nation is a super power like the United States of America, or an embryonic democracy like the Republic of Guyana.
Your editorial states that “Even by the extreme standards of Al-Qaeda, Mohamed is a monster. He masterminded the 9/11 attacks and a raft of other terrorist plots, and he personally carried out the horrific execution of the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl (and made sure that it was videotaped for propaganda purposes)”. But still it argues that “As a result, the US now finds itself in the grotesque situation of having undermined its legal proceedings against the very embodiment of Al-Qaeda’s barbarity, precisely because it chose to violate the guiding principles of its own legal code”. And why is that? Don’t worry, that is a rhetorical question. When a state or any arm or part of it that is charged with the ultimate responsibility of upholding the “guiding principles of of its own legal code”, sanctions, whether tacitly or otherwise, or turns a blind eye to the violation of those principles, that state and all who shallowly and near-sightedly attempt to pass such violations off as excusable or justifiable are, to borrow usage of your term, grotesquely misrepresenting what is palatable in any civilized society.
The symbiotic parallels that emerge from reading your editorial are too poignant to ignore. Basically you make the case that subsequent to the horrible terrorist attack on the United States of America, some of the suspects or perpetrators of that attack were subjected to torture and violations of their human and legal rights under the constitutional and legal principles of the said United States of America. And you believe that undermines and maybe impeaches the character of the justice system in its efforts to mount proceedings against those in custody. Well in Guyana, subsequent to or paralleling numerous criminally violent attacks upon citizens, bodies taken to be those of suspects were routinely turning up in the backlands and other places with evidence that they were tortured before being executed. And I am yet to read or hear of a parallel level of castigation, not only of those who might have indulged in these barbaric acts, but also of those who up to today still persist in whitewashing them as excusable or justifiable. As you posited, ceding the moral or ethical ground will only assure pyrrhic victories for those who choose so to do. And if in the case of the United States of America the buck stops at the President and his administration, my question is, where and at whom does it stop in the case of Guyana?
I am in total agreement with the contextual perspective that leaps out throughout your editorial. The killing and slaughter of innocents is always reprehensible. It is understandable that many officials and citizens in the United States of America, shocked beyond description by the barbarity of 9/11, of Daniel Pearl’s slaying, of the attack upon the USS Cole and the US Embassies in Africa, by thoughts of the thousands who died or were maimed in those conflagrations, might call for the abandonment of the rules and laws that are essential to the survival of that nation as a civilized state. The emotions of pain and anger and frustration tend to lead us away from rationality and commonsense. But there is a wide chasm between an understanding of the impulses that might cause people to wish or call for such excesses, and public or tacit support of them.
There is no less onus on the Government of the United States of America to, regardless of personal,individual or group sentiments, guarantee the right to due process and the rule of law to suspects or offenders whatever their crimes, than there is on the government and officialdom in Guyana. There can be no lesser degree of alarm or concern over the overt actions and enunciations of officials in the US that conflicted with the guiding principles of the constitution, than there should be over the deafening silence and complete disassociation of officialdom in Guyana from similar conflicts in respect of our guiding principles. The rules and laws that are established to ensure order in a society are not made or enacted so that they can be conveniently discarded when it is politically or otherwise expedient. They represent the very fabric of the accord that binds us together in our human nestings. And it matters not whether the tearing occurs in a rich and affluent nation, or whether it occurs in one that is broke. The end result of any tear in the fabric will be a beginning of the disintegration of that nest, maybe sooner than later.
Yours faithfully,
Robin Williams
