Negotiating Politics: The Issues: Guantanamo
Because I'm heading for a swing state to campaign after the State Bar Convention and a brief vacation, I am starting a string of posts on talking about politics with your colleagues, friends and families. There is a way to do this without harming your relationships. In fact, understanding the stories, needs, desires and interests that drive one anothers' political positions is as fruitful to a personal relationship as an understanding of our negotiation partners' interests is to our business relationships.
I had one of these conversations over dinner with a good friend recently whose judgment, wisdom, education and skill as a lawyer I respect highly. And yet she did not seem to have been gathering any information in the past 7+ years about the issues that make my candidate the obvious choice for me -- the occupation of Iraq; our use of waterboarding to gather intelligence; extraordinary rendition; detainee rights at Guantanamo (see Detainees' rights subverted at Guantánamo, their lawyers say; A federal judge asks for statements from two guards accused of threatening a detainee here); education; health care; and, the economics of poverty, gender and race ("there is no racism in America").
We left that lengthy dinner as friends -- maybe even better friends that we commenced it -- even though I violated all of the first rules of productive communication, negotiation and mediation during the course of dinner -- create an atmosphere of hope and safety; be hard on the problem and soft on the people; ask questions about party interests, fears, needs and desires; and, share personal stories that have led to interests that too often mask themselves as hardened positions.
While reading the Guantanamo piece (above) this morning, I was reminded of an experience I don't spend much time thinking about -- my second year, second semester externship with the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California.
I was the assistant to the District Judge's "Writ Clerk" who handled all petitions for writs of habeas corpus and prisoner's civil rights cases that crossed our Judge's desk. Most of these petitions were handwritten by prisoners, who had (too much) access to a law library, causing their filings to be adorned with and obfuscated by 19th century legalese.
"If you see a potential cause of action," the Judge instructed me, "deny the government's motion to dismiss and if you think I should grant a Petition for a Writ, bring it to me right away."
This was Sacramento. I was suprised that this Republican-appointee was such a "liberal." He wasn't. He was simply and fiercely and unequivocably devoted to the rule of law.
As I read the accusations of the detainees at Guantanamo -- who have only recently been granted the right to file Petitions for Writs of Habeas Corpus -- the pencil-scrawled papers I read day after day spring immediately to mind -- how hard I worked to make sense of them, repeatedly asking myself whether I could suspend my disbelief of the charges made by the prisoners against their guards, and doing what I'd been instructed to do, lean ever so slightly toward the conclusion that those in charge could possibly be abusing the power that has been conferred upon them.
Grant the Petition or deny the motion to dismiss, and eventually the truth, or something close to it, will appear. Deny the Petiition or grant the motion to dismiss from the first and deprive ourselves of that which we have guaranteed to all of us -- the right to be charged with a crime (whether allegedly committed on the "battlefields" of the streets of Bahgdad or in the mountains of Afghanistan or at the liquor store down the street); the right to have the evidence arrayed against us presented to us; the right to legal counsel; the right to be heard; and, the right to have a neutral third-party decide whether we have been justly imprisoned.
The prisoner accusations recited in the Christian Science Monitor article have the ring of truth to me because they are so similar to those I recall being made by the prisoners who had unknowingly delivered their pleas into my young and inexperienced hands back in my Spring Semester of law school in 1979. These are the experiences that shape us.
Rules for having political conversations will follow.
