From Glenn Greenwald's Guardian column (
Report: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's repeated requests for a lawyer were ignored):
In March of last year, the New York Times' Editorial Page Editor, Andrew Rosenthal - writing under the headline
"Liberty and Justice for Non-Muslims" - explained: "it's rarely
acknowledged that the [9/11] attacks have also led to what's essentially
a separate justice system for Muslims." Even if you're someone who has
decided that you don't really care about (or will actively support)
rights abridgments as long as they are applied to groups or individuals
who you think deserve it, these violations always expand beyond their
original application. If you cheer when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's right to
counsel is denied, then you're enabling the institutionalization of that
violation, and thus ensuring that you have no basis or ability to
object when that right is denied to others whom you find more
sympathetic (including yourself).
..
For
those who are still having trouble comprehending the point that
objections to rights violations are not grounded in "concern over a
murderer" but rather concern over what powers the government can
exercise - just as objections to the US torture regime were not grounded
in concern for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - perhaps the great American
revolutionary Thomas Paine can explain the point, from his 1795 A Dissertation on the First Principles of Government:
"He
that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that
will reach to himself."
That's the same principle that led then-lawyer-and-revolutionary John Adams to vigorously defend five British soldiers (of the hated occupying army) accused of one of the most notorious crimes of the revolutionary period: the 1770 murder of five colonists in Boston
as part of the so-called Boston Massacre. As the ACLU explained, no
lawyers were willing to represent the soldiers because "of the virulent
anti-British sentiment in Boston" and "Adams later wrote that he risked
infamy and even death, and incurred much popular suspicion and
prejudice."
Ultimately, Adams called his defense of these soldiers
"one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of
my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my
country." That's because Adams understood what Paine understood: if you
permit the government to trample upon the basic rights of those whom you
hate, then you're permitting the government to trample upon those
rights in general, for everyone.
This is not a platitude they
were invoking but an undeniable historical truth. Governments know that
their best opportunity to institutionalize rights violations is when
they can most easily manipulate the public into acquiescing to them by
stoking public emotions of contempt against the individual target. For
the reasons Paine and Adams explained, it is exactly in such cases -
when public rage finds its most intense expression - when it is
necessary to be most vigilant in defense of those rights.
