March 3, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    A Chinese colleague told me that she had just gone through the formal ceremonies for becoming a citizen of the United States. I asked whether the judge gave an inspirational sermon, and added that if he wasn't naturally eloquent he could do worse than showing the Spielberg movie, Amistad. That movie illustrates the triumph of the Courts over Government, of Justice over Expediency--a true tale that should impart pride and confidence in the new citizens. The first part of the movie is almost unbearably harsh, for it shows the brutish conditions on the Spanish slave ship, Amistad, carrying Africans from Havana to a slave port. The Africans rebelled and forced the two members of the crew they did not kill to sail the ship to Africa. Before long the Amistad was commandeered by an American naval vessel and taken to Connecticut, where the US government argued that the Africans were property and should be returned to their owners. Against the government's and the slave owners' case were the relatively powerless Abolitionists and Christian Evangelicals. They hired an inexperienced young lawer to argue their case, which was that the Africans were free men, wrongfully captured, and should be returned to Africa. Miraculously, the jury of the Circuit Court came down on the side of the powerless--the Africans. The case was bumped up to the Federal District Court, where, again, the government and the slave-owners lost. The government then appealed to the Supreme Court, where seven out of the nine justices, were slave owners. The Africans were defended by seventy-four-year old John Quincy Adams. He rose to the occasion and in an extremely powerful speech persuaded the Supreme Court to favor the Africans too.

    I saw the film only recently. Even more recently, I read an article in The New York Times concerning the UN's objection to the American government's practice of holding on to prisoners without trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A substantial number of the inmates went on hunger strike. They were force-fed in a manner that can only be described as brutal. "The head is immobilized by a strap so it can't be moved, their hands are cuffed to the chair and the legs are shackled. 'Are you going to eat or not?' and if not, they insert the tube through the nose all the way down to the stomach." Down this tube were poured two large bags of liquid formula that caused acute pain, and a desperate need to piss and defecate, which were disallowed. American military spokesmen said that these accounts were exaggerated, that maximum consideration was shown the inmates: for example, the tubes were left in the inmates between forced feedings so that the pain of insertion might be avoided. General Craddock suggested that the hunger strikers were even allowed "to choose the color of their own feeding tubes" (The New York Times, February 22, 2006).

    "We are at war," our intrepid leader endlessly reminds us. These hunger strikers could be terrorists. But were they terrorists? Isn't the whole point of justice not to leave this an open question? To leave it dangling not over weeks or months, but years, is unconscionable, and remains so even if the horrors of another 9/11 haunt us. In the Amistad case, the government argued that unless it deferred to Southern interests, a civil war was bound to follow. Adams knew this. Nevertheless, he said sorrowfully, "We fought a war for liberty. We have not attained it, and if we have to fight another war for this principle, so be it" (my paraphrase).

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu