JUSTICE IN AMERICA

Class Writing Exercise

Assume all the following to be factual:

You are a 20 year-old male, the son of a U.S. Naturalized, South African white male, religion Catholic, and his U.S. Naturalized wife, a black female native of Mali, religion, Islamic. Your parents immigrated legally to the U.S. two years before your birth in Denison, Texas, and became U.S. citizens 5 years later. Under the laws of both South Africa and Mali, you have dual citizenship with the U.S. Physically, you have inherited the most attractive attributes of each of your parents. You are tall, lean, muscular, and hirsute, like your father, whose parents were Irish and Dutch, and you have the finely chiseled features of your mother, whose parents were Moroccan Berber and Malese. Your skin color is pale white with a slight swarthy cast, your hair very dark brown, your eyes are a steely blue, and if you don’t shave at least once a day, you quickly sprout a thick, curly beard. A day in the sun will produce the beginnings of a dark, long lasting tan. You were baptized in the Catholic Church, but in your teens, you went to Mali for a summer and became attracted to Islam, especially Sufism. When you returned for a second summer, you visited a Mosque in Timbuktu where you were invited for coffee after prayers one afternoon by a man in his thirties, with a compelling – almost mesmerizing – personality, who persuaded you that there was a more rewarding spiritual form of Islam, but which would require great sacrifice and commitment on your part. The spiritual rewards, however, would place you at the right hand of God in Islamic paradise. To accomplish this, you must go to the Sudan for intense training, and then on to Central Asia where you would receive your final training and your holy mission. An initial sacrifice, would be to give up home, family and friends, assume a different identity and no longer have any contact with them. With some trepidation, but with the growing sense that this contact was divinely inspired, you agreed.

As a teenager with moderately affluent parents in the U.S., you had become a computer nerd and when you arrived in the Sudan for Islamic boot camp, after you had easily mastered the physical training requirements, you were invited to join an elite communications corps, and this excited you greatly. Quickly, you were able to reach instructor status and worked with a group of young men on establishing networking capabilities with agents of your new Islamic organization. Your main job was to facilitate the transmission of coded messages which came to you through the satellite facilities of some Arabian Gulf TV facility called Al-Jazeera. You had no understanding of the substance of these messages. Soon, you were sent first to Saudi Arabia, where you met and joined up with Saudi members of your group, and then with some of them were transferred to Afghanistan where you were ordered to take further religious instruction from the Taliban, to strengthen your spiritual commitment, and then were assigned to their military arm to help organize their signal corps. By this time, you had become aware of the events of September 11 and had been instructed that they were part of the holy mission which you had been recruited to support with your technical capabilities, and spiritually were part of your grand design for entry into the holiest of places. You had doubts, which you discussed with your spiritual leaders, but you eventually accepted the inevitability of violence in this world in order to gain entry to a better place.

As the U.S. took the fighting to Afghanistan, you learned that some of the Taliban leaders were nearby, and you began to realize that you were personally in grave danger. You sensed that the ultimate commitment in your mission was also about to be tested. One night, an enormous explosion blew your cave office apart while you were working on your computer. When you regained consciousness, you became aware of soldiers speaking English, rummaging around what used to be your cave, and, based upon your rigorous training, you reached for and found, strapped to your leg, a small pistol which had been given to you for use in emergency as you struggled to get the gun, a soldier with infra red glasses spotted you first and fired, wounding you painfully in the right shoulder. The shock of the hit caused you once again to lose consciousness. Over the next few days, you were delirious and not fully conscious of what was happening to you, and not completely aware of the fact that you were giving some interrogators information.

You fully regained consciousness in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba at an interment camp set up by U.S. forces. It was quite some time before you knew the location of your whereabouts. Your wound had obviously been treated and bound, but was still very painful and you were given no medicine, and food and water was rationed out on a very limited basis. Personal hygiene facilities were practically non-existent, your beard flourished mightily and you were thoroughly miserable. After some weeks in this condition, you were told by an officer, at various times, that you were an “unlawful combatant” and at othet times that you were a “war criminal” and would be charged with war crimes, including conspiracy to commit treason against the U.S., plus aiding and abetting enemies of the U.S. in time of war, and other serious crimes, for which you would probably be brought before a military tribunal. Unknown to you, one of your former comrades, who had become jealous of your rapid advancement, had identified you as an American citizen. You did not believe your parents would be interested in hearing from you, but, also unknown to you, they had seen reports of your capture on television, believed that you were their son, and had hired a Dallas attorney to try to help you.

Further assume that it is now the early weeks of 2003 and you still have had no contact with anyone other than a military officer who now tells you there is a new set of crimes just published by the DOD, some of which you may be charged with having committed. You have not yet been told what these crimes might be, but you have been told that for some of them you might be put to death.