It is obvious to me since 9-11 that the Bush administration and those who support them are not interested in the vaunted rule of law. They are actively working to undermine it especially when it interferes with the incarceration and treatment of those who are considered to be threats against U.S. society. The "detainees" at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan, South Carolina, New York, Syria, and Egypt are examples of abuse of law and in many cases abuse of the people themselves.

I remember during my high school years in the early 1970s listening to news stories speculating about what was happening to our POWs in North Vietnam. There were snippets of information passed on by the few who escaped. There was the occasional video or audio footage released by the North Vietnamese. In 1973, upon the negotiated mass release of those fortunate enough to have survived, we as a society finally began to hear the full extent of what had occurred to them at the hands of a government which ignored humanitarian law. The national outrage was great and many of us stated we did not and never would have treated those we captured in the same manner. As we found out decades later, this was not and has not been the case. Witness our hooding of "detainees", a practice we condemned during the 1960s and 1970s, and found convenient to use in the 21st century.

Then as an USAF Academy cadet in the mid-1970s, I was taught about the Geneva Conventions and the reasons for "rules of war", international and domestic law. I underwent survival (POW) training, and had the opportunity to interact with and listen to POWs from WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Some of these men had undergone horrendous abuse -- a South Vietnamese officer who suffered incarceration for eleven years and Everett Alvarez, the second longest held U.S. military individual in Vietnam, eight and a half years. I served in the early 1980s in Greece with an officer who spent six and a half years in the "Plantation", the second most notorious POW camp after the "Hanoi Hilton". On the rare occasion this officer could even speak about his "experiences", he would be speechless for long periods between nearly inaudible utterances as he struggled to put into words the memories of what most of us would never know even in our worst nightmares.

My consciousness continued to expand through deliberate effort concerning the arbitrary detention and mistreatment of human beings in nations such as the former Soviet Union, China, Burma, Indonesia, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. (remember Native Americans during most of our national history and Japanese-Americans during WWII among others). The work of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights provided specifics to that which I knew in my gut to be true - " do unto others, as you would have them do unto you". In other words, we should treat those we held according to the rules and not give others the excuse to mistreat our "detainees" through retribution. But, I came to realize that the rule of law was used as a convenience that could be enforced or not, dependent upon the whim of the few politically and economically connected, at the expense of the vast majority of the rest of us. And, it didn't matter whether those in power were fascist, communist or democratic.

There are valid reasons the WWII generation from many nations debated and wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in an attempt to set goals for the humane treatment of all people. These rights were defined from civil, political, economic, social and cultural perspectives. That generation understood the necessity to form the next set of humanitarian laws in the aftermath of that conflict. It appears current generations have forgotten that necessity, if they ever knew it to begin with. Some of these goals have been codified in international law (treaties) such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. There are also valid reasons why over 90 nations have ratified the International Criminal Court treaty to prosecute those who commit war crimes and crimes against humanity when nation-states are incapable or unwilling to do so.

The recent court rulings regarding Jose Padilla and the Guantanamo "detainees" by two separate federal courts show that at least some in our judicial system and those who brought the suits still recognize that enforcement of the rule of law is necessary. Neither must it be cast aside based upon a whim nor for expediency. The findings of the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General regarding the mistreatment of the 9-11 "detainees" in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, NY, is another case in point. This shows that some among us are as capable of abusing others as those whom we ostensibly condemned for mistreating our military and civilians in wars declared and undeclared, and in nations far from the "homeland". And, some among us took the further illegal route by sending "detainees" to other nations. Witness Maher Arar, the Syrian-born, Canadian citizen, who was sent by our government in October 2002 to Syria, a nation notoriously known for torture, without notifying the Canadian government, and with strong evidence that Arar was, in fact, mentally and physically tortured before his release this past October.

Just because others "do it" is no excuse for us to abandon our nobler principles or the foundation of what we purport to uphold - the rule of law instead of the rule of men.

Dana Briggs is a human rights advocate, USAF Veteran and 1978 USAF Academy graduate. He can be contacted at danalbriggs@earthlink.net

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