First, let me say that I voted for you, I was proud to do so, and still am. I was so completely impressed with your speech on race that I was sure that I had found a candidate that would make a difference. The way you ran your campaign and the manner in which you spoke affirmed in me the hope that there would be a difference this time around.
To this point, there has been a great deal of difference and I have been impressed with both your willingness to seek bi-partisan agreement and your ability to look at a decision and, after listening to people, re-think it, as well as your strength in pushing forward with ideas to help the nation work its way through the economic mess we are in.
However, there are, I believe, two issues that you have may not have completely thought through, so, as one who helps pay your salary, I am going to brief you on what I think are the second most important issues we are facing, after the economy.
I believe that a great degree of our future success is tied up in how we handle both torture and due process. I believe that these issues are of primary importance to our national security, as well as our global standing. I believe that unless we meet these issues head on, we will not be able to wield the authority to underscore our diplomatic missions around the globe with the moral clarity that our founding fathers gave us as our birthright and that our standing will be seriously undermined from the very start.
To be blunt, I feel that your support of the Bush Administration's stand on Habeas Corpus and your stated lack of intention to prosecute those guilty of authorizing torture as a policy tool is a grave mistake.
I am loathe to lecture a Constitutional Professor on our founding documents, but I must undergird my argument with the tools which I found so compelling myself. I beg your indulgence in this necessity.
Our founding fathers made their cases quite plainly regarding how they viewed their approach to the creation of this government. The power that they based their authority on was that which was derived from whatever created us and gifted us with the faculty to understand anything beyond whether we were warm or full. That spark that they called to witness their words made their choices and their course 'self evident'. They were not exclusive in their application, but inclusive. Their statement calls out not to Americans alone, but to the family of Man as a whole. They were bold enough to say that regardless your circumstances, your birth or your nationality, by virtue of the fact that you are a person, you naturally possess the same right to draw breath as anyone else. They enlarged on this to say that not only did people deserve life, but that man's natural state is a state of freedom. To borrow some words from a recent movie, they turned the worlds concept of governance on its head by stating that, contrary to what most Kings thought, the people did not exist to provide them with position and power. Rather, their position existed to provide the people with freedom and that, unless the people suffered them to continue to hold that position, they had no authority at all.
Linked with this concept of man's innnate freedom, and essential to the administration of this freedom is the principle of equal justice under the law. Since this is bound so tightly to the truth of man's equality, it becomes a natural law as well. Without man's inherent freedom and equality, the underpinnings of equal justice evaporate. Without the moral force of equal justice in a free society, man's equality and freedom suffer at the hands of despotism.
This, then, is our heritage. It is a burden in that it demands from us the sacrifice of our self-serving comforts in order to safeguard our neighbor's rights that, by doing so, we safeguard our own and our children's and our children's childrens. It lays upon us the requirement of constant vigilance, not only against those who would enslave us militarily, but against our own petty prejudices and lack of vision. It demands from us our very best. It is a blessing in that we sometimes succeed in giving our very best.
Because we have made these statements to the world, we are all bound by them as surely as if each one of us had personally taken that oath of office which you so recently recited and swore to. Because of this, the world watches what we do. Because of this, we must make it a priority to overthrow the Bush Administration's views of due process and torture. It is because we must tell the world that we believe the words that our forefathers have written and that we have enshrined.
Our purpose cannot be retribution, though it enraged me to see our founding principles so completely defeated. Our purpose cannot be a witch hunt, though my gut reaction is to brand those responsible as traitors. Though some may call it those things, my purpose is Justice.
We have exposed to the world the worst of what we have to offer, the worst of what almost any country has to offer. What can be the world's view of that? How can people who are family members of those still held without due process or those who were broken and abused for no reason have any confidence that we mean what we say? How can other nations believe that, should one of their citizens fall into our hands, we will treat them with the standards that we have espoused as our highest goal? How can the people of the world believe that we have anything at all to do with the ringing call to freedom and man's inherent value as a person that we claim as our birthright?
If we do not seek justice for those who authored these horrors, how will we speak to the world's leaders with any moral authority? If we do not seek justice for these people, what will our answer to the families of these men be percieved to be? How many of us would stop at nothing to seek a justice for ourselves if it had been our brother, our father or our uncle who was still held in prison with no rights by a country that claimed to be founded on the rights of man and the rule of law?
This is not about witch hunts and it is not about retribution. It is about Justice. Just as our founding documents lay upon us all the search for justice in our personal lives, so the last eight years lays upon us the necessity of seeking Justice for what has occurred in the sight of the entire world.
The fact is that if we do not do this, we may as well take those documents down and burn them, for they will have no more meaning to our national conscience.
Mr. President, I am asking you to reconsider your positions on due process and the pursuit of those who so betrayed our birthright and sullied those principles that have guided us to this point. I hope you will do so because I believe that a large part of our future depends on it.
Respectfully yours,
Joe Lang