The Military Commissions Act, Brooklyn, 1953

I grew up in Brooklyn, in red Brooklyn, in the arms of the Henry Wallace campaign and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts. I went to a progressive school where we learned math and folk songs and equality. The summer camp had the same chef, and the same spirit, and instead of color war we had War of Nations, and somehow the Soviet team was always assigned the best softball pitcher, and always won. When I was five my tonsils were taken out by Dr. Gladstone Hodge, to whom my mother took me for political reasons. I was, I was told, the first white child to have his tonsils removed by a black doctor in the borough of Brooklyn. I was proud of that then and remain proud.

My mother was a member of the Communist Party and testified for the defense at the second Smith Act trials. My father founded the Radio Writers Guild Anti-Blacklist Committee and later served as a front for blacklisted writers. In 1946 my uncle and his pals chained himself to the Lincoln Memorial to protest the continued incarceration of the remaining Scottsboro Boys. He had a Ph.D. in English at a time when that would get you a job but spent eight years driving a taxicab because every time he'd go for an academic job interview, the FBI showed up the next day to ask, "Do you know who you're about to hire?"

When my mother had an important phone call to make, she went to the pay phone in the drugstore on Nostrand Avenue. I was taught from childhood that when two men rang the doorbell asking for my mother or my uncle, to tell them we had nothing to say to them and that they should go away. They came fairly often, sometimes asking for my mother, sometimes for my uncle, and even sometimes for my father, who no longer lived with us.

My friend Peter's father changed his name and went to Albany and Peter only saw him on occasion, in strange places, and even then the meetings were brief, and Peter's father always got nervous and always had to go.

My family and my friends' families were Reds. In the eyes of the government, we were un-Americans. We were agents of a foreign power. We were enemies of the state.

What do you think the government would have done if, in 1950, Congress had passed the equivalent of S.3930, which President Bush last week signed into law? If "a bill to authorize trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes" had then been the law of the land?

Do you think my mother, with her Smith Act friends and her secret phone calls, would have been allowed to live the life of a free woman in Brooklyn? Or do you think she might have been classified as an enemy combatant? Do you think my uncle, who dreamed of the Spanish Civil War and chained himself to national monuments, would have been driving a cab? Or pacing a cell?

They both of them had names in their heads, names the government wished to know. If they'd had the ability to suspend habeas corpus for reds like us, don't you think they would have suspended it? If Mr. Roy Cohn had been allowed to employ what we now call Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, do you think he'd have refrained from employing them?

I know many lives that were ruined with the tools the government then had at hand. Had they had bigger, better tools, would they have shown judgment? Tact? Reticence?

My mother always said that in the US you had the right to One Phone Call, and that if something were to happen to her she would let me know. What if there were no One Phone Call?

Revised and expanded from a piece which appeared originally on the Op-Ed page of the Los Angeles Times.

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