One Teensy Amendment

If I were a U.S. Senator, I would tack a tiny amendment on Bush's pending detainee bill, one stipulating that before President Bush can sign his bill into law, he has to read every single volume of "The Gulag Archipelago".

It's a memoir that details Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's experience in a Soviet gulag.

Ah yes, the Soviet Union, now there's a country that never let a little habeas corpus get in the way of justice. And while Bush reads the memoir, he could compare that Soviet system, which was largely based on rumors, paranoia and torture, with his own ideal system.

Also while he's off reading, we could stop and take a hard look at what's happening to our country. After all, while our system of checks and balances has heartily stood the test of time, at this moment, with our standards of human rights and lawful justice so clearly under attack, it seems only patriotic to consider what's being recklessly thrust upon us.

Republican extremists say that anyone even questioning this law is being soft on terrorists. But what if you're arrested and you're actually not a terrorist? Don't you deserve to have every tool available to prove your innocence?

This would perhaps be a minor point, an irritating legal quibble, except that- according to a confidential Red Cross report given to the Bush administration early in 2004, 70 to 90 percent of the detainees in Iraq were arrested by mistake.

So, being innocent and in jail isn't such a rare thing after all. At least not in this day and age. Not when the U.S. of A. is running the show.

But it's still kind of hard to imagine, isn't it? Iraq is so a far away. So is Afghanistan. And, after all, terrorists are scary and we want to feel protected, even if it takes bending the law to make us feel secure.

Then let's imagine instead that it all happens right here in America. Let's say that, hypothetically, after Timothy McVeigh exploded his bomb in Oklahoma City, the government had reacted by sweeping through Kansas, Texas, and Indiana, rooting out terrorist suspects wherever they thought they might be. And what if only 10 to 30 percent of the people they had picked up could ever be reasonably considered suspects? What if the rest were just plain folk who wandered into the wrong Stop n' Shop on the wrong day?

Don't you think the innocent people swept up in these raids deserve every right to prove their innocence? So they could go back to their soccer practices and their P.T.A. meetings?

What makes them any different from the people we captured in Iraq and Afghanistan? I mean, other than their religious beliefs and the color of their skin?

These are just some of the things we could meditate on while Bush was curled up in the White House, dog-earing his copy of "The Gulag Archipelago". And after he was done, we could talk about what a justice system should be composed of. Sort of like the conversations our founding fathers had when they built their system, you know, back when they were trying to avoid things like tyranny and repression.

While my fellow Senators might accuse me of trying to clog up the wheels of justice with this amendment, I actually don't think it would slow things down all that much. Because even though The Gulag Archipelago is over 1,700 pages long, I've got a funny feeling Bush skims when he reads.