EDITORIALS / OPINION

Go straight to your favorite columnist

- Andrew Fois

Justice Denied

- John Robison

DC Fireworks Legislation Should Be Based on History and Experience

- Frida Burling

“Brotherhood of Man”

RANTS

By the georgetowner

June 2008

It is called prioritizing: Most Washington cab drivers you talk to have mixed feelings about the new meter system the city is now officially on. Most will tell you that there’s not much difference in fares for riders, although other things--multiple fares, base rates and such make it harder and harder to come out ahead for the cabbies. “We can’t make money,“ many have said. But many were ticked about the all out push to check cabs for meters the minute the clock struck midnight for the deadline.  One driver told us he was stopped three times during his shift. Failure to have a meter would have meant a thousand-dollar fine for real. This strikes us as a heavy-handed and wasteful use of policing resources, especially on a bloody weekend of multiple shootings and eight deaths. Talk about priorities.

Here’s an offer you can refuse: It seems that an opening gambit in pending salary negotiations with the MPD, one of the city’s opening  offers is, “No raises for the next seven years.” In a television appearance Mayor Adrian Fenty said that the offer was merely a negotiating technique. Seems a little draconian and insulting to us.

This is a joke, right? Is it just us, but wasn’t there something a little not right or even obscene about Vice President Dick Cheny presiding over the recent Gerald Ford Journalism awards at the National Press Club? Sure, Mr. Cheney was then President Ford’s chief of staff back in the day, but if anybody is a breathing symbol of this administration manipulating and stifling a free press, it has to be Cheney (see Valerie Plame, etc).

Dig this Toto: We have one word of advice for presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama about the possibility of selecting Hilary Clinton to be his running mate. “Don’t.” But do promise her the first Supreme Court seat that opens up should you win the election. Clinton would be a great justice and would make sure that Chief Justice Roberts is no longer the presumptive smartest justice on the court. And finally, maybe somebody would be there to tell Justice Scalia to stuff it. As for the VP spot, how about Kathy Sibelius, the Democratic Governor of Kansas, a GOP stronghold since at least the time of Dorothy. She’s a woman, and she’s a governor not another senator.

Honk! Close off one block in Georgetown and you have gridlock all through the community. One block of Que Street is being repaved..why? you may ask. Because there were vibrations. And all of Georgetown has been in gridlock mode all week. Vibrations? Could’t be the busses could it? Or the semi trucks barreling through to the next construction site? Or the fire trucks roaring through?

DC Fireworks Legislation Should Be Based on History and Experience

By John Robison

June 2008

Proposed legislation banning all sparklers in D.C. was turned down by a city council vote of 11 to 2 on June 3, 2008, preserving citizens’ rights to purchase and celebrate with consumer fireworks this July 4th.  The facts worked against the proposed prohibition in a manner that instigated great concern to the City Council Members of the District of Columbia and the residents that they represent.

Comparative historical data reveals that legalizing fireworks actually drives injury tallies down. Two recent cases support the point that a less restrictive policy on fireworks results in less injuries. The year after they legalized sparklers in 2006, the Commonwealth Government of Puerto Rico reported a 90 percent decrease in fireworks-related injuries from the previous year. Likewise, the Connecticut Department of Public Safety showed a 57 percent decrease in all fireworks-related injuries since 2000, the year that state legalized sparklers. While Americans’ usage of fireworks increased more than 960 percent nationwide from 29.0 million pounds in 1976 to 278 million pounds in 2006, fireworks-related injuries have decreased dramatically from 38.3 injuries per 100,000 pounds of fireworks to 3.3 injuries per 100,000 pounds of fireworks. 

With close to 45 years of experience within the fire protection industry and as a former Fire Marshal and President of the International Fire Marshals Association, a personal passion for the safety and protection of our communities from the danger and damage that can be caused by fires naturally accompanies me. Armed with this passion for public safety, I’ve learned through experience that prohibiting something that’s already legal often creates unintended consequences that actually cause more harm than good.

Criminalizing the use of sparklers in D.C. would have offered an incentive to promote fireworks that know no safety restraints. The legalization of consumer fireworks in 45 states and thousands of districts across this great country has opened the doors for a proliferation of consumer safety education campaigns and aggressive product-testing initiatives. If fireworks in D.C. had become illegal, public education campaigns on how to use safe and sane fireworks products such as sparklers would have become a thing of the past, resulting in more injuries to the public. 

History and experience – the building blocks of public policy – tell us that banning consumer fireworks would ultimately have done a disservice to the safety interests of D.C. residents. On June 3rd, the city council supported keeping D.C. businesses, family get-togethers, and most importantly, safety of the District’s residents by negating the well-intentioned, but flawed, logic behind the emergency bill, with a vote of no – keeping safe and sane consumer fireworks products available to District of Columbia residents. By keeping “safe and sane” fireworks legal and promoting the safety and education campaigns that accompany their sale and use, the District of Columbia City Council will promote fewer injuries among D.C. residents and allow them to celebrate the Fourth of July in their own backyards more safely.

John Robison is a former President of the International Fire Marshals Association.

“Brotherhood of Man”

By Frida Burling

June 2008

In 1963, August 28th dawned sunny and full of promise, as I packed a little brown paper bag with my camera and my lunch, saying goodby to my husband and children before driving in to Washington for the Civil Rights March. They chose to play tennis and laze around the pool at our elegant summer place in Middleburg, but some moral imperative impelled me to stand up for what I believed, to show how I felt about civil rights.

As a white woman of 46, living a comfortable privileged life, this was a total change from my earlier years, growing as a teenager in the segregated old-fashioned southern town of Washington in the thirties, automatically assuming the racial bigotry of those years. However, I was proof that with an open mind and heart, one could re-learn and become a wiser and more understanding person. More remarkably, my mother, now about 66, had learned better as well, and so I drove into Georgetown to pick her up for our big adventure.

Driving quietly along the George Washington Parkway, the Catheral stood out the tallest, and the many white buildings of our capitol city glowed extra white and shining in the eraly morning sunshine, reminding me of how very much I loved this, my  city. I was somewhat apprehensive, wondering if we would encounter any of the violence we had seen on television in Alabama when hoses and snarling dogs were turned on demonstrators.

Mother was ready, and we drove through Georgetown, but then parked my car and hopped aboard a bus to downtown, spontaneously hopping off at 16th Street, and hesitantly entering St. John’s Church, Lafayette Square.   The singing inside lured us on the spur of the moment, an unplanned and auspicious beginning of our day downtown. The rafters rang with such heartfelt enthusiasm as we all sang “Glory, glory, Hallelujah, His Truth is Marching On”, the most beautiful and meaningful music I have ever heard, 

As we left, newly inspired, we unintentionally followed the Episcopal Church flag carried by the Headmaster of St. Albans School, and its priest. As we walked south toward the Mall along the west side of the Square, the most moving sight of all, bus after bus, marked “Selma’, “Mississippi,” “Alabama.” We thought of what great courage it had taken these bus passengers to defy the threats of firings, evictions, and even hanging. Not only the long exhausting ride up, the frustration at home that fired them to come, but worse, the danger awaiting their return.

As we walked, our crowd grew and we were all so friendly and welcoming. Near the Washington monument I paid a dollar for a placard on a stick I carried, “I Have a Dream.” Later the stick was lost and the placard, now framed, hangs in my office, and is the one object of mine which a grandchild has requested when I die.

We were early enough to be among the forefront of the huge crowd who walked together in a mass to the Lincoln Memorial, so we sat there and ate our sandwihes, chatting with our fellow-marchers. Later we had some songs and prayers and even the immortal speech of Martin Luther King.

But what really moved me the very most of all, with a feeling I never have totally lost, is the one-ness of us all that day, the “brotherhood of man” which was the peak experience of my life. Weddings are great, and babies a marvel, but this one-ness is even more special, this bringing together. Some might say, “we are all God’s children”. I have “marched” for other causes, especially against war, but this was tops. This was a spiritual High.

So can you imagine how I felt when I learned that Obama is to speak as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party on August 28, 2008 – the very same day, just 45 years later?  My first thought was that I must go down and sit where I was, 45 years ago, and ponder the changes that have taken place, but then I realized, no, I have to be home to watch on tv as Obama brings our dream alive, at last.

Justice Denied

By Andrew Fois

June 2008

The Bush Administration’s efforts to bring its Guantanamo detainees to trial before military commissions rather than United States courts continue to fail miserably. These prisoners are the alleged terrorists whom the President has called the worst of the worst committed killers. Most were seized in Afghanistan or Iraq, usually by natives seeking U.S. rewards, and subject to “enhanced interrogation” and indefinite detention.

In the six and a half years since President Bush issued an executive order authorizing the commissions, however, not a single prisoner, of the approximately 750 who have been held at Guantanamo since it opened in January 2002, has been brought to trial. Recent developments in several cases, as well as the condemnation of the procedures by military prosecutors, have served to underscore the mess that the President has made.

A little history is in order. After the President ordered the creation of the commissions in October 2001, the Department of Defense unilaterally promulgated the first procedures for the commissions to apply by a March 2002 Military Order. These procedures, which allowed the admission of secret evidence as well as evidence obtained through coercion, were widely criticized as unfair denials of basic due process rights. No trials took place as the Administration unsuccessfully argued in court that the Geneva Conventions barring cruel and inhuman treatment did not apply to Guantanamo prisoners and that they were not entitled to use the ancient right of habeas corpus to challenge the legality of their detentions.

In June 2006 the Supreme Court, in the case of Hamdan v. United States, rejected both claims. Salid Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who admits to being a driver and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden but continues to deny, after seven years’ imprisonment and relentless interrogation, U.S. accusations that he was an al Qaeda terrorist. The Court threw out the Defense Department’s military commission procedures as inconsistent with basic human rights and lacking Congressional authorization. In response, the Administration immediately proposed, and the Congress quickly enacted, the Military Commissions Act to codify the procedures and to deny Guantanamo prisoners access to U.S. courts through habeas corpus.

As this litigation proceeded, the Defense Department was able to dispose of just one case through the March 2007 guilty plea of Australian citizen David Hicks to the minor offense of providing material support to terrorists. He was sentenced to only nine months in prison, served in his home country, and was released on December 29, 2007.

At present 14 detainees are charged with crimes, including the six alleged September 11 co-conspirators. Some of these cases are finally taking baby steps towards trial but the significant number of complex issues of first impression, including how to handle the use of classified information and whether evidence obtained through the CIA’s interrogation program (including water boarding and other torture techniques) is admissible in the hearings.

The Supreme Court is now considering whether habeas is constitutionally based, thus making the President and Congress powerless to deny it. The ruling could provide access to U.S. courts for most of the 270 prisoners still held at Guantanamo, including those charged with crimes. The Supreme Court may continue to assert itself, but it will be up to the President to ensure the needed change.