Art Marmorstein: Indefinite detention is definitely destructive

Beginning around 1964, increasingly violent student protests shook college campuses throughout the country. By spring 1969, turmoil was so great that many college administrators simply called it quits.

At Stanford and Berkeley (and probably other colleges), school officials simply gave students credit for all the classes they had signed up for and sent them home.

America had never seen anything like this. “A time of unprecedented student activism,” Wikipedia calls it.

But the student protest movement wasn’t quite what it seemed. It certainly wasn’t a spontaneous movement by well-informed students eager to end an unjust war. While lots of students really wanted the war over before their student deferments expired, most were pretty much ignorant about what was actually happening in Vietnam, and campus presentations on the war were poorly attended. The joke was that some of the meetings had more government informants than genuine anti-war radicals.

But when spring rolled around, things changed. A handful of organizers got the ball rolling. They’d choose a beautiful day and sponsor a series of incendiary speakers. Pro-war and anti- war students would loudly argue with one another, and they’d soon be joined by their far less informed peers, many of whom had just found the Holy Grail: a guilt-free reason for cutting class. News reporters and cameramen soon joined them. The revolution was going to be televised after all!

Local high school students showed up too, knowing they might get that great chance to throw a rock through a plate glass window or set something on fire. Often enough, they did. A stirred-up crowd headed toward one target or another, perhaps an administrative office, an ROTC building or a facility that aided weapons research.

Things would heat up, and rocks would start to fly. The anti-war leaders (and the wiser students) knew it was time to make themselves scarce, and by the time the police showed up to get things under control, who was left to arrest?

Freshmen.

Bewildered, often totally innocent gawkers found themselves cuffed, carted away and in jail for the night.

With mass protests, that’s often the way things work. When guardsmen fired on Kent State protesters, some of the victims were just passers-by, not even part of the protest.

At the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017, angry activists staged protests throughout the country. “Not my president,” the crowds chanted. “I reject the president-elect.”

Unsurprisingly, many of these “mostly peaceful” protests turned violent. Protesters hurled rocks and bricks at policeman. Businesses were torched. Transportation centers were blockaded.

This was just the beginning. During the next four years, “mostly peaceful” protests kept turning violent. Churches were set ablaze. Activists stormed a police station and occupied a six block area in Seattle for a month, while in Portland rioters using crowbars and hammers tried breaking their way into a federal courthouse. Several hundred activists fighting the Affordable Care Act repeal swarmed into Congressional offices to stop the Senate from voting on a bill that would have killed the act.

Over the course of the last five years, thousands have been arrested — as they should have been.

But there is a major problem. With mass demonstrations, it’s hard to separate the violent from the peaceful, the arsonists from the slogan-chanters, the malicious activists from the freshmen.

Surely, those arrested should at least get their day in court.

It doesn’t work that way. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Congress and the courts have, little by little, whittled away at traditional habeas corpus, bail and trial by jury protections.

Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have been constantly warning us that provisions included in bills like the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act are a real danger to fundamental liberties. The ACLU warns that the practice of indefinite detention (holding an arrestee in jail without trial) is a particular threat, giving government officials the ability to coerce guilty pleas even from the innocent.

Initially intended to deal with terrorist threats, indefinite detention has become a political weapon, used both against the anti-Trump protesters in 2017 and the Capitol insurrectionists of 2021. It’s fast becoming a greater threat to American freedom than anything coming from the left or the right.

Art Marmorstein, Aberdeen, is a professor of history at Northern State University.

This article originally appeared on Aberdeen News: Marmorstein: Indefinite detention is definitely destructive