Begley Louis - Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters

why the dreyfus affair matters

why the dreyfus affair matters

louis begley

Yale university press
new haven and london

Copyright 2009 by Louis Begley. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Published with assistance from the foundation established in
memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894,
Yale College.

Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Adobe Garamond
type by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in the
United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Begley, Louis.
Why the Dreyfus Affair matters / Louis Begley.ist ed.

p. cm.(Why X matters)

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-12532-0 (alk. paper)
1. Dreyfus, Alfred, 18591935. 2. Dreyfus, Alfred, 18591935
Influence. 3. Trials (Treason)Political aspectsFrance.
4. AntisemitismFranceHistory19th century.
5. FranceHistoryThird Republic, 18701940. I. Title.
DC354.B44 2009
944.0512dc22 2009005140

A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO
Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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I was making the final changes in the manuscript of this book today, the day after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, when I learned from an article in the Miami Herald that the Pentagon prosecutor at Guantnamo Naval Base had filed a motion the previous afternoon, eight hours after the president had taken the oath of office, to stay for 120 days the war crimes trial of the alleged September 11th mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The purpose of the motion was to give the new administration time to study ongoing war on terror prosecutions. According to a military commission spokesman at Guantnamo, similar delays will be sought in all pending cases. Mohammed is one of five detainees, all allegedly involved in planning the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in whose cases the government is seeking the death penalty. The charges against the sixth detainee in this group, Mohammed al-Qahtani, said to be the missing twentieth hijacker who was denied entry into the United States and thus did not take part in the attacks, have been dismissed. According to a recent interview with Judge Susan J. Crawford, the top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantnamo detainees to trial, al-Qahtani had been tortured by the U.S. military, and she would therefore never permit him to be put on trial.

In his Inaugural Address, with former president George W. Bush and former vice president Richard B. Cheney sitting a few rows behind him, President Obama said: As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of mana charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake. Thus in two lofty sentences the president rejected the Bush-Cheney heritage of trampling on Americas international obligations under both the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture while at the same time evading or violating the laws and Constitution of the United States. An end had come to the era of dragnet detentions and mistreatment or worse of alleged enemy combatants, and secret CIA prisons. President Obama had taken the first step toward redeeming his campaign pledge to close Guantnamo and bring the United States back under the rule of law.

One supposes that the news of Senator Obamas victory on November 4, 2008, must have spread from cell to cell in Guantnamoexcept perhaps to those in which detainees, some of them shackled, are held in solitary confinementand one can imagine the stirring of hope among the prisoners. One can even more easily imagine the joy with which the news of the stay of the trials before the military commissions has been greeted. Certainly, those detainees who know that there is reason to bring them to trial cannot expect to evade that outcome. But the trials will be before U.S. federal courts or properly constituted military tribunals. In either case, the defendants will be under the protection of U.S. laws and the U.S. Constitution, and they will be afforded substantially the same protections as defendants charged with crimes who are tried before U.S. courts.

One can allow ones imagination roam further, to Devils Island, where on the afternoon of June 5, 1899, after almost five years of brutally punitive solitary confinement, Alfred Dreyfus learned that his 1894 conviction for treason by a court-martial in Paris had been overturned by the Cour de Cassation, the highest court of France. The communication he received from the prison administration did not say that the Court was setting him free; rather, he was being remanded for a new court-martialbut that was all he had asked for. This former French artillery captain, stripped of his military grade and condemned to perpetual imprisonment on a tropical and insalubrious island, wanted above all to be cleared by a jury of French officers of the hideous crime of treason for which he had been convicted, and thus to save his own and his childrens honor. He knew that he was innocent. Indeed, no sane person would have thought otherwise. He had no motive for the crime, and the guilty verdict had come after a trial from which the public and the press had been excluded. So far as he knew, it had been based on nothing more than a single piece of paper to which nothing except an alleged similarity of handwritings linked him, a similarity on which handwriting experts could not agree. The fellow staff officer who had testified against him had perjured himself. The military jury before which he was tried had been intimidated by the army chiefs who had accused him. Even so, the jurybut this was a fact of which he was still unawarehad convicted him only after the minister or war had caused to be given them in secret altered documents, of whose existence neither Dreyfus nor his counsel were informed.

Times and circumstances change. Some Guantnamo detainees may be as innocent as Dreyfus; some surely are not. But before January 20, Guantnamo detainees could look forward only to trials that would be as unfair and lacking in protections for the defendant as the court-martial that convicted Dreyfus. The Dreyfus case became the Dreyfus Affair, which tore France apart for long years after the case had come to an end and Captain Dreyfus had been fully exonerated. Steps taken by President Obama may spare the United States similar bitter strife, burnish its soiled image, and offer a path to freedom to those Guantnamo detainees who deserve it.