Walden University hosts Conference on Social Change in Baltimore

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Oct 17, 2005 by Cynthia Di Pasquale

To the naked eye, St. Paul, Minn., seems far removed from this country's ongoing war on terror. Its buildings weren't struck by hijacked planes on Sept. 11 and the average American wouldn't rank it high on a list of future targets.

But Walden University professor Jason Lum sees links all around him. Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th hijacker, received flight training and was arrested near the city; and the only FBI agent to suspect the Sept. 11 plot was located in Minnesota. Further, St. Paul's thriving Somalian community has been the subject of much federal scrutiny since 2001.

In planning a presentation for Walden's upcoming Conference on Social Change, to be held in Baltimore later this week, Lum sought to tie in what I see in St. Paul in a broader social change context, he said in an interview.

Law and public policy

Lum has been teaching public policy at the Maryland-based online university since 2001. Educated at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, the civil rights lawyer has always tried to infuse as much about the law into his courses as possible since the two subjects intersect in the real world. He plans to take the same approach in discussing how rulings by the Supreme Court related to the war on terror affect people in his city, as well as any other city in the United States.

The Supreme Court gave undue deference to the executive branch to detain Japanese-Americans with the Korematsu v. United States decision during World War II, Lum said. However, he contends, a trio of recent opinions shows that the court has learned its lesson, and that fundamental notions of due process adhere even in times of war.

The Bush administration has asked for a broad mandate to apprehend and detain those accused of fighting against the United States without giving them access to legal counsel and U.S. courts, according to Lum. Surprisingly, the court under the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist pushed back a bit against the executive branch with three cases decided in June 2004 - for Yaser Esam Hamdi, Jose Padilla and Shafiq Rasul, et al.

The court said 'Hold on a minute. We may be in a period of combat or conflict overseas, but that doesn't mean there should be no constitutional processes,' Lum explained.

Hamdi is a U.S. citizen allegedly caught while fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan. He had been held at a naval brig in Charleston, S.C., but the high court ruled he had the right to offer evidence to a neutral decision-maker that he is not an enemy combatant. Padilla, another citizen apprehended at a Chicago airport in 2002, remains in that same naval brig. While the court only found he filed a habeas petition in the wrong jurisdiction, it still gave his attorneys the green light to file another one.

Rasul was brought on behalf of 12 Kuwaiti and two Australian citizens detained at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. For Lum, the court's ruling in this case that detainees can challenge the legality of their detention in U.S. courts was the most significant.

The Bush administration said it's outside of the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts, according to Lum. It said Guantanamo is not a part of the [United States] because it's a part of Cuba. [But] the court rejected that.

Lum said he could not predict how the new Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and the possible confirmation of White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers as an associate justice, might influence decisions on related cases.

The court is in flux, he said. We have seen with the decisions from June 2004 that there is a fine line [between] the minority and the majority regarding how they view executive prerogative.

While there aren't any detainee cases for the term that began this month, other issues are bound to arise as the war continues. At a minimum, Lum predicts further challenges to portions of the USA Patriot Act dealing with law enforcement investigation of domestic terrorism.

Lum will be joined at next week's conference by Daniel Ellsberg, author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and other speakers. The university will present Ellsberg with the President's Award for Leadership in Social Change.

Walden University is owned by Baltimore-based Laureate Education Inc., formerly Sylvan Learning Systems. The company operates campus- based and online universities in 13 countries.

Walden planned its first conference on social change as a way for scholars both within and outside of the school to present and exchange information with doctoral students, according to Ana M. Sanchez, Laureate's director of public relations.

The university expects to continue holding the event annually in Baltimore.