As I type this I am watching Peter Ackroyd's programme about the Thames, and I have just been stirred by a shot of the memorial at Runnymede, celebrating 'Freedom Under The Law'.
I have been a lifelong admirer of the American dream, one that has delivered freedom and prosperity to unprecedented numbers of people, and has in the last century unselfishly spent blood and treasure to liberate the Europe from which its ideals and principles spring in large part.
That's why Magna Carta struck such a chord. The barbarians who currently hold power in America have junked more than 200 years' worth of freedom under the law in an obsession to avenge the unbearable hurt of 9/11. If the Founding Fathers could see what is being done in their name at Guantanamo, with its travesty of legal process, they would surely weep.
The memorial that moved me to write this was paid for by American lawyers. They owe it to their nation to redress the wrongs now being perpetrated.
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