So this is going to be the Year of the Torturer. At home and
abroad, we are again and again held in contempt for supposed
torture of all those poor suffering terrorists we’ve captured in
places such as Fallujah and Tora Bora. There is at least one more
major investigation going on, and the outcry at its findings will
again obscure the real effect of this propaganda campaign. It is
limiting what our interrogators are doing — lawfully under both
U.S. and international law — in interrogating prisoners. Of
necessity, they treat these people differently than the FBI treats
dangerous criminals such as Martha Stewart.
Does anyone remember the description aptly tagged to the inmates
of Gitmo by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers about three
years ago? He said, as I recall, that these guys were so crazily
determined to kill Americans that they’d chew through the hydraulic
lines of an aircraft they rode in simply to make it crash. Take
your choice. You can believe General Myers or you can believe the
Aunt Pittypats of Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the BBC?
HRW, purportedly the largest U.S.-based human rights
organization, said last week that America can no longer claim to be
a defender of human rights because it abuses those rights itself.
What’s more, according to HRW, by our lawlessness in handling
terrorist prisoners, we’re enabling real human rights abusers such
as Egypt to escape blame by pointing to our example. This nonsense
is just another part of the continued assault on the way we fight
by people who should concern themselves instead with those who hack
the heads off hostages.
Announcing the group’s pretentious “annual world survey” on
human rights, HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth said, “the U.S.
government’s systematic use of coercive interrogation has weakened
a pillar of international human rights law — the requirement that
governments should never subject detainees to torture or other
mistreatment, even in the face of war or other serious threat.” The
fact that there is no such law never slows those such as Roth. They
pant and rant against America because here they can be heard, if
not taken seriously. And they reflect the EUnuchs almost
perfectly.
Last week, yours truly was subjected to a hostile
cross-examination on BBC radio. My three interlocutors, joined by
dozens of others asking questions by instant e-mail messages to the
moderator, all took the same line. They wanted to know how ashamed
I was of the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo
Bay, and pretty much everywhere else we’ve interrogated suspected
terrorists. They were shocked when I told them I found their
questions ill-informed, legally wrong, and offensive. They were
simply aghast. But the show’s producer called me later to say
almost half the e-mails were agreeing with me, saying America was
fighting terrorism for everyone’s sake, and it shouldn’t be bashed
by the usual lib suspects.
HRW and their ilk peddle the idea that America cannot be a
defender of freedom unless it places itself under the control of
the full panoply of “human rights” measures the international
community wants to impose. As HRW said, “It is one thing to declare
oneself opposed to terrorism, quite another to embrace the body of
international human rights and humanitarian law that enshrines the
values that reject terrorism.” Yes, and it is one thing to declare
oneself a pious defender of human rights as Jimmy Carter did, and
quite another to actually go beyond sanctimonious pronouncements
and fight terrorism as George W. Bush has done.
Start with the beginning. America is a signatory of the U.N.’s
international Convention Against Torture. But — and this is the
important “but” — we refused to sign Protocol 1 to the CAT because
it extended the definition of torture beyond that stated in U.S.
law, and beyond what the Geneva Conventions require, to a fuzzily
utopian vision of “human rights.” U.S. law defines torture with
reasonable clarity, but it neither prohibits every form of harsh
treatment of prisoners nor endorses real torture in any form. What
the HRW clowns and BBC exasperators refuse to understand is that
our policy — and our law — neither permits torturing prisoners
nor ignores it when it happens. Ask Army Specialist Charles Graner,
who was sentenced to ten years in prison last week for prisoner
abuse at Abu Ghraib.
And precisely who — other than useful idiots such as HRW —
agrees with the likes of Egypt, Malaysia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and
North Korea when they say no one can complain about their horrific
practices because America does what they do? Do we even need to
debate that point?
Over the past several weeks, one report after another has come
to me saying that because our interrogators no longer know what the
limits are, they are backing off just about every interrogation
technique that places anything more burdensome than the
Miranda warnings on these prisoners. One credible source
told me that to poke a prisoner in the chest with a finger to get
his attention now had to be approved by someone at least two levels
up in the chain of command. In short, our interrogators are tied in
knots, and information that may save dozens or thousands of lives
remains in the heads of captured terrorists.
What to do? Tune in next week for the answer. HRW and the BBC
surely won’t like it, but there’s a large dose of reality
coming.
TAS Contributing Editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are Worse Than
You Think (Regnery Publishing).
