President Bush voices outrage at “those few people” he holds responsible for the barbaric treatment of Iraqi prisoners. But any attempt to blame this disaster on a handful of misguided underlings simply won’t wash. We’re sure the president felt “deep
President Bush voices outrage at “those few people” he holds responsible for the barbaric treatment of Iraqi prisoners. But any attempt to blame this disaster on a handful of misguided underlings simply won’t wash.
We’re sure the president felt “deep disgust” when he saw the photos from Abu Ghraib prison, but his own policies bear some responsibility here. He has repeatedly ignored international rules and legal procedures in dealing with prisoners seized since 9/11, and that attitude helped create the climate in which the lawless actions of American soldiers were permitted and even encouraged.
Listen to Staff Sgt. Ivan “Chip” Frederick, who wrote home on Jan. 19 to express concern about what he’d seen while serving as a guard in Abu Ghraib: “I questioned some of the things I saw … and the answer I got was this is how military intelligence wants it done.” In fact, he adds, intelligence officers “told us, great job, that they were now getting positive results and information.”
By any moral code, civilian or military, Frederick and his fellow guards should have known better, but their commanders concede that they received no training in the international norms for prisoner treatment. In fact, Frederick was so distraught that he looked up the Geneva Convention on the Internet on his own.
How is it that an American soldier, placed in charge of enemy captives during a highly controversial conflict, has to research the rules of war for himself? What does that say about his commanders — including his commander-in-chief — and their regard for those rules?
Like many others, we’ve warned before that the Bush Administration’s disdain for the Geneva Convention is both shortsighted and self-destructive, and those warnings have proven true. America’s moral authority has diminished, while the risk to America’s soldiers has multiplied. How will they be treated now, should they ever fall into enemy hands?
Democracy, as the maxim goes, is not a suicide pact. Terrorism poses a profound threat that must be met with power and determination. And new rules of engagement are necessary in fighting a new kind of enemy.
But the administration doesn’t want new rules; it wants no rules. The treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib is not an isolated incident, it’s part of a clear pattern based on a simple precept: the nation is at war, and whatever the president does to fight that war is justified.
Consider the hundreds of captives seized on the battlefields of Afghanistan and shipped off to the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba. This administration has adamantly refused to recognize them as prisoners of war. They can be held indefinitely, goes the argument, with no chance to challenge their status or condition.
Lawsuits by British, Australian and Kuwaiti detainees have finally reached the Supreme Court, claiming the right to file habeas corpus petitions with domestic judges. The Bush position: U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over prisoners held outside of U.S. territory.
On another legal front, two American citizens suspected of aiding terrorist organizations have been declared enemy combatants and jailed without facing formal charges. The Bush position: since Congress has given the president virtually unlimited powers to fight terrorism, even American citizens have no standing to challenge those powers.
The source of that power, maintains the administration, is the USA Patriot Act, passed in great haste right after 9/11 and up for renewal at the end of 2005. In a recent survey of 65 legal experts, three out of four said that some provisions of the Patriot Act violate individual rights, but the president is campaigning for even stiffer provisions and seems likely to win that fight, in part because Democrats are reluctant to oppose him.
At least American soldiers are subject to a military chain of command. The possibility for lawlessness in Iraq has been greatly expanded by the use of civilian contractors for sensitive jobs like prisoner interrogation. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, rightly warns that “allowing private contractors to operate in a legal vacuum is an invitation to abuse.”
Soldiers like Chip Frederick should be punished for their actions. But they were sent into a volatile situation that they were not prepared for, and guided by a command structure that took it’s cues from the top: in the war on terror, anything goes.
That war needs to be fought, and won. But it needs to be won in the right way. America cannot preach human rights to the rest of the world if it ignores those rights when they become inconvenient.
Copyright 2004, United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
