Terror War injustice

US enlists Europe in outrageous practices



``Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.''

--President Bush, before Congress & the world on September 20, 2001

On 911, terrorism inside the United States became all too real. Our country was justifiably aggrieved. In the interest of justice, it is the responsibility of government at a time like this to make choices that are morally right.

President Bush and the US government have failed completely in the pursuit of justice for the 911 attacks. ``Justice'' must have moral and ethical meaning rooted in law. I learned in school that 800 years of jurisprudence following the Magna Carta has established a fair, public system for trying suspects of crime. But when ``justice'' becomes a show put on by a leader like President Bush--who decides to tear up the old rulebook and write a new, secret one--tyranny is the result.

To transform the Terror War into something other than the tyranny the American administration has made it, persons accused of terror involvement must be punished in public trials where real evidence is presented. The usual excuse is that such evidence must be secret for reasons of national security. This excuse cannot cut it if there is an interest in justice.

Now, the latest report on the unjust American practice of ``extraordinary rendition''--the kidnapping from one country of a person determined by unknown means to be a ``terror suspect'' and removal to a secret prison in another, possibly for torture--asks, ``Are human rights little more than a fairweather option?''

Just before all of the hoopla concerning the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Mr Dick Marty of Switzerland issued this report for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights on ``Alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe member states.''

The story of rendition is now very long and complex. An overview of the practice in February 2005 by Jane Mayer was published in The New Yorker magazine, concluding with a quote from a CIA official that the US can conduct renditions because it is ``the strongest animal in the jungle.'' Washington Post reporter Dana Priest later revealed that gulags in Eastern Europe were destinations in the ``spider's web'' of secret sites to which Marty now refers. The countries with these facilities were named to be Poland and Romania.

Strong world reaction followed, including the hounding of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her fall 2005 travels. A good summary of published stories after the Priest article is here.

Marty laments that there is ``no formal evidence at this stage of the existence of secret CIA detention centres in Poland, Romania or other Council of Europe member states.'' Official denials (in my opinion worthless denials) and the ``circumstantial'' nature of evidence available so far is what the New York Times chose to emphasize. Of course the evidence is circumstantial, because neither the Americans nor the European PACE members chose to cooperate by supplying hard evidence.

So Marty has harsh words for European states that assisted the American kidnapping program:

even though serious indications continue to exist and grow stronger. Nevertheless, it is clear that an unspecified number of persons, deemed to be members or accomplices of terrorist movements, were arbitrarily and unlawfully arrested and/or detained and transported under the supervision of services acting in the name, or on behalf, of the American authorities. These incidents took place in airports and in European airspace, and were made possible either by seriously negligent monitoring or by the more or less active participation of one or more government departments of Council of Europe member states.

The report is long (92 pages, not 67 as the Times reported) and worth reading. But for now I'm just going to pick out one major point, quoting Marty on the American conception of justice in the Terror War:

It is significant that, to date, only one person has been summoned before the courts to answer for the 11 September attacks: a person, moreover, who was already in prison on that day, and had been in the hands of the justice system for several months4. By contrast, hundreds of other people are still deprived of their liberty, under American authority but outside the national territory, within an unclear normative framework. Their detention is, in any event, altogether contrary to the principles enshrined in all the international legal instruments dealing with respect for fundamental rights, including the domestic law of the United States (which explains the existence of such detention centres outside the country). The following headline appears to be an accurate summary of the current administration’s approach: No Trials for Key Players: Government prefers to interrogate bigger fish in terrorism cases rather than charge them.

This legal approach is utterly alien to the European tradition and sensibility, and is clearly contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As was again amply illustrated on Thursday with the extra-judicial killing of Zarqawi, justice in the Bush-era Terror War will be hard to come by.