Rather than federal courts defending the rights of the accused against potentially arbitrary imprisonment, detainees plead their cases before biased military commissions seeking pre-ordained outcomes. Rather than excluding “compelled statements” like those of the exonerated Blackwater contractors, the military commissions operating in Guantanamo Bay (and those proposed by some policy analysts as a model for an even broader scheme to operate within the US after the facility in Cuba has closed) invite unreliable evidence routinely rejected by federal courts.
The US military commander in Iraq attempted to explain Thursday’s decision with the lame and inaccurate assertion that it offered “a lesson in the rule of law.” What the dismissal of the Blackwater contractors’ charges actually demonstrates is quite the opposite: law requires consistency, whereas our approach to accountability for war crimes smacks of opportunism.
The imperatives to defend our nation’s historical legacy, or the universal moral principles condemning torture, or the international legal system and its bedrock prohibition on torture have apparently proven too quiet for the deaf ear of Washington institutions. No one seems to care that although torture is an international crime, officials complicit in it remain highly rewarded and occupy prestigious positions in government and the private sector.
But these double standards carry a price, well beyond the reputation and moral standing our nation has already lost.
We wage, in the war on terror, a battle for hearts and minds. And there is no surer way to lose that battle than to violate the rights of detainees, while vindicating those of mercenaries – or to prosecute politically powerless people for innocuous behavior, while praising officials who violate our species’ most fundamental shared commitments. Such blatant inconsistency is lost neither on our enemies nor the billions of individuals targeted by their recruitment efforts.
Officials increasingly wring their heads over a supposed threat of domestic radicalization. It is ephemeral in the first instance, but the concern points to a generally legitimate fear: people of any kind who grow alienated could eventually turn violent.
Some Muslims in America may indeed be growing increasingly alienated – which may seem understandable in the face of policies like “special registration” round-ups, guilt by association, pervasive surveillance, infiltration of religious institutions and entrapment by ex-convicts paid handsomely by taxpayers, intrusive interrogations and searches, private sector employment and housing discrimination, hate crimes, bullying and racial and religious profiling by law enforcement authorities. But as a group, we have not renounced the social compact by taking up arms, to any greater extent than former servicemembers could be said to have been categorically radicalized by virtue of some supporting right-wing militia groups like the Aryan Nation.
But while Muslim Americans remain loyal to the US, people in other countries have no compact with us to renounce. And they have no reason to accept our military presence except the principles we purport to uphold … at the same time that we overtly violate them without apology.
The strategy that could most effectively hamstring violent extremism abroad is the same one that would most effectively stop disaffected youth in America from turning to violence: applying our principles equally and with consistency. Honestly investigating our nation’s record and prosecuting those individuals responsible for international crimes would go a long way to reassure observers that we take justice seriously. And allowing the rights and laws in which we have long taken pride to also govern the trials of those we militarily detain would relieve concerns about US human rights abuses, among international critics and also domestic observers targeted by militant propagandists.
At the moment, we continue to fail on each front. Despite the president’s pretty words in Cairo last fall, we Americans committed to rule of law and the Constitution remain waiting for that “change [we] can believe in.” And it’s not just us: the world – and the people over whose hearts and minds we struggle – are watching, too. (Posted by Bulatlat.com)
