Wolf D. Fuhrig

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A Proud Record In Jeopardy

“The United States has long been proud of its commitment to the rule of law …. The picture has never been perfect—the legacy of institutionalized discrimination that followed in slavery’s wake is the most obvious example of flaws—but the United States has long seen itself to be, and in many places has been perceived to be, an effective advocate for human rights worldwide and one that practices much of what it preaches.” This was the introductory statement to the 2005 report of Human Rights Watch, an American organization that since 1978 has carefully scrutinized and documented human rights records worldwide.

Yet, since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, that good reputation has been blemished by numerous documented reports of human rights violations by employees of the U.S. government--violations we thought could be committed only by foreign governments. Officials of the Bush administration stand accused of ordering coercive interrogations, mistreatment, and torture of detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at Guantanamo Bay--in disregard of the Geneva Conventions. It remains unclear if the torture of Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison was caused merely by a few misguided guards, or if the Secretary of Defense permitted torture in the erroneous belief that it could produce reliable intelligence.

The Bush administration refused to apply either U.S. or international law to the more than 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, most of them held in indefinite and long-term detention and kept largely incommunicado. The President refused to recognize the imprisoned suspects as either prisoners of war or as criminals. Instead, government lawyers came up with a hitherto little known category: “enemy combatants.” Whether foreign nationals or U.S. citizens, those captives were not to have any recourse to lawyers and legal processes.

Fortunately, in 2004 the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the administration’s effort to maintain Guantanamo as a place outside the rule of law. In Rasul v. Bush, the Court ruled that U.S. courts do have jurisdiction to hear cases by the Guantanamo detainees. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the court ordered that the plaintiff--a U.S. citizen held as an “enemy combatant”--must be afforded a meaningful opportunity to contest the alleged reasons for his detention before a neutral decision maker.

Following those two rebukes by the Court, the Bush administration brought prisoners suspected of complicity in terrorist activities before military commissions. Regrettably, however, such commissions do not meet fair trial standards. The government sought to block the most basic due process protections, even to U.S. citizens detained as “enemy combatants.” Worse yet, some detainees were reported to have secretly been sent to countries where torture can be performed more conveniently away from public scrutiny.
Prisoners released from Guantanamo alleged that during interrogations they were subjected to prolonged periods of painful stress positions, exposure to extreme cold, and weeks and even months in solitary confinement. Pentagon officials did not deny these allegations.

Red Cross and United Nations delegations wanting to check into the truthfulness of the allegations of torture at Guantanamo were not permitted to talk with detainees. Now a detailed U.N. report about the mistreatment of detainees calls on the U.S. “to close down the Guantanamo detention center and to refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.”

For the past seventy years we have denounced Germany for the total breakdown of the rule of law during the twelve-year Nazi tyranny. Now we find a German chancellor, Angela Merkel, politely suggesting to President Bush that it would be better for America’s reputation if he closed down Guantanamo’s ill-conceived prison camps. How times have changed!

That overdue request should have come first from Congress, not from concerned foreigners. Our beloved president urgently needs an attorney general who can explain to him what the rule of law requires and why it is one of America’s great contributions to world civilization.

The longer illegal treatment of prisoners remains in the news, the more it will help America’s enemies gain more recruits to their cause. To end the scourge of terrorism, the government does not need to tamper with the rule of law. It rather needs to learn how to make fewer enemies and far more friends.