Our humanitarian hypocrisy

Editor's note: Leon D'Souza, a graduate of the JCOM department, now serves America in uniform. He is a frequent guest contributor to the Hard News Cafe.

By Leon D'Souza

January 8, 2007 | Speaking at a Hoover Institution roundtable on anti-Americanism in the Islamic world several years ago, former Reagan strategist and White House analyst Dinesh D'Souza sought to dispel the notion of America as a marauding giant on the world stage.

Far from being "the largest rogue state of all," the well-known controversialist argued, America is in fact an "abstaining superpower," intervening abroad to advance its self-interests, but also endeavoring, benevolently, to defend and uphold broader humanitarian interests.

"The United States defended the rights of Muslims in Bosnia... whenever there's a famine, whenever there's genocide, everyone comes running to the United States, please help. So the United States is de facto the world super power and the world does look to the United States," D'Souza insisted.

Well, the world is certainly looking now -- and we aren't looking good.

At issue is a potentially damning lawsuit being brought by nine former detainees at U.S. military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The suit, first brought to public attention by NBC News' Joel Seidman last month, accuses Rumsfeld "and top military commanders of being personally responsible for the torture [the detainees] say they endured."

As Seidman tells it, this is gruesome stuff: "The lawsuit contends the men were beaten, suspended upside down from the ceiling by chains, urinated on, shocked, sexually humiliated, burned, locked inside boxes and subjected to mock executions."

FBI documents made available to the American Civil Liberties Union this week add a disturbing level of detail. The Associated Press reports, citing eyewitness accounts, that FBI agents "documented more than two dozen incidents of possible mistreatment at the Guantanamo Bay military base, including one detainee whose head was wrapped in duct tape for chanting the Quran and another who pulled out his hair after hours in a sweltering room."

One account describes "a female guard who detainees said handled their genitals and wiped menstrual blood on their face[s]."

Not your garden-variety CIA interrogation, to be sure.

If truth be told, the methods aren't even described in the standing policy on "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," instituted by the foreign intelligence agency in mid-March 2002. Those techniques -- which include belly slaps, standing for prolonged periods and listening "to rap artist Eminem's 'Slim Shady' album," according to an ABC News report -- seem tame by comparison.

The Defense Department's modus operandi teeters on the precipice of hellish cruelty, in many ways closely resembling the same macabre tortures America has campaigned vigorously against overseas.

The hypocrisy in our agenda couldn't be more evident and should outrage the moral sensibilities of every reasonable American. Yet there are those who attempt to legitimize these crimes while making excuses for the careless policymakers who facilitated these abuses.

Among them, Deputy Assistant Attorney General C. Frederick Beckner III, who argues "that Rumsfeld cannot be held legally responsible because anything he may have done -- including authorizing harsh interrogations at the Abu Ghraib and Bagram detention facilities -- was within the scope of his job as defense secretary to combat terrorists and prevent future attacks."

In this view, "alien military detainees held outside the United States are not generally entitled to constitutional protections."

The problem, however, isn't whether or not detainees qualify for "constitutional protections," but rather the fact that they are entitled to basic humanitarian protections, guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions.

Saying that we, in the civilized world, are willing to tolerate grossly inhumane methods simply because they might be legally convenient is, in effect, trivializing America's long-standing commitment to the promotion of human welfare and dignity. It is a perilous approach that, in the end, threatens to severely damage our credibility in a world already increasingly skeptical of our motives.

Those condoning Rumsfeld's thuggery would do well to remember the sobering advice of former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. At his farewell speech, the Nobel laureate blasted the U.S. for shirking from its responsibility as "vanguard of the global human rights movement."

America can continue in this role, Annan observed, only if it "is true to its own principles, including in the struggle against terrorism."

"Many people are troubled and confused," he lamented, "when the United States appears to abandon the ideals and objectives, and the international instruments, with which it has long been identified."

It's a simple message: we ought to practice what we preach.

RB
RB