Much has been written about the report in yesterday’s Washington Post about the CIA holding captured members of Al Qaeda in “secret prisons” in various Asian and Eastern European countries. Though nobody knows for sure what goes on at these prisons, the implications are clear; Al Qaeda captives are being subjected to various forms of psychological torture in an effort to extract information. This is one of the things that intelligence officers do during wartime, so it should be no surprise at all that it is happening now.
The question I have, is why shouldn’t this be happening ? Aren’t we in a war ? Hasn’t al Qaeda dedicated itself to destroying the West and establishing a worldwide Islamic Caliphate ? Didn’t September 11th, March 11th, and July 7th teach us anything ?
Writing in today’s Washington Post, Eugene Robinson feels differently.
Why does it matter how we treat a bunch of Islamic radicals who are sworn to bring death and destruction to the United States? It matters because the United States draws its strength and its moral authority in the world from its ideals. We preach about due process, we preach about the rule of law, we preach about humane treatment — and now we’re ignoring our own pronouncements.
But there’s more at stake than American standing in the world. Our ideals are the heart and soul of this nation. We are not an ancient nation united by language or blood. Our ideals, rather than ethnicity or even territory, hold us together and make us a nation. When we betray those ideals, we weaken America.
Precisely how are American ideals being betrayed ? These are not American citizens that are being held, they are foreign nationals who have most emphatically declared war on us and demonstrated their ability to bring that war to our shores. Robinson’s desire that we “live by our ideals” betrays the view of terrorism that was held by the Clinton Administration — that it was a criminal justice problem rather than a national security problem, as this quote reveals:
Would it be so risky to do the right thing — to bring al Qaeda operatives into American courtrooms and give them proper trials?
We tried this in 1993 after the first attack on the World Trade Center, and then again when the same group of terrorists was caught planning an attack on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels coming into Manhattan. We tried it, and yet they still came after us 8 years later and managed to succeed where the first group of terrorists had failed.
The utter insanity of this strategy has already been demonstrated. Let’s say we were lucky enough to capture Osama bin Laden or Ayman al Zawahiri and brought him to the United States to be tried in, say, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Even if they were convicted does anyone doubt that we’d end up the same situation we had after convicting Omar Abdel-Rahman, leader of the cell that plotted the first World Trade Center attack, who continued to communicate with his followers even from the confines of a maximum security prison ?
We aren’t going to defeat Al Qaeda by serving its leaders with arrest warrants. We are going to defeat it by destroying it on the field of battle. This is a war, and it requires that all of the methods of war be utilized.
Linked with today’s Beltway Traffic Jam and Mudville Gazette’s Open Post
