If an enterprising Washington Post reporter gets a good un-American scoop that the CIA has been using the headquarters of Jordan’s General Intelligence Department to torture people, the editors can’t really bury it. If it must get front-page treatment (just on merit), then it will be a Saturday front-page when the fewest people will read it and it has the least chance of getting picked up by the cable news programs.
The problem is that people throughout the rest of the world are reading about this.
Sharqawi said he was threatened with sexual abuse and electrocution while in Jordan. He also said he was hidden from officials of the International Committee for the Red Cross during their visits to inspect Jordanian prisons…
“I was told that if I wanted to leave with permanent disability both mental and physical, that that could be arranged,” Sharqawi said in his April 2006 statement, which was released by a London-based attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, who represents Guantanamo inmates. “They said they had all the facilities of Jordan to achieve that. I was told that I had to talk, I had to tell them everything.”
…Independent monitors have become increasingly critical of Jordan’s record. Since 2006, the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued reports on abuses in Jordan, often singling out the General Intelligence Department.
Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the “grilled chicken,” in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten.
To be fair, one reason we have sent prisoners to Jordan is because they are the best informed friendly intelligence service in the world on the issue of Islamic radical groups. It isn’t all about torture. But that doesn’t excuse what we’ve done. It’s a national stain on our honor. And I’m glad the Post put it on the front-page so we can all wallow in our reputation for torture.
Here’s the problem. We should not be sending any prisoners, secretly, to any country. They should be held here in open hearings and courts. The problem is a concept of justice for foreigners that is different from our concept of justice for ourselves.
What ends up happening is one erodes the other; ultimately we could have Americans secretly disappearing.
It’s definitely hard to dispute the slippery-slope argument in light of what has happened.
Having said that, there are good reasons to detain people suspected of terrorism with less information than is required in the U.S. judicial system.
That doesn’t mean they can or should be tortured. But they can be questioned. It’s also useful, often, to have them questioned by people better qualified to both pose the questions and understand the answers.
It’s not a simple situation.
NO! The Bill of Rights is for everyone.
Once you’ve accepted that the mere suspicion of a crime gets someone locked up, you’re sliding down that slope toward the inevitable result of torture and tyranny.
you all know what Ben Franklin said about security vs liberty; I think he’s still correct.
The Bill of Rights is not for everyone. It is for U.S. citizens. The rights are based on principles that are universalizable. But that’s a moral, not legal argument.
It was not intended that people living in Pakistan who are suspected of plotting attacks on U.S. citizens and property, would be afforded the same rights as U.S. citizens.
And, the problem with treating them as criminal suspects is that we can’t put our informants on the witness stand and we can’t always reveal what tricky way we went about capturing their conversations, etc.
It is not reasonable that we would restrict our methods abroad to what we do here at home. For one thing, we don’t have subpoena power in Pakistan, we don’t have independent judges, we don’t have the FBI, and we simply can’t build a case in a methodical way and then bring that case to a jury in the United States.
We can ask the Pakistanis to arrest people and deal with them. But the people we are looking for are riddled throughout the Pakistani army and government. We can’t always trust them.
The result is that we sometimes have a reason to take a subject into custody and deny them the basic rights that we give to a U.S. citizen.
It isn’t pretty or nice, and there is definitely a slippery slope problem. It’s one reason that torture should be strictly banned and harshly punished. But you can’t fight against terrorist plots by pretending that our judicial system can function on foreign soil. It can’t.