Fighting and Hunting Terrorists

Category: Americas, World Affairs Topics: George W. Bush, Osama Bin Laden Views: 2871
2871

Means and Ends Matter Very Much

On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the planes destroyed the World Trade Center, George W. Bush declared he was going to hunt down Osama Bin Laden. "There's an old poster out West, I recall, that said, 'Wanted, Dead or Alive'."

Now we learn, nearly four years later, that Bush's wife Laura, had privately admonished him for talking like a gun-slinger - not very sophisticated and presidential seems to have been the gist of her remarks. Yet, as you can tell a tiger by its stripes, you can tell a person by the way they talk, especially when they are charged up.

This is a president who acts on the baser instincts that dominate his personality. Means and ends do not cohere in Bush, as Martin Luther King might have said. There are no regrets about suspending perhaps the oldest of all codified human rights - habeas corpus. No doubts about creating a legal limbo in Guantanamo. And now we learn no regrets about being caught in flagrante delicto, running a CIA-organized network that transports all over Europe and the Middle East terrorist "suspects", so that they can be detained, threatened and, if necessary, tortured without anyone in a sophisticated and open legal system being allowed to know.

There is no surprise in all this. The man spoke four years ago as he feels. And he acts as he speaks. What is surprising in the recent revelations by the Council of Europe is that this "spider's web" of rendition involved over a dozen European countries, some of whom publicly broke with America over its decision to go to war with Iraq, supposedly because it was in cahoots with Bin Laden as well as maintaining an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. What we learn is that the break was skin deep. The umbilical cord that stretches from bureaucracy to bureaucracy from intelligence service to intelligence service and often enough from elite governing classes to their counterpart across the Atlantic was never cut. European public opinion which made clear with its marches, articles and declarations on the eve of the Iraqi war that it did not want to be part of a "cowboy" foreign policy, where means undermine the end, has been totally betrayed.

Public opinion takes some time to be roused. But once the penny drops that Europeans have been duped by the governments they trusted the backlash could be severe. Even the middle-of-the-road Financial Times editorialized last week that rendition was "Orwellian" and that "we should not need to make the case against torture. It is morally depraved. It corrodes the society that condones it."

This does not mean that Europe has to shut its eyes to the terrorist menace. It cannot. But it has to stick with the methods of pursuit of the late Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter-in-chief, who was a stickler for legality. He had the skill and the perseverance to unearth war criminals wherever they were hiding. His greatest catch was Adolf Eichmann, the mastermind of the Holocaust. Baltasar Garzan, Spain's top anti-terrorism judge, whose prosecutions broke the back of ETA, is a man of the same mould. All was accomplished without a hint of torture and followed due process of law.

In the spring of 1996 the government of Sudan, where Bin Laden was then living, made an offer to the CIA to arrest him. But the Clinton administration passed on the offer, believing that it couldn't get a conviction in a US court and instead tried unsuccessfully to persuade Saudi Arabia to take him in and put him on trial. Samuel Berger, Clinton's national security advisor, told the Washington Post in October 2001, "In the US we have this thing called the constitution, so to bring him to justice I don't think was our first choice. Our first choice was to bring him some place where justice was more streamlined."

It is clear that the policy of "rendition" predates George Bush. What is missing in both the Clinton and Bush attitudes is the conviction that US courts will be responsive to an honest, above board, prosecution. 

One assumes the evidence against Bin Laden even then must have been rather incriminating, so why were they so doubtful about American justice? The truth is the law only works well if we believe in it. Wiesenthal and Garzan clearly had no doubts. Clinton and Bush appear not to. Europe now has to make up its mind where it stands.

Jonathan Power is a columnists on international affairs, human rights and peace. He is an an Associate at "The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research". He can be reached at [email protected]


  Category: Americas, World Affairs
  Topics: George W. Bush, Osama Bin Laden
Views: 2871

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Older Comments:
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE FROM GB said:

Everything that the mujahideen did..are are termed as terrorist actions, barbaric and hyenious.

What about the occupying coalition forces..killing and murdering people who are under their custody being arrested unlawfully restraining those civillians from their freedom?

Iraq is a legal country even under Saddam Hussein and so is Afghanistan under the Taliban...but because the Bushes Administration do not like what they see all those rulers are against the US hegemony and boastful in their actions..the Bush Administration show their evil plot by invading those countries as if they are the rightful guardian of this world.

No country had ever administered and agreed to let the Bush Administartion lead this world..but those evil doers they controlled the UN and imposed evil and murdering plots against the Muslim people.

The secular Muslims are baits for their hyenoius crime..and those secular Muslims do not even realise that when they give in to the Bush Administration as partners...they had committed a crime against their own people and against Islam

That is why we terms those secular muslism as munafiqeens.


2006-06-21

RAFI' FROM SINGAPORE said:
Mr Power please advice, can anybody or organisation takes legal action against Bush, cause I've been hearing about his attrocities and everybody in condeming it but nobody ever stand for the legal rights.
2006-06-20