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On
never tracking down Bin Laden
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
October 6, 2005
LONDON - There are two ways of
tracking down terrorists and war criminals. One we might
dub the Simon Wiesenthal way, in honor of the Nazi
hunter-in-chief who died on September 20th at the ripe
old age of 96. The other we should dub the George W. Bush
way.
Wiesenthal was a stickler for
legality. As The Economist obituary described him,
Wiesenthal "was a clever detective with an elephantine
memory". It was this skill that enabled him to unearth
war criminals wherever they were hiding, even though
governments everywhere, including Western ones, were
often content to let sleeping dogs lie.
His greatest catch was Adolf
Eichmann, the mastermind of the Holocaust. Another
important catch was a former concentration camp guard
notorious for shooting small children. She was living a
respectable life in New York and neighbors thought her
"the nicest woman on the street". All those he uncovered
were sent for trial and the evidence presented with
scrupulous fairness. He refused to condemn Kurt Waldeim
as a war criminal, a former secretary general of the
United Nations, for lack of evidence.
One can surmise that Wiesenthal
would have been proud of the convictions of a cell of Al
Qaeda terrorists in a Madrid courtroom last week, the end
result of careful detective work initiated by Spain's top
anti-terrorism judge, Baltasar Garzón. Eighteen
men were convicted of conspiring to commit the attack on
New York's World Trade Center. Spanish investigators and
politicians have acted on their conviction that extending
the reach of international law, sharing evidence across
borders and painstaking detective work are the most
effective way to combat terrorism. They have been angered
by the Bush administration's refusal to let Spanish
investigators interview Ramzi bin al-Shibh in detention
at Guantánamo Bay.
George Bush could not be more
different. On September 17th, 2002, six days after the
planes destroyed the World Trade Center he 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'". The purpose of going to war in Afghanistan, Bush
added, was "to smoke him out".
Yes, Afghanistan now has had a
democratic election of sorts and women have a little more
freedom than they had in the days of the Taliban. But bin
Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban still wage war, either
from inside Afghanistan or just over the border in the
mountains of Pakistan. More civilians have died in
Afghanistan since the American bombing first began than
perished in the World Trade Center. Yet the Bush
Administration persists in believing that it can defeat
its demons by shooting up whole countries.
Wiesenthal and Garzón always
said that police work is hard and frustrating, but they
also maintained that if systematic and thorough it could
produce better results than going to war - it was simply
more precise, as well as more just.
One still wonders at how the
Clinton administration muffed its chance to bring bin
Laden to justice. In the early spring of 1996 the
government of Sudan, where bin Laden was then living,
made an offer to the CIA to arrest him. (The CIA had
recently published a short profile of him in which he was
named as one of the most significant sponsors of Islamic
extremist activities.) But the administration passed on
the offer, believing that it couldn't get a conviction in
a U.S. court and instead tried unsuccessfully to persuade
Saudi Arabia to take him in and put him on trial.
Samuel Berger, Clinton's National
Security Adviser, told the Washington Post in October
2001, "In the U.S. 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 send him to
some place where justice was more streamlined." Three
colleagues of Berger made it clear to the Post reporters
what Berger meant: "They hoped that the Saudi monarch,
King Fahd, would order bin Laden's swift
beheading."
This is how it came to be that
Sudan expelled bin Laden to Afghanistan, where he planned
the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,
the near destruction of the American destroyer in Yemen
and finally the devastation in New York.
Berger's account rings with
contradictions. If he was convinced that bin Laden was
such a danger to the U.S. that he should be beheaded then
it seems the White House possessed rather incriminating
material. And if that were so the courts would surely
have been responsive. At the very least he could have
been detained whilst his trial was pending and the time
used, as in the Spanish case, to secure further evidence.
War war is easier than law law, to
misquote Winston Churchill, but it is probably not just
more indiscriminate, but also far less
effective.
Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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