Means
and ends in
hunting terrorists
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
June 13, 2006
LONDON - On September 17th 2002,
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
Guantánamo. And now we learn no regrets about
being caught in flagrante delicto, running a
CIA-organised 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 editorialised 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 Garzón, 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 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 advisor, 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 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
U.S. courts will be responsive to an honest, above board,
prosecution. Berger's colleagues told the Washington Post
that "they hoped that King Fahd would order bin Laden's
swift beheading". One assumes the evidence against him
even then must have been rather incriminating if that was
their viewpoint, so why were they so doubtful about
American justice?
The truth is the law only works
well if we believe in it. Wiesenthal and Garzón
clearly had no doubts. Clinton and Bush appear not to.
Europe now has to make up its mind where it
stands.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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