Earlier this month the United States State Department released its annual global survey of human rights practices. In addition to the usual suspects of perennial offenders such as Iran, North Korea, Russia, Myanmar, Egypt and Sudan, the report had harsh words for US allies such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan. The criticisms included poor treatment of detainees such as beatings, electric shock, sexual assault and other methods of torture; it rightly condemned other governmental abuses such as poor prison conditions, official impunity, prolonged pre-trial detention and extra-judicial arrests.
Fast-forward to this past week when we hear that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a senior deputy to Osama bin Laden and alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon has confessed his role in multiple attacks by al-Qaida on US and western targets during a recent “Combatant Status Review Tribunal” hearing at the US Navy facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. KSM was arrested in Pakistan in March 2003 and handed over to the Americans.
Evidently it took American authorities four years to finally decide to initiate the process of formally declaring him an “enemy combatant”. So where the heck has he been for four years? Hanging out in one or more secret CIA-run prisons, possibly in facilities that were once used by the old Soviet Union or its former Warsaw Pact allies, being subjected to harsh interrogation methods that may well rise to the level of torture, and kept out of sight of the International Red Cross. All of this at the hands of a country that issues an annual survey of human rights practices around the world. The irony is enough to leave you gobsmacked, as the Brits might say.
And there’s more. Now that we have presumably wrung all the information out of him that is to be had, KSM’s fate is to be tried eventually before a US military commission for war crimes with rules of evidence that render it not much better than a kangaroo court. For example, coerced evidence can be introduced by the prosecution; yet KSM may not get to see all the evidence or information that can be used against him if it is classified. And he is denied habeas corpus rights.
These clumsy judicial instruments devised by the Bush administration when combined with secret detentions and the employment of harsh interrogation methods that likely violate international norms and conventions, have served to undermine our claim to the moral high ground in our “war on terror”. Rather than a celebration of the differences between ourselves and al-Qaida, the manner in which the Bush administration has pursued its campaign against the terrorists has muddied the water in a way many of us would simply not have thought possible before September 11th 2001. In doing so we have managed the feat of elevating the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to the status of jihadist warrior, rather than to treat him simply as the murderous thug he almost assuredly is, no matter how overblown his claims to be a terrorist mastermind.
Had we treated KSM like a terrorist criminal and prosecuted him in our criminal justice system or, at least, subjected him to something resembling a fair and impartial trial, his detention and (given his video confessions and other legally obtained evidence) conviction would truly have been something to celebrate. Instead, during a month in which we preach to the world that its human rights practices leave much room for improvement, the face of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is an uncomfortable reminder of how far our own nation has fallen from grace in the last six years.
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