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Jewish World Review June 6, 2005 / 28 Iyar, 5765 Amnesty too easy on terrorists in Iraq, too hard on U.S. effort By Debra J. Saunders
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Amnesty International's latest report didn't denounce conditions
for U.S. troops captured and held in detention facilities in Iraq. That's
because, as far as anyone knows, there are no camps for American prisoners
of war in Iraq.
According to Pentagon sources, there is only one U.S. soldier
listed as missing-captured in Iraq. Sgt. Keith Maupin, 21, has been missing
since April 2004.
Terrorists in Iraq don't take prisoners. They fight to kill.
Larry Greer, spokesman for the Pentagon's POW/MIA office, noted that while
there is no way of knowing how the terrorists would treat U.S. detainees, it
is clear how they treat hostages: "Their treatment appears to be torture
followed by execution."
So Amnesty International cannot refer to a POW camp run by Iraqi
and foreign insurgents fighting the U.S.-led coalition as it does to the
U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay — as a "gulag of our times,
entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to
the law." The dead don't talk.
I do not believe that Amnesty International is indifferent to
the carnage committed by what it calls "armed groups opposed to the presence
of U.S.-led forces in Iraq." The group's 2005 report does cite "gross
human-rights abuses which caused thousands of civilian casualties." It also
reports that insurgents have engaged in kidnapping for ransom and, "Some
kidnap victims, including children, were killed."
I do believe, however, that Amnesty is too easy on terrorists in
Iraq, and too hard on the U.S. effort.
Note how Amnesty's language — "armed groups opposed to the
presence of U.S.-led forces in Iraq" — cleanses the aim of the terrorists.
Men who blow up mosques, kill children and butcher Iraqi police and military
trainees are fighting more than coalition troops. They are fighting to keep
Iraq from being free.
The Washington Post editorial page, among others, scolded
Amnesty for comparing Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet "gulag." There is, after
all, a big difference between thousands of concentration camps housing more
than 20 million people over decades and a detention camp that houses some
500 captured enemy combatants. A more apt comparison would be Stalin's gulag
to the prisons of Saddam Hussein.
I don't like bashing Amnesty International, which for years has
done important work that shined the light on ruthless, bloody tyrants. But
the group's leaders have wandered off the path if they think that President
Bush is the planet's big bad guy. This is a man who has sent troops to risk
their lives protecting U.S. interests, but also to free Afghans and Iraqis
from tyrants. And Amnesty doesn't care.
No, the folks at Amnesty International are too pumped up with
the conceit — shared by some of my brethren in the media — that without
Amnesty International, U.S. troops would be torturing every prisoner in
sight.
Indeed, Amnesty reported that "torture and ill-treatment by
U.S.-led forces were widely reported." The word torture is being overused,
and the fact that charges are "widely reported" does not make them all true.
Be it noted that the Pentagon already had investigated abuses
and charged bad actors at the Abu Ghraib prison before the story broke.
Ditto with soldiers involved in the wrongful death of two Afghan prisoners,
a story featured in The New York Times last month.
Of course, the Pentagon acted quickly. Mistreatment of enemy
combatants invites mistreatment of U.S. troops when captured — if not in
Iraq today, then somewhere else in the future. Some of the victims were
completely innocent — which makes their suffering doubly wrong. As Sen.
John McCain, R-Ariz. — who as a former prisoner of war in Vietnam would
know — recently told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "Torture doesn't work."
When a practice is morally wrong, dangerous to U.S. troops and
ineffective, the Pentagon doesn't need to be told to eradicate it.
But there are other issues at stake — like the war.
Amnesty called on the Pentagon to close Gitmo and either charge
or release all the prisoners there. Bad idea, countered Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld: Twelve of the 200 detainees who had been released from
Gitmo "have already been caught back on the battlefield, involved in efforts
to kidnap and kill Americans." He has an obligation to his troops to not
release back to Afghanistan or Iraq someone who will try to kill them.
Then there's Amnesty's insistence on pinning all mistreatment on
the top brass, despite the fact, as noted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers at a press conference last week, that abuses
took place "on one shift in Abu Ghraib — not the shift before, not the
shift after, but one shift."
That is poor treatment, to be sure. But it is not torture. It
doesn't matter if these prisoners were trying to kill them and their buddies
two weeks ago. It doesn't matter if Muslim terrorists are blowing up
mosques. Still, American G.I.s have to show more respect for Islam than many
Muslim fighters display.
It's odd how the left bemoans "the desecration of the Koran." An
investigation found that five U.S. personnel may have mishandled the holy
book. There has been no substantiation of charges that any American flushed
the Koran down a toilet. Still, Bush-haters are outraged.
It wasn't too long ago that conservative Christians were enraged
that the federal government funded an exhibition with a crucifix in urine.
That was a matter of free speech, and woe to the taxpayer who dared to
complain. So why complain if a U.S. soldier might have treated the Koran as
poorly as a U.S.-funded artist treated the crucifix?
On Memorial Day, A&E aired "Faith of My Fathers," a television
drama based on Sen. McCain's book about his 5-and-a-half-year stint as a POW
at the Hanoi Hilton, the infamous prison in North Vietnam. The North
Vietnamese beat McCain, they left him hanging by the arms, and in one scene,
McCain's captors dunked his head into a trough filled with urine and
excrement.
But at least they didn't throw the Bible in the trough. That
would have been real torture.
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Comment JWR contributor Debra J. Saunders's column by clicking here. © 2005, Creators Syndicate |
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