The United States is a land of lawyers, who will sue over anything and everything, from the obvious, such as injuries sustained in a car wreck to loss of earnings because someone with a head cold did not warn another person and so passed on the condition. This would seem to betoken the fact that America is a land of laws, rights that can be enforced in the courts. Indeed, most Americans will tell you that it is the protection enshrined by the constitution and the laws that have flowed from it that makes the US “The Land of the Free”.
Odd then, that the United States is now behaving in complete contravention of all the values that it supposedly holds so dear. Ever since the Palestinian intifada broke out, successive US administrations have countenanced Israeli repression. George W. Bush, however, has gone further than any of his predecessors, in not only supporting the military thuggery of Ariel Sharon but in refusing to have Israel censured by the UN, even when Israeli soldiers have gunned down unarmed UN officials.
In their war against Al-Qaeda and international terrorism, the United States seems to have abandoned its supposedly treasured values of freedom and justice. The detention conditions of Taleban and Al-Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba rightly caused outrage. Investigators discovered that these men were humiliated and brutalized, forced to live in mesh-floored cages that might have been considered unsuitable for a battery hen, let alone a human being. As a result of visits by outsiders to Guantanamo Bay, conditions were improved, though not by much. The US authorities, however, had learned a lesson. Even though access to the Cuban base was restricted, because it was officially US soil, there were legal obligations to permit inspections. Elsewhere, detention centers for terrorist suspects have been set up in secret and on foreign soil, so that there is no automatic right for concerned US legislators or officials to come and inspect conditions.
Nevertheless, the authorities press on with legal niceties. They say that the suspects they are holding, even those detained during the fighting in Afghanistan, are not prisoners of war. Therefore, they are entitled to none of the rights enshrined for captured combatants in the Geneva Conventions. If, however, these people are being treated as suspected criminals, in US law, they have other rights, not least the right to a lawyer and also an early trial. Yet none of this is happening. When top administration officials say that post-Sept. 11, the gloves have come off, the majority of Americans seem to approve. Terrorist suspects should be interrogated, maybe even knocked about, until they reveal whatever it is they know. If, as seems statistically likely, there is a significant number of entirely innocent people caught up in the US international dragnet, tough. The end now justifies the means.
In their fury at the attacks upon their homeland, today’s Americans are prepared to throw over values which they once considered fundamental to their way of life. The assumption of moral superiority, which has underpinned so much of what the American superpower has done in the world, is fast becoming inappropriate. In its brutalization of its perceived enemies, America is in grave danger of brutalizing itself.
