Before she boarded her flight to Europe and what promises to be a difficult tour of its capitals, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made it clear in a carefully worded speech that she was going to take the offensive against Washington’s critics over secret CIA prisons and allegations of torture. It was a clever presentation which managed to avoid addressing directly the issue of whether or not the CIA has been running a network of clandestine detention centers, in among other places Poland and Romania. But she readily admitted to “rendition” — administration-speak for extradition, if necessary without due legal process in the country where a suspect was detained, maintaining that this had been used successfully, not just by the US, to bring terrorists to justice. It had also helped obtain information which enabled the authorities to prevent new terrorist outrages.
She justified “rendition” by saying that since 9/11, the world had been faced with an entirely new challenge — international terrorists were often stateless. Because the US had classed them as “illegal combatants,” they could be held, like prisoners of war, until the conflict was over or until they were no longer deemed to be a threat. However, she rather spoiled this line by saying that rendition had long been used successfully before 9/11.
Having effectively admitted that the US, presumably in the shape of the CIA, had been flying suspected terrorists around the world for interrogation, she denied that these flights were taking the suspects to torture. Indeed she repeated US denials of the use of either physical or mental torture, saying that US personnel accused of abuse were tried and if found guilty, punished.
Yet her insistence on the one hand that the world was confronted with an exceptional new challenge which required exceptional new responses, while on the other hand asserting that Washington was committed to upholding the rule of law, does not hang together. The seizure of suspects and spiriting them away from countries without proper extradition, the use of secret prisons and indefinite detention without trial are absolutely nothing to do with the rule of law. They are worthy Saddam’s Iraq or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or Myanmar’s junta. If suspected terrorists are kept in secret prisons, who is to see what happens to them? If their very names are not published, who can know if they die and how can anyone investigate the circumstances of their deaths?
Rice has said in essence that the world should trust Washington to do the right thing. This is to ignore the proven untrustworthiness and profound bad judgment of the Bush administration. Trust is earned, not delivered on demand and once squandered is hard to restore.
US policy as outlined by Rice is simply not good enough for the country which is supposed to be leading the fight against terrorism in the name of freedom and justice. It must be hoped that the Europeans will not stand for such a mealy-mouthed apologia for the abandonment of civilized standards and the rule of law. Justice must always be seen to be done.
