THE war against international terror is a war that must be won. Nevertheless, victory cannot come by using the same lawless tactics as that of the terrorists themselves. Torture is a method that has been dismissed by military and intelligence experts; it only works on television serials like “24”.
So it is perhaps not surprising that the European Parliament yesterday roundly condemned both the CIA for its “extraordinary rendition” seizure of terror suspects and the 14 EU states, including Germany, Italy and the UK, which turned a blind eye to special CIA flights that took these people into US captivity.
By an overwhelming majority of 126 votes, members of the European Parliament also condemned the failure of many EU states to cooperate with the union’s investigators who had tried to find out exactly what had happened to allow the CIA to kidnap terror suspects and fly them out of EU countries. The final report established without any doubt that the CIA had broken EU laws with the clear connivance of some member governments.
US officials have always been clear that what they were doing went against every tenet of a civilized, law-abiding society. The very use of the phrase “extraordinary rendition” demonstrates this. First of all, this was an admission that in the “ordinary” course of events, such actions would not have been permitted. Secondly, the word “rendition” is a gentle euphemism for the ugly word “kidnapping”. Sadly, many Americans — perhaps brainwashed by the rhetoric, hubris and television shows that say torture and covert kidnappings are necessary evils in the post-9/11 world — seem more than happy to support these policies.
EU investigators believe that some 12,000 CIA secret flights passed through European airspace on kidnapping missions. Even assuming that only return flights were carrying terrorist suspects and that some of them had been moving detainees within Europe to secret CIA camps, such as those believed to have been established in Poland and Romania, the number of people seized could be several thousand. This is a scandal that deserves even further investigation. The credible reports that those grabbed off European streets by US spies were tortured during their imprisonment in secret camps, raises the alarming specter that some, maybe many, died under interrogation. Were this to be the case, then the Americans and those European governments who aided and abetted them, have behaved no better than terrorists themselves. Worse, they have traduced the standards of law and decency in whose defense they presumably claim to be acting.
The war on terror has been reduced by these tactics to something more fitting a pensive and violent fictional television serial than an official policy of a self-professed champion of civil liberty and human rights. Legislators may continue to huff and puff, but in the face of stonewalling tactics from Washington and European chancelleries, there will be nowhere else for the cause of truth and justice to go. Terrorism cannot be defeated with terror.
