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How Civilized, Law-Abiding Countries Imprison Terrorists
While the U.S. continues to debate whether it must imprison accused terrorists without charges or trial -- and now even refuses to say whether it will release those who are given trials but then acquitted -- numerous other countries are, with their actions, adhering to the values and principles which we, with words, righteously claim to embody:
From The Associated Press today:
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- A Turkish appeals court has upheld a verdict sentencing six al-Qaida militants to life in prison for the deadly 2003 bombings in Istanbul.
The court in Ankara says Wednesday it has approved the life sentence for the six of the 74 suspects for their involvement in the attacks on Nov. 15 and Nov. 20, 2003. Those bombings killed 58 people and targeted two synagogues, the British consulate and a London-based bank. . . .
The court has sentenced 33 other suspects to between three years and nine months in prison to 18 years. It acquitted 15 of them, citing lack of evidence, while ordering a retrial for the rest, requesting further investigation.
From The New York Times yesterday:
BERLIN - The defendants in Germany's largest terrorism case in a generation announced in a Düsseldorf courtroom on Tuesday that they were ready to confess to plotting a series of deadly bombings.
The trial was expected to last two years and had been billed as the biggest terrorism case since leaders of the far-left Red Army Faction were prosecuted in the 1970s. . . .
German authorities arrested three of the suspects in September 2007 with 26 military detonators and 12 drums of hydrogen peroxide, more explosive material than was used in the 2004 bombings of commuter trains in Madrid.
German security officials said the suspects had visited terrorist training camps in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. They are accused of being members of the Islamic Jihad Union, a radical group based in Central Asia with roots in Uzbekistan. The four men are accused of planning attacks against a list of targets, including the airport in Frankfurt and Ramstein Air Base, an American installation in Germany.
Numerous countries that aren't the U.S. -- including those targeted by Terrorist threats at least as serious as those faced by the U.S. -- have routinely and repeatedly given what are called "trials" and "due process" to those it accuses not merely of harboring terrorist wishes, but also actually having carried out atrocious terrorist attacks. During the Bush era, even the U.S. -- when we were moved to do so -- successfully did the same.
Giving real trials to people whom the state wants to imprison -- even accused Terrorists -- is what civilized, law-respecting countries do, by definition. By contrast, lawless and tyrannical states -- also by definition -- invent theories and warped justifications for indefinite detention with no trials. Before the U.S. starts talking again about "re-claiming" its so-called leadership role in the world, it probably should work first on catching up to the multiple countries far ahead of it when it comes to the most basic precepts of Western justice -- beginning with what ought to be the most uncontroversial proposition that it will first give due process and trials to those it wants to imprison. Shouldn't the claim that the U.S. cannot and need not try Terrorist suspects be rather unconvincing when numerous other countries from various parts of the world -- including those previously devastated by and currently targeted with terrorist attacks -- have been doing exactly that quite successfully?
UPDATE: The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar has a good summary of yesterday's Senate hearing on Obama's proposed policy of indefinite, preventive detention. The hearing was shaped by an odd (though quite revealing) spectacle: the most vigorous defenders of Obama's proposal were a far right GOP Senator (Tom Coburn) and two of the most right-wing, Bush/Cheney-loyal lawyers in the country (former Reagan DOJ official David Rivkin and Ken Starr acolyte Richard Klinger). Meanwhile, Obama's proposal was vigorously criticized by the two Democratic Senators in attendence (Russ Feingold and Benjamin Cardin), along with the civil libertian and human rights advocates who testified and a former Bush DOJ federal prosectuor, David Laufman, who detailed the ongoing success the U.S. has had in prosecuting accused terrorists in real courts ("[E]xperience has shown that terrorism prosecutions in Article III courts work. . . . Congress should reject any proposal to establish a legal regime authorizing indefinite detention without charge or trial").
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12 Comments so far
Show AllGreat piece except for the phrase "...the most basic precepts of Western justice..."
Pretty racist and historically inaccurate, that. Throughout human history, peoples and nations around the world have developed various types of courts and processes that involve due process and justice.
To attribute these qualities to "the West" is just plain wrong.
E.G. many indigenous peoples on the North American continent had developed highly democratic and just societies before Europeans "civilized" them.
He isn't saying that only the west has those precepts.
He is saying that those precepts are the basic foundation of justice in western societies, in the western concept of universal justice; just as they might be the basic foundation of justice in other societies.
If we start with trials and prison sentences for "terrorists" what will we do with all the pot smokers posing such a threat to "our way of life"?
Sell to them to fund terror cells.
This article may be the first to refute US policy with examples of due-process for terror suspects in other countries and the USA itself. Before 9/11 there was a lot of discussion in the US media of other countries' much greater experience with terrorism. But that discussion was snuffed out post 9/11, suggesting quite a politicized US media. People on the far-left understand that due-process and generally enlightened/universalist policies serve to keep the peace, so fewer terrorists are created in the first place. But the pseudo-left in coalition with the extreme right support extreme-right policies, with a pretense that a crumb of sympathy to far-left people-oriented values can somehow compensate. The only way to put down the extreme right is for the pseudo-left to switch to coalition with the far-left, i.e. support due-process and related enlightened/universalist policies comprehensively and consistently. Practically, this means revoking all support for the Demok party until various conditions are met. Failure to take such action in the past has rendered unto Demok supporters/voters shared responsibility in all the destruction.
camus13
How long are we going to keep backing the Speaker in Chief Obama. You know the guy who now holds the record for flip flops.
I know that was just the campaign. Now that I'm in office I am using the Chaney-Bush playbooks. The reason.............so the big boys keep the money flowing.
Our country is supportive of torture, injustice, wars, corporate corruption, no matter how many laws of fairness and justice have to be violated. What's not to like?
Like the old saying, 'we don't need stinking badges.' We also don't need adherence to basic laws or uphold basic human rights.
Gotta love it.
www.NotOneMore.US
Next time maybe more people will consider voting for candidates that aren't beholden to corporate interests and politicians who put corporate profits ahead of the public good.
Greenwald's piece is enlightening. The history of how the U.S. got into this mess is important. Although I haven't done the research we've come to expect from Greenwald and others, it seems clear that Bush thought Al Qaeda terrorists would be equivalent to a uniformed army, but without the uniforms. This led to declaring captured terrorist suspects unprotected by the Geneva convention, and also declaring that as long as they were not put on U.S. soil, they were not entitled to basic human rights, let alone due process of law. Even when first proposed, these ideas ignored the facts and blatantly contradicted values implicit in the phrase, "land of the free and home of the brave," intoned at every sports event and television sign-off. History since then, including what Greenwald recounts here, has underlined this loss of honor. Although the hope that Obama would change course seems to be fading, we owe it to ourselves and our progeny to stand up for what we thought were American values.
Guys, the main targets of all this repression are you-all, the American left.
Of course the Muslim countries get invaded and the Muslims get more pointedly mistreated. But they form only a small part of the electorate in the United States.
Even those who imagine that all the torture and 1st and 4th Amendment violations have some efficacy in protecting a population conceive of "security" as "securely under centralized control."
Not only are these the same kinds of tactics used by the Central and South American dictatorships in previous decades, a lot of the same people remain involved behind the scenes.
The Bushies had and the Obama administration has difficulties militarizing population control within the US because to do so transparently reduces the popular cooperation that's already fairly high in the US. To persecute minorities first allows elites to reduce checks and balances with Patriot-Act style legislation, centralize ownership of commercial media by reducing or repealing controls, lay an infrastructure and network of opaque agreements for tracing and control of info over digital networks as in recent wiretap deals with AT&T & others, privatize the hardware and software of government data and databases to reduce or remove oversight and allow 1-stroke control of digital media, and, they hope, a gradual increase in popular acceptance of violence against 1st Amendment rights.
At some point, when some issue of sufficient valence comes to the for, some real or apparent emergency, the mechanisms and customs that have slowly developed as emergency measures come to action.
Other than eventual use on a domestic population, no other motive exists for the maintenance of such institutions.
I have to wonder how precipitous the fall might be.