Constitutional Crisis?
Roth, Kenneth
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION tends to view human rights and security as a zero-sum game. Because the United States faces a serious terrorist threat, it believes that some rights must be restricted....
...The attacks were undeniably evil...
...The terrorist attacks of September 11, only reconfirmed that view...
...Instead, for short-term gain, it has allied itself with an array of repressive regimes...
...Second, these swing voters must be given a positive vision...
...To link its counter-terrorism with a positive vision that might have been embraced by the swing voters, the Bush administration could have noted that terrorism is a profound affront to human rights...
...Others have been summarily detained...
...First, they must be given a reasonable opportunity to pursue their grievances through legitimate political processes...
...KENNETH ROTH is executive director of Human Rights Watch...
...If those values are seen as alien or oppressive, the terrorist message gains force...
...But as even Donald Rumsfeld has acknowledged, the real test of success is whether the administration's approach to terrorism is neutralizing more 14 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 terrorists than it breeds...
...The Bush administration has not taken either of these steps...
...Pakistan is a case in point...
...People must be free to launch independent newspapers, to establish political parties and civil associations, and to elect their government and hold its officials accountable...
...That attitude has brought us a host of rights violations: the summary detention of Americans in the United States as "enemy combatants...
...That means putting pressure on closed political systems such as those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia...
...This analysis has some intuitive appeal, but is it correct...
...The plummeting esteem with which the United States is now regarded throughout most of the world suggests an utter failure to offer a vision of a fight against terrorism that respects elementary human rights...
...But what of the broad middle category, the swing voters— those who have political grievances and could be convinced to pursue them peacefully or violently...
...Since the coup, Musharraf has systematically sought to destroy those two parties...
...coercive interrogation techniques that amount to torture and mistreatment...
...Terrorism has a nihilistic element that thrives on rejection of dominant values...
...A fair assessment would have to conclude that this radical rejection of human rights has not in fact made us safer...
...DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 15...
...But if those values are appealing—if they can be embraced by the population in question— terrorist recruiters have a harder time gaining traction...
...In the most recent elections Pakistanis unhappy with military rule turned in large numbers to radical political parties...
...Until General Pervez Musharraf overthrew an elected civilian government in 1999, Pakistanis voted overwhelmingly for one of two secular parties...
...If anything, it has aggravated the terrorist threat...
...Suppose we think of this issue in terms of the "swing vote" in the countries that produce most of today's terrorists...
...Has the administration's willingness to sacrifice human rights for security actually made us safer...
...Some citizens of these countries are committed terrorists...
...Sacrificing rights for "security" may seem superficially pragmatic, but the consequences are fraught with peril...
...Human rights and security are not a zerosum game...
...TWO THINGS MUST be done to turn such people away from violence...
...and the backing of repressive regimes around the world—Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghan warlords, the Indonesian military—so long as they ally themselves with the "war on terrorism...
...Bush came into office ideologically disposed to view human rights as an unwelcome constraint on the sovereign latitude of the United States...
...Those parties were corrupt, and in many ways COLLOQUIUM ineffective, but they gave Pakistanis an avenue to pursue their political grievances peacefully...
...On the other side of the spectrum are the vast majority of people, who would never resort to terrorist violence...
...Nothing short of arrest or killing is likely to deter these people from carrying out their murderous plots...
...It could then have announced that it would redouble its efforts to ensure that the means it used to fight terrorism would scrupulously respect human rights, with the aim of building a world in which no one faced repression or coercion...
...the proposed use of military commissions that lack basic due process guarantees...
...Here the available signs are negative...
...The foreign policy team of G.W...
...The administration chose a simpler but not a wiser path...
...the misuse of laws on immigration and material witnesses to detain criminal suspects without granting them criminal justice rights...
...By breeding new resentments, and making it harder for people to connect the fight against terrorism with any other good they cherish, blind expediency risks exposing us to greater dangers than ever before...
...Their ideas have had a fair trial, and they have not worn well...
...punishing the perpetrators and preventing further attacks was unquestionably good...
...the ripping up of the Geneva conventions at Guantanamo...
...True, some terrorist suspects have undoubtedly revealed secrets under "stress and duress" interrogation...
...A clear and early illustration was its intense opposition to the International Criminal Court...
...so, the administration reasoned, anything that got in the way of an unfettered response, like those annoying human rights standards, had better be pushed to the side...
...Those who have made and defend our current policy—Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and others—feel that it suffices in the "war on terrorism" to be against terrorism...
...The expediency of these marriages of convenience is vastly outweighed by the enormous frustration generated among people for whom peaceful avenues of dissent have been closed off...
Vol. 51 • September 2004 • No. 4
