By: Joe Reiss
My post is in response to this morning’s New York Times editorial titled The Torture Report. In this article, the author urges the government to bring criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his legal counsel, William J. Haynes, and other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff. The author points to the abuse, torture and death that occurred at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and discusses how those incidences are a direct result of the policies enforced by the officials at the top. The author then discusses how the CIA’s interrogation practices violate countless laws, and the importance of following these laws in order to maintain America’s good image in the rest of the world. As horrible as torture is, I strongly disagree with a number of the propositions advanced in this article. The author discusses how the prisoner’s had their “human rights” violated. Why doesn’t the author talk about the fact that these men are being captured, held and interrogated to prevent terrorist attacks on US soil? Do American’s not have human rights? Do American’s not have the right to walk to work in the morning and not fear that terrorists will fly 747’s into their office? Aren’t those human rights violations?
The author generally condemns America’s response to 9/11. They site some of the provisions of the Patriot Act as reprehensible. They advocate a full investigation in to all of the government’s response to September 11th because we need to know, “precisely what went wrong in the last seven years . . . [to] make sure those terrible mistakes are not repeated.” I just can’t help but feel puzzled by this declaration. I thought the problem was what happened seven years ago. I was also pretty sure, that those “terrible mistakes” of the last seven years were pretty effective in preventing further terrorist attacks. As Professor Rosenbaum pointed out many times throughout the semester, not one person in the classroom on September 12, 2001, would have believed that, seven years from now, the country would not endure a single attack. What if these “mistakes” were not made, and terrorists successfully flew a plane in to the capital building, or Sears tower, or contaminated our drinking water with chemical weapons, or somehow acquired and used a nuclear weapon. I wonder if this author would remain consistent and, in the face of such tragedy, applaud our government’s protection of the terrorist’s human rights even at the expensive of the lives and human rights, of American’s. I am not a fan of abuse and torture, nor do I like the thought of the government monitoring my communications, but someone must acknowledge that our counterterrorism efforts have been stellar over the past seven years. If our safety has been the result of those “terrible mistakes”, then I hope we keep making them.
