Torture and the world out there

What motivated many Americans to turn against George Bush’s counter-terrorism policies was, in part, a realization that the rest of the world had turned against them already. President Barack Obama’s decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and renounce the use of torture have proved enormously popular with America’s closest allies, and even some not-so-close. By the same token, his unwillingness to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of torture has important international implications that have not so far been part of the debate.

US policy on torture directly affects criminal culpability in other countries. Take the case of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Karachi in 2002 and spent seven years in detention in Morocco, Afghanistan, and ultimately Guantanamo Bay. He claims to have been beaten, repeatedly cut on his genitals and threatened with rape, electrocution and death by Moroccan interrogators who were acting at the behest of the CIA, and being fed questions by British intelligence.

Washington’s much more direct responsibility for the unlawful rendering and torturing of Mohamed has hardly created a ripple in the United States. But Britain’s more tangential complicity has generated a fierce outcry in the UK and resulted in an official criminal investigation. How strange that the mere fallout from US torture policy has done more abroad than the actual genesis and execution of the policy has done here in Washington. That fact will not be lost on Obama’s international constituency.

The unwillingness to prosecute Americans for torture will have a deleterious effect on efforts to prosecute dictators around the world for their crimes. Along with European governments, Washington is currently engaged in a fierce battle for international public opinion over the indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity and other grave offenses against the people of Darfur. Governments in Africa and the Middle East are trying to portray the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court as a tool of imperialist powers who are targeting Third World countries in a phony campaign for “justice.”

Unfortunately, this specious argument is gaining adherents. It will gain even more if the United States refuses to bring its own perpetrators of major crimes to account; the alleged double standard will be proven. At risk is a steadily developing system of international justice that has ended impunity for tyrants from Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to Charles Taylor of Liberia.

And international justice will, in the end, catch up with America’s own alleged criminals. Efforts to indict Bush administration officials such as Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet have gotten underway in German and Spanish courts only because they haven’t gotten any traction in American courts. Foreign prosecutors are much more likely to claim universal jurisdiction if American prosecutors are believed not to have done their job.

Unless European authorities obtain custody of the accused, torture prosecutions in Europe will not deliver real justice (though it might affect some of their travel plans). They could also deepen an isolationist strain in the United States that fails to understand international justice as founded on respect for the same human rights principles that Americans themselves profess.

In the debate over torture, Human Rights Watch’s position in favor of prosecution, and of the release of an additional tranche of photos, has been described as criticism from “the left.” That’s true only if being “left” in the United States today means having a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, which possibly it does. President Obama came to power promising to close the gap between America and its international partners on the neuralgic issues of fighting terrorism. His latest decisions will widen them.