WORLD VIEWS: Torture generates anger; Australia's 'Leb' bashings
Edward M. Gomez, Special to SF Gate

Tuesday, December 13, 2005


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How much torture can Washington tolerate, either by American personnel
or their agents, or by officials in U.S.-controlled Iraq? Apparently a
lot. But while the Bush administration looks the other way or denies
American involvement in the torturing of detainees in Iraq, at its
Guantánamo prison camp in Cuba or in secret prisons in Eastern Europe,
much of the rest of the world has been repulsed by the Bush team's
policy.

Washington's refusal to come clean about exactly what American
personnel and their agents have been up to around the world, despite
copious evidence of abuse, has frustrated foreign observers.

"The response of the United States' administration to recent reports in
the European media on its use of torture and illegal abductions has
been garbled, at best," Jamaica's generally middle-of-the-road Gleaner
admonished.

Of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent, weak-sounding
assertion that "while the U.S. did not countenance torture, information
yielded by suspects [whom the United States had detained and
interrogated in various locations] had saved European lives," the
Caribbean daily observed: "In effect, she was saying,'We didn't, but if
we did, it wasn't wrong.'"

Overseas, political observers in countries that normally are generally
friendly to and have tended to respect the United States are sounding
increasingly disillusioned about the attitude of the government under
Bush's watch. Writing in Spain's El País, commentator Andrés Ortega
noted that there is a growing "trans-Atlantic distance" separating the
thinking of Europeans and the Bush administration as far as "the value
and content of international law" are concerned.

This big discrepancy, Ortega noted, "along with [Washington's] tortured
definition of what is considered torture -- which has provoked a new
confrontation between the U.S. and the United Nations -- undermine[s]
even more the overseas legitimacy of the superpower, which it needs,
even though it doesn't recognize that it does so."

Recent revelations that American troops had discovered some 170 mainly
Sunni Muslim prisoners, "some of whom had apparently been abused,
beaten, starved and tortured," in a bunker operated by Iraq's interior
ministry, further fueled the concerns of critics who believe the
country's U.S.-led occupation forces are either clueless about what's
really going on there or incapable of keeping order in the war-ravaged
land.

The discovery of the prison run by the Interior Ministry, a division of
Iraq's fledgling new government that is dominated by Shiite Muslims,
the Sunnis' rivals, was seen as fueling "sectarian tensions." Sunnis
have accused the Interior Ministry "of allowing militias and police
'death squads' to harass and detain Sunnis suspected of involvement in
the insurgency." (Guardian/Süddeutsche Zeitung)


A second prison run by the Interior Ministry was discovered a few days
ago. (Le Monde)

Meanwhile, "[t]he volume of evidence pointing to the use of extreme
tactics by the U.S. in its war on terror," such as last year's Abu
Ghraib prison-torture scandal, which "has been accumulating for years,"
has convinced many foreign observers that, "along with some of its
allies, the U.S. has been engaging in some pretty rough business."
(Gleaner)

However, even if "[t]hat is to be expected, given the intensity of the
war and the challenges posed by committed foes," the Gleaner advised,
"the U.S. needs reminding that to the extent it uses the same kind of
tactics that it decries in others -- savagery and terror -- it will
compromise itself in the eyes of its friends, both actual and
potential. Extreme measures may be ethically justifiable in specific
circumstances. But they can also amount to a slide on to a slippery
slope, in which evil gradually becomes banalized."

Today's ongoing struggle with terrorism makes us face some "tough
decisions," commentator Romanus Otte wrote in Germany's Die Welt am
Sonntag. He pointed out that, in "the struggle against terror ... [w]e
must take the threat seriously and protect ourselves as well as we
can." At the same time, he cautioned, "we [cannot risk] abandoning our
values." As a result, he added, "[t]orture must be forbidden, exactly
because it is so tempting." Otte concluded: "Torture must be forbidden
so that we do not become just like our enemies."

The risks for governments that aid Washington's overseas torture
activities could be high, too. Commentator John Saxe-Fernández,
writing in Mexico's La Jornada, observed, for example, that for
Germany's new chancellor, Angela Merkel, "[t]he political costs ... if
she is suspected of even the slightest collaboration with the United
States ... [with regard to secret] interrogation and extermination
centers, could be devastating, and she knows it: her conservative
government is operating in the midst of public opinion that persists in
rejecting the Iraq war, along with a mounting sense of indignant
irritation over 'clandestine' U.S. operations, which [have included]
the systematic use of torture, a practice to which [the United States]
now appears to be addicted."