Friday, June 23, 2006
Selective Human Rights Outrage And Asymmetrical Warfare
So-called terrorists, on the other hand, benefit from scrupulously neutral coverage; that is, when their acts receive any coverage at all. In place of cold-blooded killers whose guilt is certain, we have unproven allegations against suspects targeted by
Federal agents, including the FBI, launched a series of raids tonight targeting a suspected terror cell based in Miami, and federal law enforcement officials said seven people have been arrested over the past two days.
Among those arrested, five were U.S. citizens, one was a permanent legal resident, and one was a Haitian who was in the United States illegally on a visa overstay, federal officials told ABC News.
The group has been under surveillance for some time and was infiltrated by a government informant who allegedly led them to believe he was an Islamic radical, a Justice Department official said.
Sources say the arrests reflect the government's concern about so-called "homegrown terrorists."
Contrast this with the coverage of the Haditha incident, no account of which is complete without a reminder from Jack Murtha that there is "no question" about their guilt. Take his word for it - the conclusions of several still-unfinished investigations have already been revealed to him by military officials.
Unlike the accused Marines, their accusers are treated to the same lack of skepticism enjoyed by Murtha. Who are they? A 'young man' who sat on the tape for some time before giving it to Hammurabi Human Rights which is affiliated with the respected group Human Rights Watch. Unmentioned (except in a correction buried in the Times' archives) is the fact that this "young man" is, in fact, the 43 year old founder of Hammurabi. Never mind that he is one of two members of a 16 month old unregistered activist group with no previous record of investigating other human rights violations and no ties to Human Rights Watch. It's hardly worth mentioning that the accuser, who was interviewed by the media a mere three weeks after the Haditha killings, said not a word about the "massacre" at that time. So Time simply doesn't mention it at all.
Undoubtedly, Time regrets the error.
But the accuser is backed by a slew of impartial sources interviewed by email, isn't he?
For instance, there's the morgue doctor, who previously claimed to have been arrested and severely beaten by US troops.
There's the mayor of a terrorist citadel so cowed by the insurgents that only 150 of 900,000 residents voted in the October referendum.
And finally, we have the lawyer who is currently trying to get more blood money for several relatives he claims were murdered by Marines.
If all that weren't enough, there's "the most damning evidence" of all, a cell phone photo. After all, seeing is believing, isn't it?
In the original version of this story, TIME reported that "one of the most damning pieces of evidence investigators have in their possession, John Sifton of Human Rights Watch told Time’s Tim McGirk, is a photo, taken by a Marine with his cell phone that shows Iraqis kneeling — and thus posing no threat — before they were shot." While Sifton did tell TIME that there was photographic evidence, taken by Marines, he had only heard about the specific content of the photos from reports done by NBC, and had no firsthand knowledge.
No doubt Time regrets the error.
The press's laudable desire to avoid sitting in judgment of terrorists is, oddly enough, rarely extended to US servicemembers. This double standard makes them an easy patsy for anyone desiring to vex and annoy the US government with an endless series of accusations that are uncritically parroted by our own media.
But selective outrage is hardly unique to the press. Amnesty International is outraged over US human rights violations, yet all they offer the two US soldiers whose tortured and grotesquely mutilated bodies were found on a road are their sincerest condolences and a heartfelt plea to the killers: "Don't! Stop!" Though the two US soldiers were reportedly killed by Iraqi troops, there is no condemnation of the Iraqi government which failed to control them. Amnesty sees to need to investigate these men’s deaths.
The media are outraged by collateral damage of US attacks on terrorist strongholds, yet inexplicably they ignore deliberate strikes against innocent civilians by Iraq's “freedom fighters”:
Bomber hits Iraq old age home reports news 24, a South African news outlet.
The headline above is the only one I could find by Googling Basra, bomber, old age home.
The BBC hid the information in the last sentence of the article about the two American servicemen tortured to death by their Al Qaeda Iraq abductors. The rest of MSM followed the same pattern.
We are allowed to hear that terrorists booby-trapped the mutilated corpses of two US servicemembers. We are not told the insurgents regularly do the same thing to small children.
Despite evidence that terrorists feed on media coverage, the press continue to hype news of terrorist attacks (usually with repeated reminders that terror is working and we're losing the war) while declining to cover the military's success stories:
"Both the media and terrorists benefit from terrorist incidents," their study contends. Terrorists get free publicity for themselves and their cause. The media, meanwhile, make money "as reports of terror attacks increase newspaper sales and the number of television viewers."
What is the result of the markedly unequal treatment afforded to terrorists and accused servicemen? One indication is provided by Amnesty International, which is moving aggressively to declare human rights violators Hostis Humanii Generis; enemies of all mankind who can be prosecuted no matter where they try to hide:
Initially, a federal judge dismissed the Filartigas’ claims on the grounds that Paraguay’s treatment of its own citizens was not governed by international law. But the Court of Appeals rejected this reasoning. Specifically, the Court of Appeals found that torture was a violation of international law, and that torturers—like the pirates of the 18th century—were hostis humanii generis (enemies of all mankind) who could be brought to justice anywhere.
In the Filartiga v. Peña-Irala ruling, the appeals court relied on the 1975 United Nations Declaration Against Torture and All Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which the United Nations promulgated following Amnesty International’s first international campaign against torture. The relationship between human rights activism and success in the courtroom could not have been clearer.
Prosecuting tortures, at first glance, sounds entirely reasonable. But who will be prosecuted by Amnesty International?
Who exactly are the enemies of mankind? For Amnesty, they are mostly government officials -- which is a wise position, honestly, a wiser one than the United Nations system credits. The UN system believes that rights belong to states, and the "rights" of individuals are to be protected through the various nation states. This is why Cuba is now on the UN's Human Rights watchdog group.
Like the ICC at the Hague, Amnesty International reserves the bulk of its outrage for the United States and Israel while virtually ignoring far worse crimes from totalitarian states like China, North Vietnam, Cuba, Libya, and Sudan. Why does this happen?
It happens because democratic nations like the US and Israel do not tolerate such abuses. Their legal systems of these serial human rights abusers are exquisitely sensitive to the rights of alleged victims. Paradoxically, their greatest strengths of established democracies - the capacity for introspection, a free press, and respect for the civil rights of even non-citizens - are used against them. The likelihood of bringing human rights violators to justice in China or Cuba is virtually nil, but in America the slightest whiff of scandal brings on an avalanche of self-loathing from the press, with the attendant investigations and criminal charges, many of which (as in the case of Ilario Pantano or the British soldiers recently accused of war crimes in Basra) are eventually proven groundless.
Our adversaries in the war on terror have not been slow to take advantage of this. Hammurabi Human Rights Group, the accuser in the Haditha case, is (contrary to Time's blatant misrepresentation) a 16 month-old organization with only two members who never bothered to investigate a single human rights violation before Haditha. But an anti-war agenda and our own ideals allow due process to become a vehicle for asymmetrical warfare against established democracies. Asymmetrical, because Iraq's own human rights violators will never be prosecuted, nor will those of other despotic regimes. Our enemies have found a way to use our own ideals against us.
The selective outrage of the international community is well established. The same United Nations that condemns the US and Israel with astonishing regularity refuses to act against known abusers like Libya and Cuba. On the contrary; their crimes are rewarded by leadership positions on the UN Human Rights Committee, thus cleverly putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse. The ICC relentlessly pursues Israel while ignoring the plight of immigrants to Arab nations, whose passports are routinely seized on arrival allowing them to be literally enslaved without hope of reprieve.
Yet the US is condemned for resisting the demands of groups like Human Rights Watch and the ICC; for refusing to be prosecuted under agreements to which they are not a signatory.
In the name of human rights, we are condemned for refusing to knuckle under to unequal justice which leaves us defenseless against a ruthless enemy far more contemptuous of 'international norms' than we are. And yet, we continue to investigate and, where guilt has been proven, punish our own offenders. Is it surprising, then, that the number of accusations continues to increase? We cannot refuse to investigate without sacrificing every principle we hold dear. We are honor-bound not to turn away. Our own scruples become a knife the enemy can twist in our guts until at last the only nation willing to stand up to dicatators and terrorists is paralyzed into inaction.
Talk about your unintended consequences. But what else can we do, without sacrificing our own humanity?
5 Comments:
By 
Tony Harrison, at
Fri Jun 23, 12:35:00 PM:
Regarding your outrage at the MSM, I offer Nietzsche's apt quotation: "Behold the superfluous! they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper." (Thus Spake Zarathustra)
It wasn't without reason that Hitler came to power using the Weimar Republic's constitution, which remain unchanged during his dictatorship. (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism)
By Pax Federatica, at
Fri Jun 23, 01:21:00 PM:
Talk about your unintended consequences. But what else can we do, without sacrificing our own humanity?
Worry about our humanity after the war is won, and not a moment sooner, says Diana West of the Washington Times.
War is inherently amoral, not immoral.
By Cassandra, at
Fri Jun 23, 03:26:00 PM:
I fear those days are gone, Joshua.
You have to wonder, though, whether we are so concerned with keeping our hands clean that we cannot win a war anymore.
Churchill's quote has more than a grain of truth in it, but it would be political suicide for any leader to say so openly. And then we pitch fits when they don't come clean with absolutely everything they're doing to keep us safe.
There is a reason the Founding Fathers created an executive branch - it's because you can't steer a country in times of crisis by consensus and committee. But that is an 'inconvenient truth' that, though it's born out by our own history, no one likes to talk about because it gives us the willies.
As I wrote a long time ago, America is so busy fearing and distrusting the sheepdogs that they leave the door open for the wolf.
By Papa Ray, at
Fri Jun 23, 07:20:00 PM:
West says:
"In the 21st century, however, there is something that our society values more than our own lives — and more than the survival of civilization itself."
I won't bother giving that "something" a name. We can all try to find that answer within ourselves. But I think that we can all agree that the "intended" consequence was to raise our kids and grandkids in a kinder, gentler safer world, without the mass killings and the brutal treatment of civilians during conflicts.
But there lies the start of problems, because not all peoples in this world tried to instill those values into their children. Instead many instilled the opposite: Death to all of them! (Whoever, they were at that particular time). They never taught them how to try and work out their problems, how to wage a civilized war, only how to sharpen and use their knives and guns to the greatest effect.
So, now that the long war has restarted, we have two camps that have completely different views on how to wage wars and conflicts.
Neither is right, but also neither is completely wrong.
I know what will change our views and attitudes about war and conflict and it will change it fairly fast. But I just don't want it, to have to come to it.
But most of us already know it, so I guess it bears being said again.
When we get fed up with them killing us, we will start killing them without much regards toward the how and the how many or the fairness of it all.
I hope there are enough of us left to make it a good fight whenever we come to this terrible conclusion.
Papa Ray
West Texas
USA
By Dawnfire82, at
Fri Jun 23, 10:42:00 PM:
It'll take a suitcase nuke in S.F., CA to alter these attitudes.
