It's a good thing that the European Court of Human Rights has pronounced on the case of the CIA's wrongful detention and mistreatmet of Khaled el-Masri as torture. This sheds a needed spotlight on the CIA's widely-denounced rendition program and hopefully will put an end to it as not only a gross violation of human rights but a conflict generator. (Among the persistent theories for the Benghazi attack is a story that the CIA was holding detainees suspected of terrorism in the Benghazi compound.)
But Jim Goldston, head of the Soros-funded Open Society Justice Initiative, has trouble telling the whole story on the way to making this case part of the anti-American cause. So does the leftist Guardian. So do a lot of people.
It's a narrative echoed by a lot of NGOs and individuals all over the world, and usually with none of the lawyerly care that Goldston brings to his work.
The end of Khaled el-Masri's sad story is that he is now in prison again -- this time, legitimately -- for assaulting the mayor of a German town and starting a fire over a dispute. He is serving a two-year sentence.
Now, perhaps you can craft an entire theory not only about his unhappy childhood and the trauma inflicted on him by the CIA that led him to this sorry pass, where he is now in jail for cause, not accidently.
So OSI and other human rights advocates just leave out that part out of the story -- it's awkward, it doesn't fit, and they don't think it matters. In a strict construction of "trial truth" it doesn't matter, either -- whatever the nature of the defendant's character or his separate acts in other settings, if he has been tortured in detention, his rights are violated and that's it, he deserves justice and compensation.
But in the moral and political universe that these human rights groups always pretend they don't inhabit (but actually occupy only one wing of), the larger issue acutely remains of what the CIA and the US government and the West in general are all to do about a population of young, angry Muslim men some of who actually are guilty of launching attacks on them, some of whom are only guilty of inciting such attacks or yakking them up on the Internet, and some of whom are innocent of any act, while they nurture hostile, extremist views that ultimately ensure a chronic climate of antagonism.
Step one might seem obvious -- have the CIA stop rendering and stop torturing. I'm all for that! Who isn't? Only the most obsessive conservatives in the US would really oppose it. Republicans like John McCain are in fact for publicizing and ending any US involvement in torture of foreigners and secret detention in foreign countries.
But there's another half of this equation that human rights agitators never, ever want to admit, not only because it doesn't fit their paradigm of innocent victims, and disrupts the narrative of badly treated justice crusaders, but because then they'd have to face down their own clients' antagonism of the rights paradigm -- and address the problem of their defense of jihad. In fact, where Amnesty International has gone completely wrong and utterly lost its way is in adopting a concept of "defensive jihad" that exonerates these violent clients and fits them in the same category as "prisoners of conscience", although the classic Amnesty definition of such persons was in fact that they not use or advocate violence.
The fact of the matter is, if human rights activists only celebrate the victims of Guantanamo as victims, and use it to fuel their anti-American lefty agendas, they aren't credible, and they never do anything long-term to rectify situations like we now face in Egypt, where ultimately democracy and human rights are "a train that takes you to your destiny, and then you get off" as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan has famously put it.
If human rights groups really want to change the world, they need to change this narrative that enables victims of human rights violations -- even if rightly established as victims -- also to become some kind of heroes of human rights -- which they aren't. And that means not hiding the story, but telling it in all its complexities. It means admitting that the cases are not black-and-white and that the principles of justice they fight for have to apply to the civilians harmed by extremism and terrorism as well.
In dealing with these Guantanamo cases, US authorities face a number of real challenges for which human rights groups really haven't come up with good answers: some of the people they have released have gone on to commit terrorist attacks again; some of them incite hatred and violation of others' human rights, i.e. of women, such as the Cage Prisoners group in the UK; some are mentally ill, either because they started out that way or became that way from mistreatment; some of them would be at risk of being tortured far more severely in their homelands like Yemen or Uzbekistan.
So what's a liberal if flawed superpower to do? It would be great if these suspects could be transferred to US prisons in US states that appear eager to take them, and try them normally as other terrorist suspects have been tried. It would be great if more European countries would simply take them so that the US doesn't have to endlessly fight the challenge here at home from some districts and some political forces that don't want them here (which perplexingly, seem still to have power, even though we are now in Obama II, and Obama really should must the power to address this chronic situation).
But...I'm told that when Europeans are asked -- when they complain about Guantanamo -- to take the prisoners themselves, they look at their shoes. If Spain and Switzerland took some, that's great, but what about the rest? Do you want to keep them suffering to make a point in your hateful and facile anti-American agenda, or do you really want to solve their problems?
The US really needs to step up its clear and straight-talking rhetoric around this instead of remaining silent and in crouch mode. Part of the way they clear the air is to apologize and provide reasonable restitution to Masri; part of the way is to solidly articulate the real challenges of these people and what they represent and not pretend its a mere civil rights problem. If America -- and more importantly Western human rights organizations with high visibility -- could provide a way to address the challenges of these violent and incendiary populatinos without pretense, they might provide a model for awful governments like Uzbekistan and Russia and Turkey that endlessly justify their mistreatment of suspects because of the real extremism they espouse.
Yes, the US makes grave errors in its war on terrorism. But you know, it really time to grow up and stop the litany of "Bush lied, people died" on the Iraq war, when it isn't US troops who massacred most of the 100,000 people in Iraq, but militants and terrorists aided by Al Qaeda, Iran and other hostile actors. Ditto the war in Afghanistan, where the Taliban and its allies kill 85% of the civilians -- and where the scene was set not by US support of mujahideen, but the Soviet massacre of a million -- a million! -- Afghan civilians. Let's get the historical and political framework straight here, people.
There just isn't enough good public American rhetoric on these issues -- it's the sort of connection people like Alec Ross could be making instead of burbling inanely about "innovation" and "shifts of power to the people and end to hierarchies" as he did recently in Pakistan, a place where no shift of power is occuring except to the very present hierarchy of the ISI and the terrorists its supports.
What's happening as a result of the crouching and dodging and leaving the narrative to "progressives" like Jim Goldston who won't tell the whole story is that entire generations in Eurasia and other areas of the world living under oppression are getting to engage in surrogate politics and chime in with anti-Americans instead of facing their own far more oppressive governments at home.
Somebody like "eTajikistan" on Twitter, in between tweets about American-funded educational opportunities, is enabled in this immoral climate created by the international elites of the human rights movement to rant endlessly about the need to apologize to Masri or close Guantanamo. But then he never has to do more than occasionall retweet anything about the problems both of the tyrant Emmomali Rahmon and the Islamists he faces. The e-activists living abroad can indulge in a placebo and rant about seeming US support of their government, but not confront either the dictatorship or its enemies that enable it to justify its existence.
Indeed, one gets the impression that US-funded educational programs, Soros-funded NGOs, and of course the American innovation of Twitter, have enabled entire swathes of intellectuals who should be sweeping around their own doors and addressing tyranny at home to endlessly broom the US and Israel as hated symbols along with a choir that mainly preaches to its own countries in the West.
I wondered at the endless heckling I got from certain Pakistani journalists and bloggers when I criticized Pakistani government reluctance to take on the Taliban and even support it through their intelligence arm, even as I was critical of drone attacks that have harmed Pakistani civlians. Aren't Pakistani activists able to walk and chew gum at the same time, either? Can't they condemn the shooting of Malala, the killing of children by drones AND take a whack at those terrorists in the Taliban and Al Qaeda that make it possible for the US to keep justifying its drones? Hello? Why?
Then I clicked through the screens and eventually got an admission that these Pakistanis were supporters of Imre Khan, already the target of controversy over the US antiwar group CODE PINK's decision to hook up with him to protest drones in a one-sided fashion.
Or I was dealing with Pakistani immigrants in Brisbane -- which provides a home for other Muslim hecklers on Twitter who are long gone from their oppressive homelands -- and have found in the anti-Western cause and the hating of America and Israel a comfortable placebo that helps them fit in with their newfound homeland's liberals.
And the cycle of violence from disaffected angry young men, some of them mistreated, continues, and never gets better.
