The free world must speak out against extraordinary rendition
First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left
to speak up for me.
David Miliband has today been forced to apologise to the Commons that two US flights of extraordinary rendition did indeed land and refuel upon British soil, and it seems likely that over time more such flights will emerge. The process of extraordinary rendition, as presently used by the US as part of the ‘war on terror’, is the kidnapping of suspected terrorists for transport to and interrogation in countries where torture is not illegal in order that they may be tortured and otherwise interrogated outside of the United States. To me, this is a typical American hypocracy that undermines its credibility yet further of being ‘the land of the free’. By using torture, in addition to opening itself up to all kinds of empirical problems, the US lowers itself to the level of what it is trying to fight. You cannot justify torture for precisely the same reasons that I champion liberty – “[t]hose who would give up liberty for a little temporary security deserve neither” ~ Benjamin Franklin. Fundamentally the issue is that torture may well give temporary security in the form of getting a little more information about terrorist activities. But even though with this I ignore all the practical problems with the approach, we undermine the freedom to a fair trail and presumption of innocence that are so important to the maintenance of a free society. I don’t need to give you the classic arguments.
The reason I included that poem at the top of this post was to make the point about how at present countries such as the UK conveniently sidestep the issue of extraordinary rendition and how this undermines their duties of upholding the conventions that they have signed up to. At present, the UK government has been forced into ensuring that at no costs should American ‘planes carrying prisoners to so-called ‘black sites’ be allowed to land on British soil. But while the First Report of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee said
52. We conclude that the Government has a duty to enquire into the allegations of extraordinary rendition and black sites under the Convention against Torture, and to make clear to the USA that any extraordinary rendition to states where suspects may be tortured is completely unacceptable.
Source
no real ground has been made. The US has denied allegations of torture and Europe has left it at that (while investigative journalism has continued to show otherwise). In order to protect our own freedom and integrity, our governments must speak out at the callous abuses of the US administration, and must fight back against what they clearly do not, in the main, agree with, as shown above.
Hear hear!
I had not read that poem before. It is excellent.
Agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments in this post.