Condi's Dilemma: U.S. Human Rights Standards in Doubt

Is it possible for the United States to portray itself as the champion of human rights, while at the same time practicing an 'anything goes' policy in regard to the war on terror? According to this op-ed article from Colombia's El Tiempo newspaper, this is the polemical dilemma that Condoleezza now finds herself in.

EDITORIAL

Translated By Paula van de Werken

December 9, 2005

Original Article (Spanish)

Attack is not always the best defense. As an example, in order to confront accusations of secret prisons on the Old Continent and the abuse of prisoners by the CIA, Condoleezza Rice on her European tour decided to go on the offensive. Indignation accompanied her throughout the trip.

On November 2, the Washington Post reported eight presumed secret detention camps of the CIA in Europe. Poland and Romania were implicated, and denied the report. The European press has exposed lists of landings of flights (400 in Germany alone) by American-operated aircraft which could have been transporting prisoners to countries suspected of interrogating them under torture.

Monday, as she was leaving on her five-day tour, Rice called upon the Continent not to complain about secret operations that "have saved European lives." She insinuated that several European governments knew more than they wanted to publicly admit. And she defended the practice of "renditioning" - or capturing (kidnapping, according to some) a citizen of one country and taking him to another, where he is imprisoned indefinitely, without charge, and interrogated.

Although Rice said that it isn't the policy of her country to submit prisoners to inhumane treatment, assuring when in Kiev that the obligations of the Convention against Torture applied to every American, inside or outside the United States, she declined to confirm or deny stories about the existence of clandestine CIA prisons.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the United States had admitted to "erroneously  transporting" a German citizen to Afghanistan, questions for Rice arose such as, "When the interrogators torture these prisoners that the United States has turned over, is the country (the U.S) responsible or not?" … "Do you conceive it an international right 'to capture' someone, to remove him from a country and put him incommunicado indefinitely, without charges?" The man, "captured" in Macedonia while on vacation in 2003, has sued the CIA, alleging that the agency had detained him for five months and that he was tortured.

After Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, this new scandal and the explanations offered by Condi Rice reawaken the controversy over the real standards of a country that proclaims itself the champion of human rights, which, while waging the "war on terror," then suggests that "anything goes."