U.N. Hatchet Job

By Joseph Klein
May 22, 2006
FrontPageMagazine.com 
Original Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22556

The United Nations Committee against Torture has just issued an inflammatory report that is sharply critical of the United States.  The report covers Guantanamo, stressful interrogations, secret prisons, rendition of prisoners to other countries, compensation for so called torture ‘victims’, and even Hurricane Katrina.   It should be largely dismissed as a hatchet job against our sovereign right to protect ourselves from another terrorist attack. 

By way of background, the United States is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.   As it was entitled to do, the U.S. listed a reservation to its treaty obligations as follows:  ... nothing in this Convention requires or authorizes legislation, or other action, by the United States of America prohibited by the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the United States.    This was to clarify that the treaty’s prohibition of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” could not bind the United States to a stricter standard than what constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Eighth Amendment to our Constitution.   This reservation was essential in order for the treaty to be lawful, since a treaty cannot supercede the terms of the Constitution as interpreted by our federal courts.

At the request of the UN Committee, the United States submitted detailed information concerning its treatment of enemy combatant detainees caught during the course of our ongoing war against the global terrorist threat to our nation.  Disregarding the explanatory information that we provided to the UN Committee and our lawful right to operate within the scope of the reservations to the treaty that we filed at the time of ratification, the committee then issued its largely negative report.   It asserted that the United States must implement the Convention against Torture “in full at the domestic level.”  It also said that the United States “should consider withdrawing its reservations, declarations and understandings lodged at the time of ratification” and “should reconsider its express intention not to become party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court”.

Here are some highlights of the UN Committee’s broadside:

[1] Adopt the UN Committee’s pampering definition of “psychological torture”.   
 
The United States, says the UN Committee,“should ensure that acts of psychological torture, prohibited by the Convention, are not limited to “prolonged mental harm” as set out in the State party’s understandings lodged at the time of ratification of the Convention, but constitute a wider category of acts, which cause severe mental suffering, irrespective of their prolongation or its duration.”  The UN Committee’s report goes on to say how concerned the UN Committee is over the mental health of detainees who are isolated from others – no matter how dangerous these suspected terrorists may be.  The mere presence of a fearsome dog during interrogation is also apparently too much for the UN Committee members’ sensibilities.   In other words, the committee members believe that interrogation should not be an unpleasant experience – no psychological pressure at all even if it means forfeiting the opportunity to obtain timely information about a planned terrorist attack.  It is utterly ridiculous for the UN Committee to equate coercive interrogation techniques that entail some psychological stress or embarrassment of suspected terrorists with acts of torture or with any common sense notion of cruel or inhuman punishment.   The open-ended notion of prohibiting “mental suffering” is an example of what the United States had in mind when it filed its official reservation to the Convention against Torture.  Since the UN has not yet been able to even define “terrorism” much less confront it, it is not surprising that they would show more solicitude for the feelings of suspected terrorists than for the innocent people whose lives might be saved by extracting intelligence from uncooperative detainees.
 
[2] Close down Guantanamo.   
 
The United States, the UN Committee says, “should cease to detain any person at Guantánamo Bay and close this detention facility, permit access by the detainees to judicial process or release them as soon as possible, ensuring that they are not returned to any State where they could face a real risk of being tortured, in order to comply with its obligations under the Convention.”   This is the same recommendation that was made several months ago by so-called human rights experts on behalf of the now defunct and discredited UN Commission on Human Rights.  Those ‘experts’, it may be remembered, issued their findings without even visiting Guanatanamo, even though they had been invited to do so.   Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross and others who have visited Guantanamo have found no evidence of torture there.   Needless to say, there may indeed come a time when it will be appropriate to shut down the detention facility.  President Bush has already said that Guantanamo should not stay open indefinitely.  But it is our President’s decision when to close Guantanamo, acting on the advice of his military commanders and Secretary of Defense.   And it is up to our government to decide what to do with the detainees if Guantanamo is closed.  Why should we really care what happens to the detainees if they are sent back to their own home countries – for example, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Jordan -  and dealt with under their laws?  Let the UN wallow in its worries about the personal fate of the terrorist suspect detainees.   We should be more worried about what the detainees might do if they are freed and go back to their terrorist camps to resume their jihad. 
 
[3] Compensate the detainees who are “victims of abuses”, even those who suffered only mental or emotional injury. 
 
“The Committee is concerned by section 1997 e (e) of the 1995 Prison Litigation Reform Act which provides ‘that no federal civil action may be brought by a prisoner for mental or emotional injury suffered while in custody without a prior showing of physical injury.’  The State party should not limit the right of victims to bring civil actions and amend the Prison Litigation Reform Act accordingly.”   If Congress were to go along with the UN Committee’s wishes, the plaintiffs’ bar would have a field day bringing suits against the United States government and officials to obtain monetary damages for the detainees’ ‘mental pain and suffering’.   American taxpayers would end up having to pay the bill to compensate those who are determined to kill us.
 
[4] Disregard the Constitution in favor of the UN Committee’s understanding of the torture treaty’s requirements.   
 
The UN Committee chided Congress for exercising its lawful Constitutional authority to suspend habeas corpus in certain circumstances defined by our Constitution: namely, when “in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it” (Art. I, Sec. 9).   We were invaded on 9/11 and the terrorist networks that we are fighting have threatened to do it again.  The UN Committee also wants Congress to enact a federal torture statute according to the UN Committee’s dictates as to what constitutes compliance with international law.  The U.S. Supreme Court has assumed jurisdiction over the issue of enemy combatant detainees’ rights and will presumably decide what is appropriate under our Constitution, irrespective of what the UN Committee may think is ‘legal’ or not under some ill-defined international norm.  

[5] Monitor U.S. law enforcement.   
 
The UN Committee wants the U.S. to provide them with “information on investigations into the alleged ill-treatment perpetrated by law enforcement personnel in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.”  Hurricane Katrina?   How did the UN Committee stray from the treatment of suspected terrorist detainees to Hurricane Katrina?  Anyway, isn’t the handling of looting and other crimes in New Orleans by federal and local law enforcement a purely domestic matter that is our business alone?   
 

On the whole, the UN Committee’s one-sided report is yet another exercise in anti-Americanism that should be shelved along with the vast amounts of other useless paper generated by the United Nations.  Despite selective ‘evidence’ submitted to the UN Committee by such ultra-left groups as Human Rights First, the record is clear that the United States does not systematically and purposefully abuse detainees within its custody.  Aberrations are investigated and punished.  The real battle is between the United Nations as the final arbiter of what constitutes appropriate interrogation of enemy combatants suspected of engaging in plots to harm U.S. citizens versus the supremacy of our own Constitutional system of government in protecting U.S. citizens from such harm.  The UN Committee challenges the legal basis for our representative government’s asserted right to interpret our treaty obligations in accordance with our own Constitutional requirements.  This is the fundamental choice – preservation of U.S. sovereignty and our Constitutional liberties or submission to the supremacy of an unaccountable, non-democratic UN body.  We cannot submit if we are to remain a free country.