LONDON – There are two ways of tracking down terrorists and war criminals. One we might dub the Simon Wiesenthal way, in honor of the Nazi hunter-in-chief who died on September 20th at the ripe old age of 96. The other we should dub the George W. Bush way.
Wiesenthal was a stickler for legality. As The Economist obituary described him, Wiesenthal “was a clever detective with an elephantine memory”. It was this skill that enabled him to unearth war criminals wherever they were hiding, even though governments everywhere, including Western ones, were often content to let sleeping dogs lie.
His greatest catch was Adolf Eichmann, the mastermind of the Holocaust. Another important catch was a former concentration camp guard notorious for shooting small children. She was living a respectable life in New York and neighbors thought her “the nicest woman on the street”. All those he uncovered were sent for trial and the evidence presented with scrupulous fairness. He refused to condemn Kurt Waldeim as a war criminal, a former secretary general of the United Nations, for lack of evidence.
One can surmise that Wiesenthal would have been proud of the convictions of a cell of Al Qaeda terrorists in a Madrid courtroom last week, the end result of careful detective work initiated by Spain’s top anti-terrorism judge, Baltasar Garzón. Eighteen men were convicted of conspiring to commit the attack on New York’s World Trade Center. Spanish investigators and politicians have acted on their conviction that extending the reach of international law, sharing evidence across borders and painstaking detective work are the most effective way to combat terrorism. They have been angered by the Bush administration’s refusal to let Spanish investigators interview Ramzi bin al-Shibh in detention at Guantánamo Bay.
George Bush could not be more different. On September 17th, 2002, six days after the planes destroyed the World Trade Center he declared he was going to hunt down Osama bin Laden, “There’s an old poster out West I recall that said, ‘Wanted Dead or Alive'”. The purpose of going to war in Afghanistan, Bush added, was “to smoke him out”.
Yes, Afghanistan now has had a democratic election of sorts and women have a little more freedom than they had in the days of the Taliban. But bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban still wage war, either from inside Afghanistan or just over the border in the mountains of Pakistan. More civilians have died in Afghanistan since the American bombing first began than perished in the World Trade Center. Yet the Bush Administration persists in believing that it can defeat its demons by shooting up whole countries.
| Would you be reading this now, if it wasn’t useful to you? Get more quality articles in the future |
Wiesenthal and Garzón always said that police work is hard and frustrating, but they also maintained that if systematic and thorough it could produce better results than going to war – it was simply more precise, as well as more just.
One still wonders at how the Clinton administration muffed its chance to bring bin Laden to justice. In the early spring of 1996 the government of Sudan, where bin Laden was then living, made an offer to the CIA to arrest him. (The CIA had recently published a short profile of him in which he was named as one of the most significant sponsors of Islamic extremist activities.) But the administration passed on the offer, believing that it couldn’t get a conviction in a U.S. court and instead tried unsuccessfully to persuade Saudi Arabia to take him in and put him on trial.
Samuel Berger, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, told the Washington Post in October 2001, “In the U.S. we have this thing called the Constitution, so to bring him to justice I don’t think was our first choice. Our first choice was to send him to some place where justice was more streamlined.” Three colleagues of Berger made it clear to the Post reporters what Berger meant: “They hoped that the Saudi monarch, King Fahd, would order bin Laden’s swift beheading.”
This is how it came to be that Sudan expelled bin Laden to Afghanistan, where he planned the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the near destruction of the American destroyer in Yemen and finally the devastation in New York.
Berger’s account rings with contradictions. If he was convinced that bin Laden was such a danger to the U.S. that he should be beheaded then it seems the White House possessed rather incriminating material. And if that were so the courts would surely have been responsive. At the very least he could have been detained whilst his trial was pending and the time used, as in the Spanish case, to secure further evidence.
War war is easier than law law, to misquote Winston Churchill, but it is probably not just more indiscriminate, but also far less effective.
