#477 - Hollow Words, Shameful Tactics

From the Washington Post last week:

In the first 15 months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, nearly 3,000 suspected al Qaeda members and supporters were detained worldwide, according to U.S. officials.

Yet it took the administration nearly two years to announce that torturing them is wrong:

The Bush administration pledged yesterday for the first time that the United States will not torture terrorism suspects or treat them cruelly in an attempt to extract information, a move that comes as the deaths of two Afghan prisoners in U.S. custody are being investigated as homicides.

Of course, saying the words and actually meaning them are two different things:

"If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job. I don't think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this," said an official who supervised the capture of accused terrorists.

The Bush administration has allowed torture to be used by American forces in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and countless other countries where suspects were taken precisely because they could be tortured there. While the administration uses the terrorist threat to justify these actions, the fact that it has condoned the use of torture says something disturbing about our country.

Indeed, the United States is simply unable to be the bastion of freedom that Bush proclaims it to be if it responds to crisis - no matter how great - by acting like a country that is far from free.