George Bush and Human Rights Abuses since 9/11 - Essay Example

?Jane Smith John Jones English Literature December 5, George Bush and Human Rights Abuses since 9/11 Much ado has been made over the last ten years concerning the human rights abuses of the George W. Bush administration. Yet there are two sides to every argument and for all of the modern day Patrick Henry’s who decries such incidents as Guantanamo Bay and waterboarding there are an equal amount of people who agree wholeheartedly with all of the changes that have taken place in the United States. It just seems that those who preach abuse of human rights seem to be louder and more in the forefront. For instance, Amnesty International has been one of the most outspoken groups in blaming Bush personally, especially for the waterboarding. Just this past week the group called for the ex-President’s arrest while he visited several nations in Africa for AIDS and cancer awareness. No doubt recognizing the far-reaching legal and moral consequences of arresting a United States president, Zambia dismissed the group’s request. Yet the country’s foreign minister didn’t say they wouldn’t. Indeed, he was quoted as saying that “Zambia would have considered the request only if it had come from the International Criminal Court acting on behalf of international organizations like the United Nations” (Associated Press). That is pretty dangerous wording, especially considering the fact that this very week the former president of the Ivory Coast was handed over to the same International Criminal Court to face similar charges of which Amnesty accuses Bush! So who is right? Are Bush and his cabinet war criminals? Did they act in good faith and accordance with US laws? In the following pages we shall examine the facts and come to a conclusion. Nobody would dispute that September 11, 2011 changed the course of United States history. Prior to that morning getting on an airplane was no more complicated than climbing onto an interstate highway ramp. Oh sure, after DB Cooper and the ill-fated hijackings to Cuba in the 70’s, the Government made a half-hearted attempt at keeping flying a routine thing, while trying to keep us safe. There were a few metal detectors and your carryon bags had to go through a scanner. If the guards were not bored comatose, they kept an eye on the scanners and made you take everything out of your pockets if they beeped. Box cutters? That was a ludicrous idea and of course even pocketknives were allowed to a certain extent. All that changed on 9/11. That morning, nineteen determined young men, armed mostly only with knives, stormed the cockpits of four commercial jetliners. The terrorists on three met their objectives and crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Only through extreme heroism of the passengers did Flight 93 crash into a field in Pennsylvania, instead of a target in the Washington area, still debated as to whether it was the Capitol or White House. By dark that night three buildings of the World Trade Center had collapsed and almost three thousand people were dead in the three states, including citizens of over ninety countries. The world was in mourning and the United States Government had already taken steps to secure the country’s borders. In an unprecedented step only discussed before, US airspace was closed for four days and fighter jets escorted some commercial aircraft to their temporary destinations in Canada, for utter confusion reigned in those first few hours. George Walker Bush had only been the US president for less than eight months, after winning what is arguably the mostly hotly debated election in the country’s history. Prior to September 11, his most pressing foreign incident was the April Hainan Island incident, in which the Chinese captured a US Navy EP-3 intelligence aircraft and held the crew and plane for some time. That morning Bush was in Florida giving a routine speech at an elementary school. After hearing the news, the president is returned to Washington by a torturous route through secure Air Force bases in Louisiana and Nebraska. Almost immediately Bush and his staff began piecing together what had happened and deciding what to do. There was little doubt that Islamic extremists were at the center of the attacks, part of a previously mostly unknown group called al-Qaeda and led by somebody whose name was to become very familiar to the world, a tall Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Not anonymous to the Government, bin Laden was believed to be behind several previous terrorist attacks against Americans, including the attack on the USS Cole and the bombings of two US embassies in 1998. Yet Bush and his people didn’t start war with Islamic extremists. His own father had infuriated bin Laden by stationing US troops in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. The World Trade Center was attacked the first time in 1993 and al-Qaeda had been instrumental in the Somali uprisings and the infamous Black Hawk Down episode. The Bill Clinton administration had considered military action against both Afghanistan and Sudan as early as 1998 but had merely lobbed a few cruise missiles into a training camp inside Afghanistan, narrowly missing bin Laden (Strasser). On the evening of September 11, Bush addressed the country to console the American people. That weekend he stood near Ground Zero and comforted the grieving New Yorkers, during which time he declared a Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) and promised the world that those responsible would face the wrath of the United States for the scars on her landscape. Knowing that Osama bin Laden had fled to Afghanistan and that country was in pieces and a haven for extremists, the United States and its allies launched an offensive against Afghanistan in October. Not surprising, most every country in the world either supported the operation militarily or quietly lauded it, even such unlikely candidates as Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. A decade later, bin Laden was finally killed by Navy SEAL’s this past spring and the military campaign in Afghanistan is still ongoing, although Bush’s successor has promised to wind it down prior to the end of his first term in January 2013. None of the above is in dispute except by a few diehard conspiracy theorists and few in the world mourned bin Laden’s death; maybe his family and his terrorist cohorts. If that was the entire story, George W Bush would have gone down in history as the most lauded president ever. Indeed, in the months following the attacks, even after committing the country to war, the president’s approval rating was an astounding ninety per cent! Instead though, in the weeks prior to the end of his tenure in late 2008, that same rating had dropped to less than thirty per cent, with some pollsters putting the figure at closer to twenty per cent. (Polling) Why such a dramatic change in popularity in seven years? A lot of it has to do with Bush’s decision to invade Iraq as part of the GWOT. Also Americans blamed Bush for the inept handling of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and disastrous downward spiral of the US economy in 2008. Yet many blamed Bush for the same things Amnesty does, torture and human rights violations. To be sure, many citizens and members of Congress were calling for the president’s impeachment and criminal arrest long before the 2008 elections. Fortunately for him, nobody could find any laws that had been broken and such talks quietly disappeared after he left office and flew home to Texas. One of his biggest naysayers was his successor, Barrack Obama, both as a member of Congress and a 2008 candidate for president. However, probably knowing it was an unwise move politically speaking, Obama avoided talk of impeachment and trial. It is interesting to note that almost three years into his presidency, most all of the Bush foreign policies are still in place, including those things which Bush stood accused of by his detractors. Bush and his people knew from the start that we were not at war with a Government as we were in World War II, or even a loose yet organized one like the Viet Cong. Afghanistan was a fractured country, torn apart by years of war, from the Brits to later the Soviets and did not possess a singular government. Al-Qaeda consisted mainly of splinter “cells” ranging from the Philippines to Somalia and even had groups integrated in Western Europe and in the United States itself. Infiltrating and destroying the groups would require operating on the same shadowy levels as the terrorists did. At no time did Bush say the operation would be quick and easy, as he stated that the objectives would be lengthy and require our resources to be stretched thin. Those tactics that were decided upon by Bush’s people in the first few months after 9/11 remain in question to this day. After a successful air campaign in October and November, the ground invasion at Tora Bora and the Qala-i-Jangi prison riot, which resulted in the death of a CIA agent, convinced the leadership that other means were necessary to isolate and imprison the captives. Those means turned out to be the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which in itself in controversial, because Cuba does not recognize the treaty authorizing the base. “Detainees” were shipped there as early as January 2002, as the Government refused to even recognize them as prisoners of war and stated Guantanamo was outside jurisdictional rights of any country. This was somewhat overruled in 2006 by the Supreme Court, which while not declaring the facilities illegal, did say that detainees were authorized minimalistic rights under the Geneva Convention. Tortures of the detainees have been alleged since the camp’s inception and have continued throughout its existence. Some have been the same complaints of POW’s throughout the centuries; denial of mail and care packages, denial of religious books and materials, and refusal to let the International Red Cross to visit the prisoners. Because the Bush administration maintained they weren’t official prisoners, they weren’t allowed access to attorneys for four years, except for US Military lawyers. Likewise, visitation with their home country representatives was somewhat disallowed, which is a definite no-no for foreign prisoners in US jails. However, the physical and mental tortures are the most shocking, especially those who allege sexual torture, including such torture by female interrogators against their male detainees. Beatings were common and some of the detainees have wound up maimed for life because of physical maltreatment. Some of the attorneys also stated their clients used the bathroom on themselves and then forced to lie in their waste for hours or days. Some have stated going without food and water, with one detainee stating he had one apple in two days. The harsh jungle-like climate was also used as a form of harassment, with vermin allowed to run rampant in the cells. Air conditioning, or the lack of it, was another cause of torment, for the mostly metal cages would heat rapidly to well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Psychological treatment was also highly effective in breaking the prisoners as the extreme isolation for weeks into years, including hoods over the head, succeeded in destroying their mental capacities. There have been hundreds of attempts over the years and at least five have succeeded in committing suicide, although the Defense Department does not confirm or deny the figures. (CCR) Another alleged violation of human rights has been the incarceration of juveniles alongside their adult counterparts, without communication from their parents or visitation, some as young as thirteen. Even US citizens have been detained for years (in Naval Brig Charleston, South Carolina), even though they did receive counsel. This included such high profile prisoners as Jose Padilla and John Lindh, the “American Taliban”. Both were subsequently convicted in Federal civilian courts and sentenced to lengthy terms in a Federal prison. Some of the prisoners have been liberated and still others have been extradited to their home countries to serve out their sentences. There have also been various tribunals and other administrative procedures for the detainees throughout the years, of which only a handful have been convicted or pled guilty. In order to fulfill a campaign promise, in the early days of his administration President Obama ordered Guantanamo closed and the remaining detainees be transferred to an obsolete Federal prison in Illinois. Yet Congress intervened and the facility remains open. Of roughly eight hundred people detained over the past decade, 171 remain incarcerated. Granted, most of the abuses have only been substantiated through testimony of former detainees and their lawyers, although a good many do bear the physical scars of their imprisonment. Also, at least one former US soldier has come forward to agree that the inmates were tortured. Our Government mostly dismisses that as so much rhetoric but it should be noted with some irony that the very same allegations were used to convict and execute Japanese and German POW guards and the court of public opinion convicted those at the “Hanoi Hilton” in absentia, based solely upon the testimony of former prisoners such as Senator John McCain. So it may well be that the human rights organizations may have a very valid point. One of the most controversial aspects of the GWOT interrogation techniques is something called waterboarding, and is that which Amnesty International demands George Bush’s arrest. Basically, the person is strapped to a table, hooded, and immobilized, with his feet higher than his head. Water is then poured over the individual’s head to simulate drowning. Because water is indeed entering the person’s nose, he really believes he is being drowned and the psychological effects are tremendous. CIA agents who underwent the experience lasted an average of fourteen seconds before cracking. The Geneva Convention specifically forbids mock executions and because the prisoner is visually impaired, he actually believes he is being drowned. Not only that but some have actually died due to a phenomena known as dry drowning. President Obama has publicly announced his disapproval of the practice, while most of the Republican Party mostly agrees with it. The one exception to that is Senator McCain, who as a POW was subject to severe torture. Even our own Government banned the practice for many decades, as Japanese guards were hung after World War II for waterboarding (CBS). So it would appear on the surface that Bush’s accusers may have a valid point in requesting he stand trial for his actions as president. True, some argue that others like Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Tenet stood responsible. Yet that argument was not valid with Nixon during the Watergate debacle; and like Truman said, “the buck stops here” when it comes to the President’s actions. Even so, the entire argument of human rights and right or wrong in wartime usually boils down to who the victor is and how honorable the intentions were. Whatever the outcome was, even his detractors begrudgingly agree George W Bush only wanted to rid the country of a menace that had been torturing us for decades. The very people who scream “Geneva Convention” when captured believe in maiming, torturing, and even beheading their own prisoners. International opinion was prejudiced against the President from the outset and he was thought of as “the cowboy, the toxic Texan”, especially considering his record number of executions as Texas governor. One of the staunchest truth seekers of our lifetime, Bob Woodward said that “Criticism, the judgments of history, and other information may, over the coming months and years, alter the historical understanding of this era. The decision to go to war is one that defines a nation. That is truer today than perhaps ever” (Woodward). Maybe Bob is right and history and the world will come to honor our forty-third president for the good he did for mankind, much like history has been kinder to Nixon. Works Cited The Associated Press, “Zambia Rejects Rights Group's Call to Arrest Bush” December 4 2011, as published by National Public Radio December 4, 2011 Web http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=143100705 Strasser, Steven, “Objective Infinite Reach”, The 9/11 Investigations Staff Reports of the 9/11 Commission, Cambridge, MA, Perseus, 2004, Print. Polling Report, President Bush: Job Ratings, November 6, 2011, Web http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob1.htm Center for Constitutional Rights, REPORT ON TORTURE AND CRUEL, INHUMAN, AND DEGRADING TREATMENT OF PRISONERS AT GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA, July 2006, Web http://ccrjustice.org/files/Report_ReportOnTorture.pdf CBS, McCain: Japanese Hanged For Waterboarding, June 18, 2009, Web, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/29/politics/main3554687.shtml. Woodward, Bob, Bush at War, New York, Simon & Shuster, 2002, Print. Read More