The Pole Position

With the litany of crashing airliners, the Israeli-Hamas explosion, the continued Russian military “gifts” to the pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists, the ISIS purge of Christians in Mosul and our own border crisis from kids fleeing cartel wars in their Central American homelands, it’s easy to miss one of the biggest and most interesting “little developments” in Europe. It happened at an official European legal tribunal where an entire country was on trial. Poland.

The court? “The European Court of Human Rights … is a supra-national or international court [that] hears applications alleging that a contracting state has breached one or more of the human rights provisions concerning civil and political rights set out in the [European] Convention [on Human Rights] and its protocols. An application can be lodged by an individual, a group of individuals or one or more of the other contracting states, and, besides judgments, the Court can also issue advisory opinions. The Convention was adopted within the context of the Council of Europe, and all of its 47 member states are contracting parties to the Convention.” Wikipedia. In Europe, this court is ultimate arbiter of human rights issues.

The defendant was Poland. It seems that prisoners in a facility in Poland were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including having a power drill and/or a gun placed against their heads in an effort to extract a confession or information, the gun occasionally being discharged by their heads (so-called “mock executions”). Here are the facts found by the Court in addition to the above observations: Prisoners were hanged by their shoulders for prolonged periods (almost dislocating their sockets), subjected to waterboarding, subjected to extreme noise and sleep deprivation and told that their loved ones would be sexually assaulted if they did not cooperate.

The Court called these techniques “extraordinary rendition” and violative of Article Three of the above Convention (the part that bans torture, etc.). After a lengthy hearing, Poland was found to be culpable for these horrific incidents, fined and severely censured. The Court ruled that "the treatment to which the applicants had been subjected … during their detention in Poland had amounted to torture." Poland was also ordered to pay these prisoners damages and costs as well. Bad Poland, bad!!! Shame on Poland!!!

Unfortunately, the money awards aren’t going to do these prisoners much good. They’ve been shipped off to do indeterminate time elsewhere… far, far away from Poland. Oh, did I forget to mention that Poland actually wasn’t the country responsible for the torture or the incarceration of these prisoners? It happened on Polish soil with Polish blessings, but it was the United States of America that maintained and operated this secret CIA prison in Poland (one of several in Eastern Europe). Poland was held responsible because they allowed the CIA to operate within their borders.

It’s not as if these prisoners were sweet little innocents. Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian, purportedly a mid-level al Qaeda operative, was arrested in Pakistan. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi, was arrested in in Dubai as the mastermind behind the 2000 attack on the US warship USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, which killed 17 US sailors. They were “detained” and interrogated in Poland in 2002/3 for many months, before being transferred to the U.S. prison complex in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they have remained ever since. They are awaiting a “trial” – eventually – by a U.S. military commission.

But they haven’t been tried yet, and the Court noted that the mere transfer of these individuals to Guantanamo as well as the very nature of these military commissions were in and of themselves “suspect.” The Court stated: “Consequently, by enabling the CIA to transfer the applicants [detainees] to its other secret detention facilities, the Polish authorities exposed them to a foreseeable serious risk of further ill-treatment and conditions of detention in breach of Article Three [prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment]." “A spokeswoman for Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski called the ruling "embarrassing for Poland" and "a burden both in terms of our country's finances and its image.’” BBC.co.uk, July 24^th.

This was the first ruling by a duly-authorized body against these CIA “black site” prisons using these techniques. It is also the first ruling that suggests that military confinement in Guantanamo as well as our military tribunals charged with trying these individuals for criminal acts against the United States may well be illegal under law. And while President Obama has banned most of these enhanced interrogation techniques, the fact remains that a U.S. president, with lots of popular support, had no problem authorizing the forms of torture for which the United States actually executed Japanese officers using the same methods on American soldiers in WWII.

Even setting aside the reprehensible and immoral nature of the torture itself, there are even bigger issues. There would seem no justification for “crying foul” by the United States if another country were to use these techniques on Americans captured in battle. Further, it is difficult to see how the United States can stake a moral high ground – whether it is on Mr. Putin’s mendacious and covert support of the separatists who probably shot down Malaysia Air Flight 17 or Bashar al-Assad as he blows up his people’s own neighborhoods and employs torture against his rebel captives or so many other aspect of global dysfunction where the United States is attempting to impose a semblance of humanity – when America has sunk to such depths of misconduct without punishing the guilty or atoning for the harm. We need to make up for this wrong, figure out how never to repeat these rather obvious violations of human rights and understand exactly who we want the world to see when they think of the United States of America.

I’m Peter Dekom, and expediency often is a very bad partner to humanity and democracy.