A Road Diverged

The United Nations is calling for the closure of Guantanamo Bay due to torture allegations.  They would also like for the detainees to be tried on US soil.  Interestingly enough, although the envoys who are calling for the closure have interviewed past detainees, they have never visited the site.

Whether torture has taken place at Guantanamo Bay will probably never be known by the public, but it does raise the interesting question of whether torture is ever acceptable.  For some the issue is black and white, but for me it seems to fall in more of a grey area.  If a detainee/prisoner/what-have-you has information that would stop the deaths of thousands, or even hundreds of people and you’ve exhausted all of your options, does that make torture acceptable.  Is the “discomfort” of one person worth the lives of hundreds, or even one?  What if that one is your mother or father or child?  Where does one draw the line?  Does the safety of a country’s citizens rise above the rights of another person.  Does that person even have rights or have they been forfeited by their actions?  Ironically, one of the crimes the US is being charged with is force feeding detainees who are on a hunger strike.  Why do I have the feeling that if the US let them starve that it would also be called torture?

This situation does raise another interesting question of whether the detainees at Guantanamo Bay (or similar places) have the rights afforded to American citizens - the basic rights of trial by jury, not to be held indefinitely, etc.  My answer to that would be no, they do not.  First, they are not American citizens, second, they have conspired to harm a large number of American citizens (or even a few), and third, they are not soldiers that fall under the Geneva Convention.  These detainees made the choice to go against the rules of warfare and against our country, they should not expect to be treated equally.

The last thing I want to mention is that the UN should look at itself before pointing fingers.  All one needs to do is look up the list of countries that are on the Human Rights committee to learn that they have little room to say anything at all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.