Defend the rights of others we will loose our own 
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By: Father Shay Cullen
The suicide deaths of three ‘enemy combatants’ at the infamous US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is all the more tragic and insidious because one of them was to be released but hadn't been told. The European parliament has called for its closure and human rights defenders have sought fair trials for the inmates.
All of us ought to be deeply concerned about what is going on in the name of democracy and freedom and we should never be afraid to say what is wrong is wrong. We have to oppose all who try to justify the abuse of power. Unless we take a stand to protect the rights of others one day we will loose our own.
The abuses of human rights by torture tactics are the tools of terrorists and non-civilised society should stoop too imitate such low and dehumanising tactics. The torturers themselves are demeaned in as much as their victims are dehumanised. Fighting terror with more terror makes for a much terrorised world. It is morally wrong and a fruitless strategy.
The Guantanamo Bay prison camp is a grave embarrassment to the US administration. Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and a senior senator from US President George W. Bush's Republican Party criticised the administrations policy of imprisonment without trial of hundreds of alleged enemy combatant suspects. "Those people have to be trialed," he said "There are tribunals established ... Where we have evidence they ought to be trialed, and if convicted they ought to be sentenced," The Senator also said the only evidence against many of them is mere hearsay.
All this, together with the abuse and torture that was allowed to go on inside Abu Ghraib prison camp in Iraq has brought shame and disgrace on the once proud record of the United States as a defender and protector of human rights.
Can we ever forget the image of hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib standing on a box wired for electrocution if he moved? Or the pictures of terrified prisoners, some only young teenagers stripped naked and set upon by attack dogs snarling and straining at the end of a leash. Others were dragged along the floor by the neck while others were forced to lie naked in piles of bodies reminiscent of the piled up bodies of dead prisoners found at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other prison camps. Imagine being even remotely associated with such heinous crimes.
Millions of good hearted and patriotic Americans, civilians, members of the intelligence services and congress itself are angered by the bungling and arrogance that ignores their advice and guidance and tramples all over sacred principles clearly laid out in the bill of rights and the constitution. A former general who fought in Iraq is speaking out about the folly and mishandling of the war.
European countries are implicated too in the torture and abduction of suspects denied their rights and due process of law. The Council of Europe, the highest human rights body on that continent has published a report that provides cogent evidence that European governments including Germany, UK, Poland, Romania, Italy and Sweden, violated human rights. They knowingly acted in collusion with CIA abduction operations. They allowed CIA aircraft to land, refuel, and take off on their soil while carrying suspects to alleged torture camps in Romania and Poland and further a field in the Middle East. There they were allegedly tortured to extract information, most of it useless and inconsequential.
All countries named have denied involvement. “Authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities. Other countries ignored them knowingly or did not want to know” said Dick Marty, the Swiss legislator who researched and prepared the report.
So what now, torture camps in Romania, Poland? Are memories so short, principles so scarce, values so absent, love so dead, consciences so dulled and hearts so hardened that the spectre of prisoners being transported for imprisonment, torture and perhaps execution across Europe once again raises not a qualm? [End]
