Muslim protesters march past an NYPD officer at a large anti-war rally in Union Square, New York City. (File photo)
As headiness over the killing of Osama bin Laden ebbs, three nettlesome issues have resurfaced in public debate—how to resolve long strained relations with Pakistan, the use of torture to gain information from terror suspects, and Islamophobia.
The US assault on Bin Laden’s compound about 40 miles from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad was an embarrassment for the Pakistani government and military, which said it was a breach of Pakistani sovereignty. The US, on the other hand, had no confidence that bin Laden would not have been warned of the attack if permission to carry it out had sought. How, US officials have wondered out loud, could bin Laden go unnoticed in a military town that close to the capital.
President Obama put it diplomatically: “We think that there had to be some sort of support network for Bin Laden inside of Pakistan. But we don’t know who or what that support network was. We don’t know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that’s something that we have to investigate, and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate.”
Some members of Congress, such as Representative Joe Baca, Democrat of California, were more blunt: “It’s time for the United States to have a very serious conversation with Pakistani officials to ask them just how Bin Laden could have been living under their noses without anyone noticing.” Serious doubts were raised, he, said whether Pakistan could be relied on as a good faith partner in the war on terrorism.
Pakistan insists it had no knowledge of Bin Laden’s presence and reminds that more Al Qaeda terrorists have been killed on its soil than anywhere else.
Informal polling shows Americans in general feel Bin Laden received help from Pakistani military or intelligence sources. What to do about it is another matter altogether.
Pakistan is strategically important because parts of its territory and that of neighboring Afghanistan are remote and ungovernable, making them inviting as terrorist safe havens. Moreover, Pakistan, like its neighbor and rival India, has nuclear weapons. The possibility of any of these falling into the hands of Islamist jihadists is quite worrisome to the US. The US is cozier with India but wants to keep Pakistan in the fold as well.
Thus, despite the rising chorus of critics who say Pakistan should be jettisoned as an unreliable perhaps duplicitous partner, that seems unlikely to happen though there is new support for at least trimming the $1.3 billion in foreign aid, mostly military, the US sends there each year.
At the same time, Americans are wrestling with a new call for acceptance of torture as a useful tool for interrogating terrorist suspects.
Over the last few days, former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Justice Department aide John Yoo, argued that information gleaned from enhanced interrogations, seen by many as a euphemism for torture, paved the way for locating Bin Laden.
Mr. Yoo, now a law professor in California, authored what has come to be known as “the torture memo,” which set forth the Bush Administration’s legal justification for using enhanced interrogation of terrorist suspects in US custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Following the assault that killed Bin Laden, Mr. Yoo said, “President George W. Bush, not his successor, constructed the interrogation and warrantless surveillance programs that produced this week’s actionable intelligence.”
Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld asserted that the disputed techniques specifically led to intelligence identifying a courier that led to Bin Laden’s whereabouts.
Critics disagree, insisting a person subjected to the physically and psychologically brutal interrogation techniques would say anything and that the information likely would be unreliable. They maintain there is no clear link between information gained from torture of terrorist suspects in US custody and the locating of Bin Laden.
Mr. Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell said he believed the practice a violation of the Geneva Convention, and President Obama said torture would have no place in his administration.
The public has embraced a long tradition of opposing torture, remembering the horror stories of its own citizens tortured in recent history during the Vietnam War. It remains deeply divided, however, on exactly what constitutes torture or what to do about those accused of it.
A poll conducted in 2009 by the Gallup polling organization found that 38 percent of people questioned favored a federal criminal investigation into the alleged use of torture during the interrogation of terror suspects. Another 24 percent favored an investigation by an independent panel that would have issued a report of its findings but not seek any criminal charges. Thirty-four percent opposed both a criminal or independent panel investigation.
While opposition to torture remains strong, a sizeable number of people indicated they would be willing to allow it if it led to the capture of someone like Bin Laden, who orchestrated the terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center and killed nearly 3,000 people from the US and other countries (including from the Arab world).
Similar reasoning appears to be behind justification by some for religious profiling and continued Islamophobia in the country. Last Friday, the pilot of a commercial flight refused to allow two Muslim imams dressed in traditional garb as passengers although they had cleared screening twice and no passengers had expressed concern about their presence.
The pilot said he was uncomfortable with their presence and defenders argued that he should have had authority to do so or bar any passenger that look suspicious. Critics dismissed this as an excuse for religious profiling, saying the imams drew attention only because of their dress. They said this was wooly logic because the terrorists who commandeered jets then crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were dressed inconspicuously, more like computer nerds. A back and forth debate continues on Internet social networks, radio and television news and public affairs programs.
The imams, by the way, were on their way to a conference on Islamophobia.
(Nathaniel Sheppard Jr., formerly with the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, is a distinguished foreign correspondent who has covered Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East. He can be reached at: planetnat@mindspring.com)
source : alarabiya.net
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