"If there's any country which can legitimately claim that Islamic radicalism
poses an existential threat to its system of government, it's Pakistan.
Yet what happens when they want to imprison foreign Terrorism
suspects? They indict them and charge them with crimes, put them in
their real court system, guarantee them access to lawyers, and can punish them
only upon a finding of guilt. Pakistan is hardly the Beacon of Western
Justice -- its intelligence service has a long, clear and brutal record of
torturing detainees (and these particular suspects claim they were jointly
tortured by Pakistani agents and American FBI agents, which both governments
deny). But just as is true for
virtually every Western nation other than the U.S., Pakistan charges
and tries Terrorism suspects in its real court system.
The U.S. -- first under the Bush administration and now, increasingly,
under Obama -- is more and more alone in its cowardly insistence that special,
new tribunals must be invented, or denied entirely, for those whom it wishes to
imprison as Terrorists (along those same lines, my favorite story of the last
year continues to be that the
U.S. compiled a "hit list" of Afghan citizens it
suspected of drug smuggling and thus wanted to assassinate [just as we
do for our own citizens suspected of Terrorism], only for Afghan
officials -- whom we're there to generously teach about Democracy -- to object
on the grounds that the policy would violate their conceptions
of due process and the rule of law). Most remarkably, none of this will
even slightly deter our
self-loving political and media elites
from continuing to demand that the Obama administration act as self-anointed
International Arbiter of Justice and lecture the rest of the world about
their violations of human rights."
Genuine American exceptionalism on due process
