The U.N. Steps up to the Plate

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An Austrian, Manfred Nowak, who serves as something called a U.N. special rapporteur in Geneva, is now warning the United States that former Bush administration officials should be tried and prosecuted for torture, including the lawyers who gave advice about statutes on interrogation.

Three notes:

1) The U.N. special rappoteur, like most transnational officials that have no accountability, is cowardly; Mr. Nowak knows that he can gain publicity by trashing the U.S. — and, especially in the present politicized climate, the former administration. He also knows from past experience, that if he were to dare to go to Russia, China, or, in fact, almost any country on any U.N. commission connected to civil rights and press his case, he would probably either be ignored (no headlines, some danger in reporting that China tortures dissidents) or, who knows in the case of Iran, Libya, Cuba, etc., be himself tortured.

2) He is hypocritical. If he is really worried about serious transgressions of human rights, perhaps he could simply stay home and investigate his own country's quite amoral policy of shipping everything from sniper rifles to nuclear technology to human-rights-violating regimes like Iran. Or, better yet, he could use his U.N. dais to go after the growing Austrian neo-Nazi movement.

3) The current Third-world practice in the U.S. of serially trashing an outgoing administration, whether by demonizing it abroad or seeking to try its former officials, is already bearing fruit, as it brings the likes of Professor Nowak out of the woodwork. Soon, when the Obama administration releases pictures, more memos, etc. (of course, prepped by the now mandatory denials on the Sunday-morning talk shows that it would ever do this, and the now mandatory postfacto "anguished" pep talk to the particular intelligence agency in question), we will see even sharper reactions from our enemies.

And if we are going to go down this Orwellian route, then let us at least be consistent, and call in the U.N. to find out who gave the "order" to blow apart the heads of the negotiating Somali teen pirates (no habeas corpus there), and the Predator "execution" of "suspected" Wazirstan purveyors of man-made catastophe, and perhaps even those in the media who not all that long ago falsely reported that U.S. guards had "flushed" Korans at Gitmo — all the latter are not matters of supposed torture, but had consequences that led to death.

Do we really wish to turn our country into something like this?

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