By Karen Fragala

NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE

Jan. 18 � In the days following September 11, sympathy and support for the United States flooded in from around the globe�even old nemeses like Cuba and Libya weighed in with condolences. But a new report issued by Human Rights Watch, says the Bush administration�s treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay and other controversies have caused global support for the war on terror to deteriorate sharply. In particular, the Human Rights Watch report cites the U.S. military policy of detaining suspects indefinitely without charging them or providing access to counsel.

Newsweek: In times of war or after events like on September 11, is a certain amount of compromise on civil liberties necessary, both on behalf of governments and the people, in the interest of security?

Kenneth Roth: There is a tendency to look at rights and security as if it were a zero-sum-game, that greater security requires fewer rights. One of the important points we were trying to make with our report is that it�s dangerous to look at the problem that way. The Bush administration�s failure to pay adequate attention to human rights is hurting the war on terrorism by driving away the allies the United States needs to effectively defeat terrorism. The United States, as powerful as it is, cannot defeat terrorism alone. It needs the support in the countries where terrorism resides because they�re the people who have to cooperate with law-enforcement, they�re the ones who have to be on the front line of dissuading would-be terrorists. And if they see the United States backing oppressive governments, they are going to be much less likely to cooperate. We are going to drive them into the hands of the terrorists rather than enlist them in a fight.

In countries such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, the Unites States has been criticized for not speaking up against the regimes in certain cases, but as you said, we do need the cooperation of those governments. How can the United States retain these valuable relationships without condoning unjust behavior?

The key is to not allow military cooperation to become a reason for being an apologist for a government�s abuses. And Pakistan is a perfect example of that. Rather than the Bush administration saying that this is a military alliance of necessity, but we are going to be strong proponents of a return to democratic rule in Pakistan, President Bush, when he was asked about [Pakistani President Pervez] Musharraf�s new five-year, self-appointed term, the increasing militarization of Pakistani society, the creation of a national security council that would trump civilian institutions, he dismissed all this, and said that he is tight with us on the war on terrorism, and that�s what matters to us. That�s disastrous. It signals to the Pakistani people that President Bush is indifferent to their plight...

I think that the Geneva Conventions are largely adequate for dealing with the war on terror. The problem is the Bush administration has just refused to apply them. The Geneva Conventions do not impose a significant restraint on the effective combatant of terror. To give you an example, with respect to the Guantanamo detainees, the Geneva conventions require that a competent tribunal be established to decide who is a prisoner of war and who isn�t. The likely result is that the Taliban detainees, who are basically low-level Afghan soldiers, would be found to be prisoners of war. The real Al Qaeda operatives would not be. There would be no impediment toward prosecuting anyone who was involved in war crimes or terrorism. There would be no restriction on interrogation, short of the ones that exist now�you can�t torture people anyway, but you can question them about anything you want. So the Bush administration is saying is that we�re going to ignore human right for our purposes, but we want the terrorists to respect human rights. To be smart in fighting terrorism, he needs to be scrupulous in upholding the law that explains what�s wrong with terrorism, and he hasn�t done that....

Under the rule of war, you have to repatriate POWs when the war is over, and let the home country deal with them. And the war with Afghanistan is over. It�s been over since Hamid Karzai went into power. There is no longer legal justification to be holding the Taliban detainees. Al Qaeda [prisoners] are obviously a different matter. There is an ongoing war against Al Qaeda.

Why is the Bush administration digging its heels in about the POW designation�is there any sort of justification for this?

They seem to have some kind of emotional reaction, that we don�t want to dignify the terrorists by saying that the Geneva Convention applies to them. But you can�t really have it both ways. You can�t declare war on Al Qaeda, and then not apply the laws that apply in war. When we talk to the White House about this, the officials strain and groan to try to justify the unjustifiable and end up saying, well the president decided this. So , let�s dispense with logic, let�s dispense with legal thinking, and we�ll just defer to the guy who happens to be in the Oval Office who is in no sense an expert on these issues.

Can it be argued that the U.S. Department of Justice has reason to exercise caution in revealing the names of detainees for security purposes, to avoid future terror acts by their supporters�in other words hijacking an airplane to get them set free?

The argument that detainees need to be held incommunicado because somehow they�re going to send secret, predetermined messages to their co-conspirators has been brought to such an absurd extreme. To give you an example, Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber, is at best a low-level Al Qaeda operative who has been sitting in prison now for eight months or something. The Bush administration is opposing efforts by his lawyers to see him on the grounds that some secret signal might be sent out. It�s almost absurd to think that eight months later that there is any kind of signal that is going to have any kind of operative effect at this stage. That�s the rationale that the Bush administration is putting forward, and when they do that, they utterly discredit the government. It makes it seem that they are just denying people their rights for its own sake without any reasonable legitimacy. And that�s what gets the rest of the world perturbed. They say, �What is the United States doing enlisting us to fight terror, when they are so willing to rip up the basic legal rights that explain what is wrong with terrorism?�...

� 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

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More on that dastardly Total Information Awareness:

Planned Databank on Citizens Spurs Opposition in Congress By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Opposition is growing in Congress and among public interest groups to a domestic antiterrorism surveillance program being developed in the Defense Department.

The program, known as Total Information Awareness, would mine the databases of American telephone, financial and travel companies, retailers and other concerns for patterns that suggest terrorist activity.

In the Senate yesterday, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, spoke against the system and introduced an amendment to the omnibus spending bill that would suspend money for the program until Congress gave it a full review.

The program, Mr. Wyden said, "really cries out for some oversight, some accountability and some sensitivity to procedural protections and constitutional rights."

Another senator, Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, meanwhile, planned to introduce separate legislation today that would suspend the program until Congress reviewed it, a spokesman for Mr. Feingold said yesterday.

On Tuesday, a coalition of nine public interest groups from across the political spectrum wrote to Congressional leaders, asking them to rein in the system, which is overseen by John M. Poindexter, who was national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan.

The groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Conservative Union, said the surveillance program "would put the details of Americans' daily lives under the scrutiny of government agents, opening the door to a massive domestic surveillance system." The letter urged that Congress stop the system or at least delay it for "a closer look."

James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit group in Washington that is concerned with civil liberties in the digital age and a member of the coalition, said the Bush administration had not explained how it planned to use the data. "We haven't begun to understand this," Mr. Dempsey said.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group, said concerns about privacy transcended notions of liberal and conservative. "This goes back to the founding fathers warning us that if we wanted to keep our liberty, we had to take it seriously," Mr. Norquist said.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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