Counterterrorism Blog

Doug Farah’s recent post about our complacency in dealing with the problem that is Saudi Arabia dovetails well with one of my pet causes: showing that counterterrorism and human rights go hand in hand. That our most reliable social critics (and multilateralists) are refusing to condemn the deplorable human rights record of much of the Arab world, I have argued, is a symptom of partisan politics and an eagerness to find fault with what we are doing in counterterrorism. The same thing is happening in reverse when it comes to pointing out the bad records of our “allies” in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Remember, Saudi Arabia maintains that the proper punishment for infidels who set foot in Mecca is execution. This creates a little problem for American pilots employed by American airline companies who make money ferrying Muslims to and from the Haj. The response by these American companies? Require the pilots to convert to Islam, in order to maintain their jobs. The companies even coughed up money to ease their pilots' conversions, hiring religious counselors. A federal judge in Texas inexplicably ruled that this did not constitute cognizable employment discrimination, because being a Muslim was a “bona fide occupational qualification” for these American-employed American pilots. Kern v. Dynalectron Corp, 577 F.Supp. 1196 (D.C. Tex. 1983). Go figure.

The good news is that it is just a matter of time before American human rights enthusiasts get with the program and stop bad-mouthing the current American cause. I say this on the basis of their reactions to my stridency on this point, as I travel to academic conferences at American law schools. I may be losing the argument, but not for long.

I am convinced because I recently listened to a podcast of a speech given by Jack Donnelly, a liberal international relations professor at the University of Denver, to a student group at the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah. The March 2007 speech was entitled “The War on Terror and International Human Rights,” and I was interested in it because I had been having trouble coming up with an individual human right that is impacted by the procedure whereby the U.S. and the U.N. designates terrorists and freezes their assets. These counterterrorism remedies are increasingly controversial as we move further away from 9/11, and they are frequently attacked by multilateralists like R.T. Naylor and Ibrahim Warde. Do they represent a threat to human rights? Asset freezing? Is the unfettered enjoyment of private property a human right? That would be nice, but how can we explain how plenty of U.N. member countries do not recognize private property whatsoever? Perhaps the answer is that human rights requires a meaningful ability to be heard on whether your property is confiscated in those countries that recognize private property (those that don’t are, like, given a pass), which would suggest that the U.N. and U.S. regimes - perhaps tweaked a little bit - would conform with international law. This recognition might not make Naylor and Warde happy, but it would solidify the legality of the designation process as a counterterrorism tool.

Donnelly’s lecture in Salt Lake City focused on the history of human rights as an American foreign policy driver, and it contained some observations that are grounds for optimism. If the source of a country’s foreign policy is, in order of importance, (1) security, (2) economic interests, and (3) “other interests," as Donnelly maintains, we may be in very good shape, for he agrees that even the current Bush Administration has raised human rights to a prominent role in the “other” category. This means that once the exigencies of security are lessened, human rights can emerge as a more important factor in American foreign policy.

When that happens, what can we expect? The great thing about international human rights is that it gives unilateralists like me a legal basis for claiming that the U.S. is not interfering with the sovereignty of other nations when he take them to task for how they treat their own people. After all, the acceptance of international human rights is what bolsters those who argue that the civilized world had the right to send soldiers to Rwanda in 1994, or to Darfur today. It means we are not merely being busybodies when we express chagrin at how non-Americans are suffering in their home countries. Suddenly, our problem is not merely Islamic terrorists. It involves the application of Shari’ah law itself.

I look forward to that moment. It will mean that, finally, the international human rights community might understand that the American prosecutor is their best friend. We have domestic laws that allow us to prosecute people who violate principles of international human rights, even if the accused has never set foot in the United States. That means there is a very real chance of getting some results, even while the U.N. and the EU. continue to debate the issue into oblivion.

The reemergence of human rights will signify that the threat we face from Islam is not limited to its “violent” or “terrorist” strain. After all, if we accept human rights as a source for our foreign policy and our domestic prosecutorial decisions, we are not merely concerned about Muslims who violently attack our nationals or our buildings. We can also be concerned about the plight of those people unlucky enough to live in a place where they might get stoned for adultery or executed because they are gay, without apologies. Some cultural artifacts are utterly indefensible. Those are my nominees.

What exactly am I suggesting? Try this one on for size: organizations like Amnesty International and Global Watch should go to the Muslim world, and videotape the public acts of stoning. They should make sure to capture footage of the people wielding the stones. Then, they should take this footage back to the U.S., and share it with people capable of taking official action on the basis of the evidence. This could be the Department of Justice (to indict the culprits) or the U.N. (to hold them up to international disapprobrium, or indict them for crimes against humanity). Over time, repressive regimes in the Arab World might have more difficulty getting people to willingly to play a role in this gruesome domestic practice. When that happens, let’s see how many multilateralists are willing to argue against tough multilateral (or U.S. unilateral) responses in this situation.

I agree with Doug (and with Professor Donnelly) that it should not matter whether the regime happens to be helping us currently. Saudi Arabia? Pakistan? Their current cooperation will not be enough. When my argument is accepted, they can keep giving us platitudes about how they’re with us in the War on Terror. Then they should brace for the arrival of a concerted unilateral and multilateral human rights protection regime where they have blood on their hands. Stay tuned.

The views in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.