US faces painful human rights dilemma

RIGHTS: The US, also known as the "world's mightiest democracy", is coming under a barrage of criticism on an issue which should be close to its heart - the integrity of the individual.

What triggered the controversy were what appeared to be suicides recently by three Arab detainees at the US naval base at Guantanamo bay, Cuba. Described as the first prisoners to die at Guantanamo, the two Saudis and the Yemeni reportedly hanged themselves in their cells using their clothes and bedsheets.

Often at the centre of controversy over what seem to be dehumanising internal conditions, the incarceration centre at Guantanamo has been holding prisoner, terror suspects of al Qaeda and Taliban origin since 2002.

"Their blood is on the hands of the Bush regime and their deaths will fuel the anger of the global Muslim community," a Web site highlighting the condition of the detainees was quoted as saying.

That criticism of the detention centre is not confined to the "Arab world" is borne by the reaction of Britain's Constitutional Affairs Minister Harriet Herman: "If it is perfectly legal and there is nothing wrong there, why don't they have it in America?"

Underscoring what could be considered the condition of the average detainee at Guantanamo was a comment made by a US military lawyer, Major Michael Mori, on the psychological distress suffered by his client, David Hicks, who has been held at Guantanamo over the past three months on a number of charges. Hicks is a Western convert to Islam.

"I found him very desperate for human contact. You could just tell when I first got to see him that he was just so hungry to interact with another human being", Mori was quoted telling Australian Broadcasting Corp radio.

Disturbing disclosures of this kind tend to question the genuineness of Washington's commitment to the protection and furthering of human rights. For, the preservation of the personal integrity and well being of prisoners and detainees too is subsumed under the rubric of human rights protection.

Thus has another "battlefront" been opened for the Bush administration.

It is up against the challenge of establishing its innocence in the face of charges that some of its detainees are suffering a multiplicity of serious abuses. A failure to answer the charges satisfactorily would place a huge question mark over the sincerity of Washington's human rights professions.

These developments come in the wake allegations of military excesses by US forces in some parts of Iraq. In the backdrop is also the damning Abu Ghraib episode which established the abuse of some Iraqi prisoners of war by US military personnel.

Needless to say, an inability on the part of Washington to absolve itself of culpability on these inflammatory issues could rebound disastrously on the fledgling broad-based Iraqi government headed by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

For, the latter administration could expose itself to the charge of conniving unreservedly with scandal hit Washington. To the extent to which Baghdad is seen as collaborating with Washington amid these uncleared allegations, it loses legitimacy and the right to rule.

This is indeed a tangled web which needs to be unravelled as quickly as possible. Washington now faces the searing stricture of being double-faced and highly inconsistent in the context of human rights promotion and protection.

What moral authority would it have to call to account human rights violators in the rest of the world?

An inability to resolve these harsh dilemmas would only strengthen the hands of those Washington dismisses as "terrorists".