International Law
Megan links to this piece over at TNR about the possibility of American officials being seized and tried for war crimes if they travel to Europe after Bush leaves office. I think she’s on track when she writes
The liberals who think it can have spent far too much time in the Bat Cave telling each other that justice will soon be restored to the universe. Seizing US officials and trying them for war crimes will be perceived by most of the American public as an act of war.
I don’t know if it’s true that seizing Yoo, Feith, et al would be perceived by most Americans as an act of war, but it’s a very real possibility. At the very least the backlash against any such country would be enormous. I’d like to raise a couple of separate points, however.
1.) The concept of “international law” in this case is illegitimate, and Americans should not submit themselves to it. There are problems with “international law” in general, but in this case it’s particularly problematic; as Megan writes, it’s not international law at all that these countries would be invoking, but Spanish (or wherever) law as some idiotic Spanish judge thinks it pertains to American citizens. This is, on its face, ludicrous.
2.) Why stop at Yoo and Feith and the rest? Shouldn’t these countries move to arrest and imprison Bush and Cheney if they visit Europe? Why wouldn’t they do that? Because the American people would consider that an act of war. If the Europeans really have the courage of their convictions they won’t arrest medium level staffers–they’ll go after the big dogs. But they don’t have that courage–they’re simply interested in grandstanding for their European peers.
3.) One of the reasons your average American citizen would get upset with a European ponce who absconded with one of his countrymates and called him a torturing war criminal is because plenty of people don’t think waterboarding is torture. They reject the premise that pretending to drown a terrorist is equivalent to smashing someone’s knees with a sledgehammer. Look: the abominable things that happened at Abu Ghraib deserved to be punished. The people who took part in those acts have been punished. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. CNN did an interesting poll last year, discovering that even though 69% of those polled think waterboarding “is torture,” 40% thought it was okay to waterboard a terrorist. The writeup that went along with the poll results said that
Waterboarding was used during the Spanish Inquisition and by Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime and the World War II Japanese military, according to advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
You phrase a question even remotely like that and of course a majority of people are going to say whatever you’re comparing it to is torture. But it’s telling that even then forty percent of Americans think it’s an okay procedure. You wouldn’t see the same response rate if you substituted waterboarding for, say, “cutting off fingers” or “systematically burning alive,” I guarantee you.