Riffs From The Row

By William Van Poyck - March 27, 2006

The recent U.S. media frenzy surrounding Abdul Rahman, the yet-to-be- condemned –to-death Afghan citizen, is instructive to any objective observer. Abdul Rahman was on trial in Afghanistan for the “crime” of converting from Islam to Christianity. Under Afghan Islamic law – the established law constitutional of a sovereign nation – conversion from Islam is a crime punishable by death. Whether or not you believe in the propriety of such a crime and/or punishment, and I certainly don’t, the fact is that this is a constitutional provision (pursuant to Article 3 of the Afghan constitution which makes Islamic law paramount to all secular laws) of a sovereign nation. It is a cornerstone of the Bush administration’s policies (and American policy in general) that no other nation (and especially the hated United Nations) has any business interfering with the internal policies of America. This is particularly true on the issue of capital punishment – an issue dear to the heart of the Bush administration and the conservative Republicans who pull his strings – where this country has in the past proudly and loudly ignored international protests regarding executions. Whether it was the late pope, or the United Nations, or the presidents and prime ministers of various countries, no amount of pleading, protesting or cajoling ever prevented a single execution in America, no matter how mitigating or extenuating the circumstances. The juveniles, the retarded, the mentally ill, the foreign nationals, they were all executed without hesitation while the administration proudly waved the flag of “sovereignty.” Every nation, we’ve consistently preached, has the right to enforce its own internal laws free from interference by other nations. No nation wraps itself in this blanket of sovereignty tighter than America . Any thinking person understood that this “doctrine” was simple a cover to justify America doing whatever it wanted to do, domestically or internationally, while ignoring “international law,” and even while insisting that other nations must toe America’s line. This reasoning of course, is precisely how the current administration was able to reduce and construe the Geneva Convention to be nothing more than an inapplicable inconvenience.

Fast forward to the recent brouhaha over Rahman’s impending trial and possible execution. Without a hint of recognition of the irony and hypocrisy of his position President Bush personally lobbied Afghan president Hamid Karzai to stop the trial. Our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice joined in, urging President Karzai to ignore his own nation’s law in order to save the Christian convert Rahman. In this country there was a huge outcry by the right-wing conservative Christian community – an outcry that motivated Bush to join the fray – to convince President Karzai to release Rahman. American conservatives called the Afghan authorities “religious extremists” and described the idea of capital punishment for such a crime to be “barbaric.” This, from the same American conservative Christian community which declares that the death penalty in America is the will of God, grounded in scripture, the same folks who love to yell “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” The U.S. media did its part to whip up the frenzy, covering the story without ever observing the glaring hypocrisy of President Bush (who personally oversaw and approved the execution of scores of men and women while governor of Texas ) demanding that President Karzai stop the trial and execution. Given that Bush could not point to his own record, or to U.S. law, to support his argument, he was forced (oh, the delicious irony!) to invoke the United Nations charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In other words, Bush was arguing that “International Law” prohibited such an execution; this from a president who openly sneers (to great applause from his conservative base) at the idea that international law can ever apply to American policy. Predictably, Karzai caved in and Rahman was released from custody.

The American government loves to profess that we are “a nation of laws, not of men. But the Rahman episode demonstrates that “the law” is whatever Bush (or men in power) decides that it is. It is a matter of policy, not law, an issue of political and religious ideology. We kill when we want to kill, when it suits our purpose, and world opinion be damned. And we stop others from killing when it suits our purposes (catering to the conservative Christian base), another nation’s sovereign laws be damned. Does anyone really believe that President Bush would have become involved if Rahman fared execution for converting to Buddhism or Hinduism? There is a term for this in the legal world: “arbitrary and capricious”, and such actions are manifestly unconstitutional in this country. But that’s only true in a nation of laws, not of men.

William Van Poyck was sentenced to death in Florida but was transferred to Virginia’s death row by the governor of Florida after Florida State Prison guards murdered Van Poyck’s codefendant, Frank Vales, in his death row cell in 1999.

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