They Deserve Each Other
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The International Committee of the Red Cross wants to check on Saddam Hussein’s treatment in American captivity, Agence France-Presse reported from Geneva last night. The French wire service quoted a Red Cross spokesman, Florian Westphal, as saying that the Red Cross has sought access to Saddam from the moment news of his capture was released. “Saddam Hussein, as somebody protected by the Geneva Conventions, has a right to ICRC visits,” the AFP quoted the Red Cross spokesman, Mr. Westphal, as saying.
The news comes at the same time that a correspondent of the Associated Press, Niko Price, is reporting from Baghdad on Saddam’s atrocities. One man, Abdul-Wahid al-Obeidi, said he was dipped in nitric acid by Saddam’s torturers. Another, Khaled Khawan, “received three months of electric shocks to his hands, neck, and ears,”according to the AP report. Saddam’s regime was unusually brutal, but surely similar abuses are under way even to this day in North Korea and Iran. In that context, for the Red Cross types in Geneva to be fretting about how America is treating Saddam is just frivolous. It becomes even more absurd when one considers that the international Red Cross receives a good deal of its funding from the American government; in other words, the American taxpayers are stuck with the bill both for jailing Saddam and for having international human rights activists play watchdog on the jailers.
Even our own Senator Clinton has ex pressed her displeasure with the International Committee of the Red Cross for the group’s refusal to admit the Israeli version of the Red Cross, the Magen David Adom, to full membership. The American Red Cross has pressed to get the Israelis admitted. The international Red Cross’s Web site declares that its visits to prisoners “do not condone the actions or beliefs of those detained or confer any status on them.” This is obviously false. A visit confers on Saddam the status of someone whose condition and treatment an international humanitarian group is concerned about. Our sense is that there are lots of prisoners out there who could use a visit from the Red Cross a lot more than Saddam.
