Center for International Policy

To Advance Rights, Lead by Example

By: Wayne S. Smith
February 16, 2010
New York Times

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To the Editor:

Your Feb. 15 editorial "Self-Inflicted Wounds," about the torture of prisoners, is right on target. For the United States to torture prisoners, or outsource torture, is not only ineffectual, "it debases this nation at home and abroad."

There is another thing: One leads by example. If the United States wishes to encourage greater respect for human rights in the world, it must set a good example. It is doing the exact opposite, so that on Jan. 19, the Cuban government handed formal protest notes to United States representatives in Havana and Washington on the abuse of prisoners at the Guantánamo Naval Base, which, as the notes pointed out, is on Cuban territory.

What chutzpah, one might say. Perhaps, but what did we expect? At a time when the our country is calling Cuba an outpost of tyranny and demanding that it release political prisoners, our own abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo puts the shoe on the other foot.

One can imagine the Cubans asking, "Are we to do as you say, or as you do?"

Washington, Feb. 15, 2005

The writer, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, was chief of the United States Interests Section in Havana, 1979-82.