Torturers in America

The US government has launched a global campaign against terrorists; President Bush has said the purpose of this struggle against criminals who murder and maim innocent civilians is to bring them to justice or bring justice to them.

Viewed against the backdrop of the war on terrorism, a report issued this week by Amnesty International, ''United States of America: A Safe Haven for Torturers,'' suggests a blatant contradiction. The report documents case after case of the vilest killers and torturers living at liberty in this country, at times in proximity to their surviving victims.

An awful question hovers over these accounts of torturers who come to America to hide from justice. How can it be that the United States – which proposes to teach the rest of the world lessons about the rule of law, respect for human rights, and protection of the individual against the overweening power of the state – makes so little effort to identify, prosecute, or extradite foreign torturers living here?

When court cases are filed against foreign torturers, they are usually brought by immigrants who were victims, not by the US government. The case of Kemal Mehinovic, a Bosnian Muslim civilian who was tortured mercilessly for months in his hometown of Bosanski Samac in Bosnia, is representative. After surviving the brutality, Mehinovic was transferred to a concentration camp and eventually released in a prisoner exchange after 2 1/2 years of incarceration. He then found his family and emigrated to this country, where he was granted permanent residence.

In 1998 Mehinovic learned that a man he remembered as one of his torturers, Nikola Vukovic, was living in a suburb of Atlanta. The same year, Mehinovic filed a lawsuit against Vukovic under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victim Protection Act. A final ruling in that trial is pending.

Similarly, Haitian refugees living in the United States have made the desolating discovery that torturers and death squad leaders from Haiti's former military dictatorship have found refuge here. Former top officers from El Salvador's military junta, suspects in the torture and murder of many Americans as well as Salvadorans, have also been discovered living in the United States, like those Nazi fugitives who found comfortable havens after World War II in Argentina, Bolivia, or Chile. One of the Guatemalan generals who supervised the genocidal massacres conducted there in the '80s even received a degree in public administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 1991.

It makes no sense to be tightening visa requirements and border security in the war on terrorism while such monsters can cross US borders and live here with impunity.