On the 24^th February, a headline title from The New York Times read that: "Afghanistan Bars Elite U.S. Troops from a Key Province". Similarly, a headline of The Los Angeles Times read:  "Afghanistan leader accuses U.S. special forces of torture." The Los Angeles Times explained further, that: "...a university student who was detained during a U.S. operation in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul, was later found with his head and fingers cut off. In another case, U.S. forces are accused of detaining nine villagers, who are still missing."

The harrowing war crimes reported above are not isolated incidents. The use of torture and denial of human rights to those whom America declares to be terrorists, namely its enemies, is a matter of standard policy. The litany of abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the cowardly practice of ‘rendition', where the U.S. and some of its allies circumvent legal restrictions on torture in their own countries by sending their victims to client dictatorships in the Middle East to quietly do the dirty work for them, speak volumes about America's moral ambiguity.
Ambiguity is considered a civilized virtue by the U.S., while rigid adherence to moral principles a throwback to the dark ages. However, moral rigidity is an indispensible virtue for an enlightened civilization; a virtue long betrayed in the torturer countries of the West and the client regimes that serve them.

Only a weak nation could, for example, have taken pride in killing its avowed greatest enemy, Osama bin Laden, while rising, un-armed, half asleep from his bed in the night. A yet weaker nation would have systematically tortured people on an international scale, in order to gather the information needed to lead them there, but such is the U.S. Its self-proclaimed greatest achievements in the ‘war on terror', themselves mired in a culture of torture that goes on unabated year after year.

Islam forbids torture. Here we simply remind the world of the exhortation of Abu Bakr, first Khalifah of the Islamic State, to the corps commanders of the army when setting out for war:

"Be just and abjure evil and tyranny, for no nation which is unjust prospers or achieves victory over its enemies."

Abdullah Robin