Ruth Wedgwood

Wedgwood clearly set out her views on these issues in a letter published in the May/June 2004 Foreign Affairs. Criticizing an article by Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch, Wedgwood argued: " It is not clear, says Roth, that the 'war on terrorism' is a real war, and in any event, U.S. criminal laws should be sufficient for dealing with the terrorists. But a war is in fact raging, and criminal law is too weak a weapon. That was the lesson the United States learned too late, on September 11, 2001, after a decade of arresting and trying terrorist suspects. ... The purpose of domestic criminal law is to inflict stigma and punishment, and so it must be applied cautiously. Such reticence is proper for civil government in peacetime, but it is not always appropriate in war. Different priorities come to the fore when an international foe embarks on a campaign to kill or wound thousands of people. The law of armed conflict thus allows measures, such as the preventive internment of enemy combatants during the conflict, that do not require the full-dress procedure of criminal trials."

Responding to Wedgwood, Roth wrote that she "wants to invoke war rules in settings far from these traditional battlefields. In her view, the 'war against terrorism' is open-ended and global, allowing the U.S. government unilaterally to designate terrorism suspects as 'enemy combatants,' at home or abroad, and to summarily detain or kill them. That radical proposition jettisons the most basic guarantees of criminal justice, leaving our liberty and our lives protected only by the government's professions of good faith." He added: "If the government can unilaterally declare a global war without regard to an actual battlefield, there is nothing to stop it from, say, citing the 'war' on drug trafficking—a violent enterprise that kills far more Americans than terrorism—to summarily detain or kill suspected drug dealers. And one can also imagine 'wars' on crime, 'wars' on corruption, and so on. Detaching the notion of 'war' from a traditional battlefield is easy. But it is much too dangerous to indulge."

Wedgwood has repeatedly defended the Patriot Act and the decision to invade Iraq, although she has been more circumspect on issues like the treatment of detainees at places like Abu Ghraib. In a 2004 interview undertaken by the Duncan Group, an independent film and TV production company, Wedgwood argued that the 9/11 attacks were an unfortunate but necessary event to awaken the United States to the need for more intrusive law enforcement. Until 9/11 she said, a shortcoming in law enforcement was "whether you could ever use an intelligence wiretap against not simply a foreign country, but a foreign terrorist network. 'Cause up until September 11th with the PATRIOT Act passing Congress, you could wiretap Bulgaria if you like, but you couldn't wiretap al-Qaida. Unless you could show they were working for a foreign country. Kinda crazy. And with the PATRIOT Act one of the other important changes was to say, yes you could wiretap a foreign terrorist network just as if it were a foreign government. And another change that was made there was to say you didn't have to be telling fibs or fables about what your purpose was. You could say with this intelligence wiretap, I anticipate that I may be treating this matter both criminally and intelligence ops, so long as a significant purpose is intelligence I can use an intelligence wiretap. 'Cause in the old days again, pre-9/11, if you thought a case might ever go criminal, you could not use an intelligence wiretap, there was the desire to keep these two worlds entirely separate" (Wedgwood, January 2004).

In a May 2003 Washington Post op-ed, Wedgwood defended the decision to invade Iraq while lambasting events at Abu Ghraib. She wrote: "The worthy ambitions of the war in Iraq—and I still believe there were many—cannot mask the moral pain of the Abu Ghraib scandal. The cruel and humiliating mistreatment of detainees held in an American prison was unworthy and illegal. It violated our plain and public commitment to observe the humane standards of the Geneva Conventions in the Iraqi conflict. It jeopardizes our authority to intern captured combatants."

More recently, in an April 2007 Los Angeles Times op-ed, Wedgwood lent her voice to support then-president of the World Bank and former Bush administration official Paul Wolfowitz against allegations that he improperly aided his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza, in the bank. She wrote: "Any friend of the bank's work should be dismayed by the disruption caused by a manufactured scandal at a time when the bank needs to replenish its coffers. The imbroglio rattling the World Bank during its spring meeting of finance ministers is a rehash of its clumsy attempt to resolve the status of Shaha Ali Riza, a veteran bank professional and Wolfowitz's longtime romantic partner. The authors of this acrid affair have nakedly forgotten the standards of fairness and due process owed Riza, who is a member of the bank staff association and entitled to its fiduciary protections. And the scandal-mongers have recklessly ignored a written record of bank documents that serves not to condemn but to exculpate Wolfowitz."

Aside from her career in academia and support for rightist pressure groups, Wedgwood has served a number of U.S. administrations in various capacities, including as a U.S. representative to the UN Human Rights Council. Her faculty biography on the SAIS website lists the following past and current posts: "U.S. member, United Nations Human Rights Committee; member, U.S. Secretary of State's Advisory Committee for International Law, Defense Policy Board and CIA Historical Review Panel; U.S. public delegate to OSCE, Warsaw Human Dimension Meeting; independent expert for International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia; formerly professor of law at Yale Law School, director of studies at the Hague Academy for International Law in the Netherlands, visiting professor at University of Paris I (Sorbonne), Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy and Charles H. Stockton Professor at the U.S. Naval War College; former member of the Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (national security study group), senior fellow for international organizations at the Council on Foreign Relations and chief of staff to the head of the criminal division in the Department of Justice, chairing the attorney general's working group on criminal and racketeering investigative guideline."

Government Service

Private Sector

Education

Ruth Wedgwood Biography, Benador Associates, http://www.benadorassociates.com/wedgwood.php.

Ruth Wedgwood and Kenneth Roth, "Combatants or Criminals? How Washington Should Handle Terrorists," Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004.

"Interview with Ruth Wedgwood," Duncan Group, in "The Cost of Freedom: Civil Liberties, Security, and the USA PATRIOT Act," January 2004.

Ruth Wedgwood, "The Steps We Can Take to Prevent another Abu Ghraib," Washington Post, May 23, 2004.

Ruth Wedgwood, "The Wolfowitz Non-Story," Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2007.

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