Kiss the Era of Human Rights Goodbye

[struggle4progress]

<Karen J. Greenberg>

... So let's be utterly clear: The policies of the Bush administration were not just horrific in themselves or to others, they may also have brought to an end the human rights movement as we know it ...

From the very beginning of my own descent into the world of Bush administration torture policy -- and, among other things, I was the co-editor of a 2005 collection of documents, already leaking out then, called The Torture Papers -- I have resisted associating what US officials were doing with past state atrocities. That was another, far worse realm, I reasoned, one in which countless people were disappeared and millions murdered. After all, the unfolding torture policy didn't kill (though some detainees certainly did die from maltreatment in US secret and not-so-secret prisons abroad), it only inflicted pain. Others pointed out similarities between such Bush administration outrages and past barbarisms, but I veered away from analogies which, to my mind, undermined the evils of this particular story. So when Scott Horton compared the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Hoess to those who crafted the US torture policy or Susan Sontag compared administration abuses of language to the linguistic perversions that preceded genocidal acts against the Hutus in Rwanda, I recoiled.

Analogies of such an extreme order just didn't suit me. But what I've resisted for five years, since the first Abu Ghraib revelations in the spring of 2004, I now find sadly indisputable. The supposed moral exceptionalism of the most powerful nation on Earth is no more. In its action-packed eight years, the Bush administration ensured that the United States would be the most ordinary of abusing, torturing nations.

Through perverse language, a twisting of the law, and an immersion in the precise details of implementing torture techniques, the United States renounced its position as the leader of the global human rights movement. Abandoned by the country it long considered its greatest ally, that movement now teeters at the edge of its grave. That's what the torture memos and the present media uproar over torture really mean.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/opinion/?id=31803