Great Job, America! (Continued)
A friend of mine brought up a good point about the Amnesty International report I mentioned in a previous entry:
To put the U.S. treatment of terrorists in prison on an equal moral plane with the terrible human rights abuses of Sadaam Hussein, Rwanda, Liberia, Zimbabwe, Milosevich, Turkmenistan, etc. is just plain foolish and strips Amnesty Intl. of all credibility.
I would agree, except I’m not certain that Amnesty does, in fact, equate them. They come close, calling Guantanamo the “Gulag of our time,” which is at best hyperbole, and at worst, simply wrong. The real, Soviet-era gulags were certainly worse both in the quality of abuse and the quantity of victims.
But that’s not really the point. At issue is not the precise measurement of Guantanamo or Abu Graib on the “Universal Abuse-O-Meter.”
The point–the point at the heart of the Amnesty report–is that the US has become a hypocrite on the World stage, and that because of our immense clout, our hypocrisy hamstrings the cause of human rights in places where they are most abused.
Is Guantanamo as bad as the Gulags? The genocide in Rwanda? The ethnic cleansing in Sudan? Dear God, no. But it is still wrong. Even if it is legal–another question entirely–it is still wrong.
Our current government wants to have it both ways. The 500-odd men kept in cages at Guantanamo are not entitled to the basic rights guaranteed under the US Constitution, such as legal representation or due process, because they are not on US soil, because they are not US citizens, and because they were captured as combatants in the “War Against Terror.” And even though these men are our enemies in this “War Against Terror,” they are not entitled to their rights as prisoners under the Geneva Convention, either, because they are “enemy combatants,” not “soldiers.”
I’m sorry, but that is a semantic quick-step easily on par with Clinton’s infamous retort, “That depends on your definition of the word Is.” It is a glib, cynical, and blatant rationalization. It is complete and utter Bullshit.
Documents such as our Bill of Rights, or the Geneva Convention, are not legal strictures to be danced around, but rather imperfect renderings of our mutual recognition that we hold certain truths to be self-evident and transcendent–such that they must be held sacred even when our own survival is at stake. We cannot, we must not, do whatever we please to people from other countries simply because we feel threatened by them–we would not tolerate such treatment of our own citizens by other governments.
Citizens and citizen-soldiers throughout our history have given their lives not merely to protect our soil or our interests, but to protect the values and freedoms we cherish. If we abuse those values in the name of protecting them, we diminish their sacrifice to nothing more than base self-interest. If those principles are so important that we will send our soldiers to die for them, surely we are willing to die for them ouselves, on our own soil?
The US is not some small, totalitarian, pariah-state, surprising no-one when it abuses basic human rights. We are a massive super-state that bases its domestic and foreign policy on claims to the moral high ground. Whether other countries acknowledge it, whether we accept it–we, more than any other nation by far, exert a tremendous influence on the behavior of other countries. When we hold to the principles we preach, that influence moves other countries to do good. When we do not, we are recognized as a hypocrite. Sure, even when we are a hypocrite, our sheer power dictates that other countries must appease us. But they do not respect us, and they do not respect the values we proclaim.
We are not virtuous, as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have suggested this week, by virtue of being the United States.
We are human. We are lucky to have inherited a tremendous tradition of morality. But we are made of the same stuff as other humans.
That we have allowed, by carelessness, the injustices at Abu Graib; or by policy, the injustice of Guantanamo, is a profound national tragedy. We have sacrificed, for our physical safety, the principles we supposedly hold more dear than Life.
Amnesty International isn’t perfect. They use hype and hyperbole to advance the causes in which they believe. They overstate.
But, fundamentally, they’re right. We can discount them, discredit them. We should remember, though, that when they have pointed their bony finger at other countries, we’ve applauded. It’s only when they point that finger at us that we discredit them, suggesting that they are, as Bush said, “people who hate America.”
June 8th, 2005 at 10:47 am
Amnesty Intl. has never even been to the U.S. facilities at Guantanamo. I don’t mean to say that our govt. can do no wrong, but a mere accusation is not proof.
I’m not trying to say that the guys are happily sipping mint tea all day but that their treatment does not constitute “human rights abuse”. They are prisoners of war. Unfortunately things happen in war and one of them is the need to get information from captured combatants. I want to see them treated as humanely as possible, but I’d rather see their discomfort if it means preventing another 9/11
December 7th, 2005 at 12:54 am
[...] The tension between idealism and realism – it’s been on my mind since Amnesty International ripped the US a hole for Guantanamo. I wrote a couple bitter posts about that. In short, I wonder how we can justify abusing one group of people’s inalienable human rights in order to protect our own; to put it another way: if America is supposedly about values, rather than mere survival, why are we compromising those values in order to survive? (1) (2) [...]