Human rights irony for the US and Arab world

[Jefferson23]

** WARNING: Large photo of John Yoo at the link.


Ten years after September 11th, human rights flounder in the United States but flourish in the Middle East

Since September 11th, the United States and the Arab world have traveled a treacherous road together. Where they have arrived after ten years sets them apart. In the US, the embrace of human rights as a defining value and ideal worthy of considerable sacrifice is gradually fading, while the Arab world is in the midst of a rights revolution.

Throughout US history, promoting individual rights and civil liberties has been central to how Americans defined themselves. To be American was to champion liberty and rights. These were repeatedly billed as inherently American values. Even when they encountered contradictions such as US support for brutal dictators, Americans' faith that more often than not the United States used its power to promote its principles allowed many Americans to continue to take pride in their "America as leader of the free world" identity. In this formulation, human rights, ideals, and morality mattered, at the very least as a bar that should be met.

But the United States' treatment of human rights after September 11th proved hard to reconcile with its "purveyor of rights" identity. Abu Ghraib's gripping images, Guantanamo's indefinite detentions without due process, the outsourcing of torture to "partner" countries through renditions, CIA blacksites where Americans themselves took up torture and disappearances, and countless legal memos and euphemisms justifying torture so blatantly flew in the face of American claims to championing human rights that most found it increasingly difficult to invoke a distinct American identity based on freedom and rights.

At the same time, while arguing that the spread of democracy and freedom through military interventions in the Middle East was "America's calling", the Bush administration embarked on a relentless campaign to persuade Americans that preserving "national security" could be justifiably pursued through any means, even what Dick Cheney termed venturing into "the dark side".

in full: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201182114309779831.html