Torture and the free world
Who cares what the U.S. thinks about human rights in the world when Bush upholds the CIA’s right to torture?
The U.S. State Department this week released its 2007 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. That’s other countries, of course. By unfunny coincidence, U.S. President George W. Bush upstaged the report by two days earlier vetoing a congressional bill to ban the CIA from interrogating terrorist suspects with torture methods such as “waterboarding.”1
2017 UPDATE: Current U.S. president Donald Trump argued during his campaign that the government should torture people worse than waterboarding. Beyond appalling.
Appalling. Torture is nightmarishly wrong, full stop. Regardless of whether or not it can sometimes be useful, a debated point, it is something a society cannot do, and condone, and continue to be a good society. Under Bush, the U.S., the supposed leader of the free world, is not even paying lip service to this very very basic human freedom.
The State Department reports, political products though they are, have been an important resource. They can have hard political and ecomomic consequences for the countries named. Political leaders care about the marks they get from Uncle Sam in a different way than they care about the annual reports of NGOs like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. But with U.S. credibility on human rights at such a miserable low, they can afford not to care very much.
This has also contributed to shifting the terms of the debate on Islam and human rights, as Ann E. Mayer recently pointed out in a noteworthy article.2
Appropriate responses
Bush’s reaffirmation of his administration’s pro-torture stance ought to have hard political consequences too.
Extraditions to the U.S. of terrorism suspects should be ruled out. The European Court of Human Rights held in a recent landmark decision that deporting people to a country where they risk torture is a violation of the the European Convention on Human Rights.3
And what about sharing intelligence with an agency that publicly reserves to itself the right to torture? How about taking part in NATO military operations with the side effect of filling the nameless, unmapped, windowless CIA basements with new candidates for simulated drowning? (Torturer allies, of course, is not a new dilemma for NATO countries, from Franco’s Spain to Turkey.)
What if the rest of us liberal democracies were to start shunning torturer states? Withhold real human intelligence from them? We would lose the prized scraps of information the CIA sees fit to hand our intelligence services in return, of course. But how big a loss is information sourced from sleep-deprived, sense-deprived, half-drowned, half-mad wretches?
Oh, and how about indicting Bush for the crimes committed on his watch as commander-in-chief? If Pinochet could get arrested in London on the warrant of a Spanish judge, why not Bush? And if Bush would now risk arrest in the towns of Marlboro and Brattleboro, Vermont (combined population: 13,000), why should he be free to move around the EU…?
Someone has to restore some credibility through accountability.
Update (27 Apr 08):
A New York Times article gives some more clues to how the administration is thinking, as well as a helpful overview of steps taken by U.S. institutions over the past years to reimpose some restraint on interrogation methods.
Footnotes:
Myers, Steven Lee. “Veto of Bill on C.I.A. Tactics Affirms Bush’s Legacy.” The New York Times, March 9, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/washington/09policy.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=&st=nyt&oref=slogin.
Ann Elizabeth Mayer, “The Islam and Human Rights Nexus: Shifting Dimensions”, Muslim World Journal of Human Rights 4:1 (2007).
Grand Chamber judgment in the case of Saadi v. Italy (application no. 37201/06), European Court of Human Rights, 28 Feb 08. See also the press release.