President Bush continued to offer deceptive reassurance that the United States does not “torture” suspects, but that reassurance rang hollow. To begin with, the administration’s understanding of the term “torture” remained unclear. The United Nations’ widely ratified Convention against Torture defines the term as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person.” Yet as of August 2002, the administration had defined torture as nothing short of pain “equivalent…to that…associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result.” In December 2004, the administration repudiated this absurdly narrow definition, but it offered no alternative definition.Here's the introduction's topic links:
The classic forms of torture that the administration continued to defend suggested that its definition remained inadequate. In March 2005, Porter Goss, the CIA director, justified water-boarding, a sanitized term for an age-old, terrifying torture technique in which the victim is made to believe that he is about to drown. The CIA reportedly instituted water-boarding beginning in March 2002 as one of six “enhanced interrogation techniques” for selected terrorist suspects. In testimony before the U.S. Senate in August 2005, the former deputy White House counsel, Timothy Flanigan, would not even rule out using mock executions.
Moreover, President Bush’s pronouncements on torture continued to studiously avoid mention of the parallel prohibition of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. That is because, in a policy first pronounced publicly by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2005 Senate testimony, the Bush administration began claiming the power, as noted above, to use cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment so long as the victim was a non-American held outside the United States. Other governments obviously subject detainees to such treatment or worse, but they do so clandestinely. The Bush administration is the only government in the world known to claim this power openly, as a matter of official policy, and to pretend that it is lawful.
Introduction
Torture and Inhumane Treatment: A Deliberate U.S. Policy
A Compromised U.S. Defense of Human Rights
British Complicity with Torture
Canada’s Ambivalent Position
Detention
Counterterrorism as an Excuse for Silence
The European Union
The Nefarious Role of Russia and China
Darfur and the African Union
International Justice
The United Nations
Conclusion
Notice anything missing?
I'll clue you in: There is no chapter heading devoted to threats to human rights from Arab or Islamic countries, organizations, or terrorist groups. While I agree the US should stop torturing prisoners, it is clear from the emphasis of this Human Rights Watch report that the authors believe human rights are under greater threat from the US, UK, Canada, the EU, Russia, and China than from Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
HRW's manifest priorities undercut the historic struggle for progress in human rights, just as George Bush's defense of torture does, by missing the real threat to human rights today--the organizations, religious leaders, and countries that don't even pay lip service to Enlightenment principles underlying the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
What Roth is doing rhetorically in his introduction, it seems to me, is a bit like criticizing President Lincoln for abolishing Habeus Corpus during the Civil War--and not mentioning a threat from Southern Slavery or the firing on Ft. Sumter. After all, John Wilkes' Booth shouted 'Sic Semper Tyrannis!' after shooting Lincoln. Was Booth a 'terrorist,' or a 'freedom fighter,' driven to rebellion by Lincoln's repressive rule?
Think carefully...
