The Other Victim of Torture--Human Rights Activists

++Lawyers, psychologists and medical doctors are taking the hits on the torture report because some of their colleagues participated in the torture program. Progressive bloggers say we are missing the story because we aren't examining the 2009 Senate Armed Services report about the detainees in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib where Bush officials insisted detainees be tortured even more intensely on the issue of an Al Qaeda connection to Saddam Hussein. All this to generate "false" intelligence to generate the Iraq War.

++But no one has pointed out now America's flagrant violations of human rights, especially the repudiation of the torture convention, leaves human rights advocates with no large country to cover their back. Whatever we say, human rights organizations implicitly act on the assumption the American society backs their efforts to improve human rights. Whether the administration was Ronald Reagan's or Barack Obama's it was thought that, despite disagreements on issues and the severity of a problem, that there was some basic, underlying assumption that human rights activists were acting in the common good. They could be a nuisance, or naive, or even wrong but their emphasis was on the improvement of a situation.

++With the Torture Report and its prior Senate Report on American treatment of detainees and the failure of the Obama administration to take remedial actions, the human rights community is adrift, depending on the goodness of strangers. Removed from any influential state,human rights activists have to become totally dependent on public opinion and the fact that public opinion can help mobilize corrective action. Luckily there is a vast global network of citizens sensitized to human rights issues and to be willing to work on them.

++But The trouble with this loss of mooring with a powerful country is that international humanitarian law and human rights covenants suffer. The United Nations reports that even more countries torture today because it is known that the United States tortured with impunity. The United States arbitrary adherence to the Geneva Convention jeopardizes the safety and security of refugees,detainees wherever they are and even our own armed forces. There is a reason that all the advocates in our military opposed the "enhanced interrogation" of the detainees at Gitmo.

++I gave a speech on Human Rights Day in the House of Representatives about specific human rights crises in the Middle East. The program saw congressmen and women from both parties give the requisite speeches, some even eloquently. But in the end these, including my own words, were meaningless rhetoric.

++Consider the shift in language from W's reasons for staying in Iraq to President Obama's for going after ISIS. We've gone from the "freedom"language to preserving "political order and stability". That doesn't bode well for our foreign policy.

++Our failure to join the ICC during the Bush years has resulted in Sudan's dictator Bashir declaring victory because the ICC didn't have the resources to pursue the case on the genocide in Darfur. 

++One can not imagine there is much gas left in Sammantha Power's notion of humanitarian intervention. We have abandoned the very standards to make that happen.Human Rights advocates face the dire circumstances of being a cultural sub-class--fun to be around,and engaged in worthwhile pursuits, but ineffectual.