Amnesty International’s Doublespeak
- 05.29.2007 - 12:55 PMAmnesty International is beating its anti-American drum again. In 2005, AI’s secretary-general Irene Khan called the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo “the gulag of our time.” Aside from defaming the U.S., this grotesque metaphor belittled the martyrdom of the millions of victims of the real gulags, most of whom did not survive the experience and none of whom were terrorists. Rather, they were sent to their doom for such offenses as being “the wife of an enemy of the people.”
On Wednesday, AI issued its 2007 report, and Khan was back at it. “One of the biggest blows to human rights has been the attempt of Western democratic states to roll back some fundamental principles of human rights,” she said. Which “democratic states”? As Khan continued, with characteristic restraint, “the U.S. administration’s doublespeak has been breathtakingly shameless. It is unrepentant about the global web of abuse it has spun in the name of counterterrorism.”
But who is doing the doublespeak? The war against terrorism is the supreme human-rights struggle of our time. This is so because the first human right is the right to life, and scores of innocents every day have it brutally snatched from them by terrorists. It is so, too, because the regimes that succor terrorists are themselves among the world’s most repressive and because the jihadists and other radicals who carry out terrorism aim to become rulers themselves. If they succeed, they will show their subjects no more mercy than they do their victims today. And the war on terror is doubly a campaign for human rights because the Bush administration has “shamelessly” built its anti-terror strategy around the objective of promoting freedom and democracy in the Middle East.
Is it odd for a bloody war to be the fulcrum of the struggle for human rights? Not at all. The two greatest victories for human rights of the last century (and probably of all time) were the allied victory over the Axis in World War II and the West’s victory over the Soviet Union in the cold war. These spelled the difference between life and death, freedom and slavery, for hundreds of millions of people. The greatest victory for human rights in American history was the North’s victory in the Civil War, ending slavery. (Amnesty International was not around, of course, at the time of the Civil War or World War II. But it was in business during the cold war, toward which it adopted a posture of studied neutrality. In other words, in the great human-rights battle of its time, Amnesty went AWOL.)
In each of these wars, our side was guilty of human-rights violations more egregious than anything that has happened at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Some of those were necessary—as President Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus may have been—and others were shameful, like the detention of Japanese-American citizens by FDR. But even these egregious abuses pale in comparison to the stakes of the wars, stakes that had everything to do with human rights.
Today, it may be that some U.S. actions in the war on terror are questionable or blameworthy. But such derogations are trivial in comparison with what is at issue between us and the terrorists. No one genuinely devoted to human rights can be blind to this. Those who ignore it are using the lingo of human rights to pursue some other agenda.
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May 29th, 2007 at 1:58 PM
Dear Mr. Muravchik,
Thanks for that excellent (if flawed) book on socialism you published a few years back.
You argue that the issues at stake in the war on terror dwarf and effectively invalidate concerns about U.S. detention policy and practices. I find it sad and dangerous that you think so.
Liberal democracies do not imprison people without charge for years on end. Guantanamo has its “high value” detainees and a few high profile tribunals of authentic bad guys, but the vast majority of its inmates are being quietly released in a slow trickle, with no apology or acceptance of financial liability for physical abuse, years lost and shattered psyches. We have no idea how many people are being held in Bagram, Afghanistan or in unidentified black sites…or under what conditions they are being detained.
I don’t get you neoconservatives, your ideals seem OK but your remedies for the world’s problems and weirdly detached from reality. Democracy should not (and cannot) be spread at the point of a bayonet….liberalism should not (and cannot) be protected through a system of pre-Magna Carta dungeons.
….But maybe I’m just “using the lingo of human rights to pursue some other agenda.”
May 29th, 2007 at 6:17 PM
As I’ve noted elsewhere, Amnesty International has betrayed its own founding principles by expanding its original concern with political freedom and the treatment of political prisoners, to encompass–and increasingly, to focus on–elaborately picayune standards for the treatment of violent criminals. Its credibility, built up over decades of non-partisan advocacy for “prisoners of conscience”–those imprisoned and horribly mistreated merely for criticizing their own governments–is now being squandered recklessly on comparatively niggling complaints about the way certain free, open, democratic societies treat murderers and terrorists.
The saddest aspect of this betrayal is not the addition of yet another voice to the chorus of defenders of the violent enemies of democracy. It’s that real political prisoners–heroic democratic activists suffering under brutal totalitarian repression–have effectively lost a historically important advocate on their behalf.
May 30th, 2007 at 9:38 AM
Adrian: What’s sad and dangerous is your inability to make distinctions between those attempting to protect free peoples everywhere and jihadis attempting to violently and indiscriminately kill anyone who is not part of their radical Islamist world. You say democracy cannot be spread at the point of a bayonet, but it has done this for hundreds of years now, as Josh points out, in the Civil War, World War I, WWII, the Cold War, and I would add the Balkans and now Iraq. But what’s most sad is that you think of Abu Ghraib and all you see is a handful of US soldiers behaving shamefully (whose crimes were uncovered and punished by US military authorities) — instead of the decades-long real horror show that infamous prison was under Saddam: estimates run into the thousands of innocent Iraqis brutally killed and tortured. That a few of our own people engaged in criminally abhorrent ways does not wipe out the ugly past of this prison, nor does it excuse you from making wildly inaccurate statements.
You are indeed pursuing another agenda: one of moral relativism in the service of “the US is always wrong.” I’m guessing you’d also add “therefore we should never meddle abroad.” Correct?
May 30th, 2007 at 3:07 PM
No sir. The U.S. was right, for example, to support Solidarity in Poland, or smuggle in Tamizdat into the Eastern Block. American regime-changers, including International Republican Institute (your confreres), did much to bring down Slobodan Milosovic….not through NATO bombings (which clearly and demonstrably accelerated ethnic cleansing) but by backing and training a corps of Serbian Otpor activists with real, local legitimacy.
WWII was a necessary war in which Western democracies aligned themselves with the Soviet Union (a totalitarian power which they correctly viewed as a containable) in order to defeat a rapidly metastasizing fascism and its allies. In order to secure a little post-war peace, the West agreed to sell out half of Europe to Stalinism and let the dictatorships in Iberia stand….I certainly wouldn’t call World War II a war for democracy.
The (justifable) American occupation of Japan and part of Germany did allow those countries to resume their democratic development. But Germany had been building a parliamentary democratic tradition for a century before it degenerated into Nazism and the Japanese Diet, with a directly elected lower house, was also established in the late 19th century.
Because of its necessarily voluntary and and participatory foundation, democracy cannot be imposed or engineered on a population, like the metric system, or the alternating current. Isn’t their a whiff of Bolshevik vanguardism in the neoconservative program of revolution from above? A viable democratic culture can only develop through an indigenously legitimate process.
Bush’s war has not brought democracy to Iraq, it has not strengthened the hand of liberal reformers, secularists or feminists in the Middle East, it has instead brought considerable comfort, power, prestige and legitimacy to relgious fanatics and reactionaries of all stripes.