What Bush has Wrought

This past Wednesday, Amnesty International’s Irene Khan, Amnesty's Secretary General, berated George Bush and the United States’ government for condoning, sponsoring, and propagating “atrocious” human rights violation. Citing Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and the so-named “renditioning” of prisoners to dangerous countries like Syria or Uzbekistan, Amnesty International claims that the United States "thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights." The United States, in the past century, has asserted itself as the leader of the free word: a leader economically, militarily, and (very importantly) a leader in freedom, egalitarianism, and humanity. The guise of “protecting our country from terrorism” has enabled this president to use his pervasive influence to subvert a great deal of this moral guidance, and has allowed the United States' authority on human rights to greatly diminish.

The United States calls on other countries to end practices of human rights violations, why should they listen? Especially when Amnesty International is calling Guantánamo Bay, a detention facility for more than 500 prisoners from more than 40 countries, "the gulag of our times."

This, truly, is a failure not just of our military, but a failure from the highest authoritative figures, even the president himself. Khan states that the Bush Administration has, “gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to 'redefine' torture."

A not surprising, perhaps incriminating, area of the United States' defense of these torture practices is, well, their indifferent lack of a defense. On a May 9^th television conference, when asked about the practice of renditioning (a euphemism for the capturing of prisoners, flying them to dangerous countries like Syria, Egypt, Jordan, or Uzbekistan where torture laws are no existent, and torturing them) Bush made an almost laughably weak case, claiming that, “we send people to countries where they say they are not going to torture people.” He then goes on, in almost complete contradiction, to claim that in "the post-9/11 world, the United States must make sure we protect our people and our friends from attack.” Torture, it seems, is the United States' new export. My article from earlier this year: Cruel and Unusual Punishment.