Today is the day that many bloggers who do not usually spend their time writing about human rights issues make the choice to do so. The idea is that by spending this one day writing about human rights, they will reach many people with the issues who don't normally read about them. I only heard about it this morning, but having heard about it, I think it's an amazing idea.
There are many issues I could choose to write about. Ever met a blogger from China on Vox, for instance? My understanding is that Vox is banned there. Freedom of speech is an important issue for me, and it's one of the areas where my country excels. Yes, we do have a strong tradition of protecting free speech.
Then again, I could be more topical. The fact that the government of Myanmar isn't allowing international aid through to its own people is certainly a travesty that is drawing a lot of attention. That fact, however, means that other human rights violations are slipping from our attention while we focus our outrage at the junta in Myanmar.
But I also feel uncomfortable attacking another country's human rights abuses while my own country's recent record is so poor. And yet, there is a perfect topic that combines the two, and that is the exporting of human rights abuses.
Our current administration's stated foreign policy is that they wish to spread freedom and democracy around the world. It's called the Freedom Agenda, and the White House is very proud of it. It's also a complete and total lie that anyone who is familiar at all with the human rights abuses of this administration cannot help but to be insulted by.
We cannot hold people in the U.S. indefinitely without charging them, so we set up a special prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, so we could do so and claim that it's not being done in the U.S. Of course it is U.S. soil, as it is being done on a U.S. military base. Irony is indeed dead if most people don't even blink at the fact that our government criticizes Cuba for its human rights abuses while sending our own war prisoners to an unwelcome base on their own soil so that we can violate their rights more conveniently.
But while the stated foreign policy agenda of the Bush administration is to export democracy and freedom, the actual agenda, as is clear from their actions, is to export human rights abuses. While the White House doesn't have a problem with violating U.S. law on our own soil, such as conducting illegal wiretaps on its own citizens, it's often just inconvenient to do so. They seem to know just how far they can push the line, and having torture camps set up on U.S. soil would be far enough that the Supreme Court would actually do their job and shut them down. So, instead, we let other countries do our dirty work for us.
Secret prisons established in foreign countries to allow the U.S. government to hold terror suspects indefinitely and treat them how they wish without having to deal with any of those pesky human rights laws we have back home. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's well documented, making it a conspiracy fact, and not a well-kept conspiracy at that.
Our government admits to using torture techniques, won't rule out using them in the future, and still has the unmitigated gall to take the moral high ground in criticizing other country's human rights abuses, claiming that we are spreading democracy and freedom around the world. The insanity of it is maddening. Make no mistake, waterboarding is torture, and is by no means the only torture technique that we know has been used.
Every time our government commits one of these acts, it gives up more of the moral high ground that it so self-righteously thinks it has. We are becoming not the saviors of the world, but its most prominent hypocrites.
What can you do? The administration has made it extremely clear that it doesn't care in the slightest what the American people think.
It's obvious that sending letter won't do a whole lot. Donate to Amnesty International, by all means. And yet, the most effective thing an American citizen can do is elect a new President who doesn't believe in torture. And our current choices?
John McCain supports allowing the President the power to authorize torture.
Hillary Clinton used to support the use of torture, and now doesn't, similar in a way to how she used to support the war, and now doesn't.
Barack Obama has stated unequivocally that he does not support either the use of torture or sending suspects abroad so that other countries can do our torturing for us.
Make your choice accordingly!
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