<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div class="printbody"><h1>The Hijacking of Human Rights</h1>
<h6><a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_hijacking_of_human_rights_20130407/">http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_hijacking_of_human_rights_20130407/</a></h6>
<h4 class="date">Posted on Apr 7, 2013</h4>
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<font face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif"><p>By Chris Hedges</p><p>The appointment of Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department
official and longtime government apparatchik, as executive director of <a href="http://www.pen.org/pen-world">PEN American Center</a>
is part of a campaign to turn U.S. human rights organizations into
propagandists for pre-emptive war and apologists for empire. Nossel’s
appointment led me to resign from PEN as well as withdraw from speaking
at the <a href="http://worldvoices.pen.org/">PEN World Voices Festival</a>
in May. But Nossel is only symptomatic of the widespread hijacking of
human rights organizations to demonize those—especially Muslims—branded
by the state as the enemy, in order to cloak pre-emptive war and empire
with a fictional virtue and to effectively divert attention from our own
mounting human rights abuses, including torture, warrantless
wiretapping and monitoring, the denial of due process and extrajudicial
assassinations.</p><p>Nossel, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for international
organization affairs under Hillary Clinton in a State Department that
was little more than a subsidiary of the Pentagon, is part of the new
wave of “humanitarian interventionists,” such as <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/post/foreign-policy-aide-samantha-power-leaving-administration/2013/02/04/8b3c5138-6ede-11e2-ac36-3d8d9dcaa2e2_blog.html">Samantha Power</a>, <a href="http://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/michael-ignatieff">Michael Ignatieff</a> and <a href="http://usun.state.gov/leadership/c31461.htm">Susan Rice</a>,
who naively see in the U.S. military a vehicle to create a better
world. They know little of the reality of war or the actual inner
workings of empire. They harbor a childish belief in the innate goodness
and ultimate beneficence of American power. The deaths of hundreds of
thousands of innocents, the horrendous suffering and violent terror
inflicted in the name of their utopian goals in Iraq and Afghanistan,
barely register on their moral calculus. This makes them at once
oblivious and dangerous. “Innocence is a kind of insanity,” Graham
Greene wrote in his novel “The Quiet American,” and those who destroy to
build are “impregnably armored by … good intentions and … ignorance.”</p><p>There are no good wars. There are no just wars. As <a href="http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/erasmus.html">Erasmus</a>
wrote, “there is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely
destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome” than war. “Whoever
heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each
other, as men do everywhere?” Erasmus asked. But war, he knew, was very
useful to the power elite. War permitted the powerful, in the name of
national security and by fostering a culture of fear, to effortlessly
strip the citizen of his or her rights. A declaration of war ensures
that “all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a
few,” Erasmus wrote. </p><p>There are cases, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_Genocide">Bosnia in the 1990s</a>
was one, when force should be employed to halt an active campaign of
genocide. This is the lesson of the Holocaust: When you have the
capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. For this
reason, we are culpable in the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. But the
“humanitarian interventionists” have twisted this moral imperative to
intercede against genocide to justify the calls for pre-emptive war and
imperial expansion. Saddam Hussein did carry out campaigns of genocide
against the Kurds and the Shiites, but the dirty fact is that while
these campaigns were under way we provided support to Baghdad or looked
the other way. It was only when Washington wanted war, and the bodies of
tens of thousands of Kurds and Shiites had long decomposed in mass
graves, that we suddenly began to speak in the exalted language of human
rights. </p><p>These “humanitarian interventionists” studiously ignore our own acts
of genocide, first unleashed against Native Americans and then exported
to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. They do not
acknowledge, even in light of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, our own capacity for evil. They do not discuss in their books
and articles the genocides we backed in Guatemala and East Timor or the
crime of pre-emptive war. They minimize the horror and suffering we have
delivered to Iraqis and Afghans and exaggerate or fabricate the
benefits. The long string of atrocities carried out in our name mocks
the idea of the United States as a force for good with a right to impose
its values on others. The ugly truth shatters their deification of U.S.
power. </p><p>Nossel, in the contentious year she headed Amnesty International USA
before leaving in January, oversaw a public campaign by the organization
to support NATO’s war in Afghanistan. She was running Amnesty
International USA when the organization posted billboards at bus stops
that read, “Human Rights for Women and Girls in Afghanistan—NATO: Keep
the Progress Going.” <a href="http://www.albrightstonebridge.com/team/madeleine-k-albright/">Madeleine Albright</a>,
along with senior State Department officials and politicians, were
invited to speak at Amnesty International’s women’s forum during
Nossel’s tenure. Nossel has urged Democrats to stay the course in Iraq,
warning that a failure in Iraq could unleash “a kind of post-Vietnam,
post-Mogadishu hangover” that would lamentably “herald an era of deep
reservations among the U.S. public regarding the use of force.” She
worked as a State Department official to discredit the Goldstone Report,
which charged Israel with war crimes against the Palestinians. As a
representative on the U.N. Human Rights Council she said that “the top
of our list is our defense of Israel, and Israel’s right to fair
treatment at the Human Rights Council.” Not a word about the
Palestinians. She has advocated for expanded armed intervention in
countries such as Syria and Libya. She has called for a military strike
against Iran if it does not halt its nuclear enrichment program. In an
article in The Washington Quarterly titled <a href="http://www.pegc.us/archive/Journals/NosselFA.pdf">“Battle Hymn of the Democrats,”</a>
she wrote: “Democrats must be seen to be every bit as tough-minded as
their opponents. Democratic reinvention as a ‘peace party’ is a
political dead end.” “In a milieu of war or near-war, the public will
look for leadership that is bold and strident—more forceful, resolute,
and pugnacious than would otherwise be tolerated,” she went on. In a <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/59716/suzanne-nossel/smart-power">2004 Foreign Affairs article</a>,
“Smart Power: Reclaiming Liberal Internationalism,” she wrote: “We need
to deploy our power in ways that make us stronger, not weaker,” not a
stunning thought but one that should be an anathema to human rights
campaigners. She added, “U.S. interests are furthered by enlisting
others on behalf of U.S. goals,” which, of course, is what she promptly
did at Amnesty International. Her “smart power” theory calls on the U.S.
to exert its will around the globe by employing a variety of means and
tactics, using the United Nations and human rights groups, for example,
to promote the nation’s agenda as well as the more naked and raw
coercion of military force. This is not a new or original idea, but when
held up to George W. Bush’s idiocy I guess it looked thoughtful. The
plight of our own dissidents—including Bradley Manning—is of no concern
to Nossel and apparently of no concern now to PEN. </p><p>Coleen Rowley and Ann Wright <a href="http://consortiumnews.com/2012/06/18/amnestys-shilling-for-us-wars">first brought</a>
Nossel’s past and hawkish ideology to light when she became the
executive director of Amnesty International USA a year ago. Rowley and
Wright have written correctly that “humanitarian interventionists,” in
or out of government, see no distinction between human rights work and
the furtherance of U.S. imperial power. Nossel, they noted, “sees no
conflict between her current role and having been a member of the
executive staff whilst her President and Secretary of State bosses were
carrying out war crimes such as drone attacks in Pakistan and
Afghanistan and shielding torturers and their enablers in the Bush
administration from prosecution.” (For more on this see Rowley’s article
<a href="http://consortiumnews.com/2012/08/28/selling-war-as-smart-power/">“Selling War as ‘Smart Power.’ ”</a>) </p><p>Is this the résumé of a human rights advocate in the United States?
Are human rights organizations supposed to further the agenda of the
state rather than defend its victims? Are the ideas of “humanitarian
interventionists” compatible with human rights? Are writers and artists
no longer concerned with the plight of all dissidents, freedom of
expression and the excesses of state power? Are we nothing more than
puppets of the elite? Aren’t we supposed to be in perpetual, voluntary
alienation from all forms of power? Isn’t power, from a human rights
perspective, the problem?</p><p>The current business of human rights means human rights for some and
not for others. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Physicians
for Human Rights, the Peace Alliance, and Citizens for Global Solutions
are all guilty of buying into the false creed that U.S. military force
can be deployed to promote human rights. None of these groups stood up
to oppose the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan, as if pre-emptive war is
not one of the grossest violations of human rights. </p><p>The creed of “humanitarian intervention” means, for many, shedding
tears over the “right” victims. Its supporters lobby for the victims in
Darfur and ignore the victims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and
Gaza. They denounce the savagery of the Taliban but ignore the savagery
we employ in our offshore penal colonies or our drone-infested war
zones. They decry the enslavement of girls in brothels in India or
Thailand but not the slavery of workers in our produce fields or our
prisons. They demand justice for persecuted dissidents in the Arab world
but say nothing about Bradley Manning. </p><p>The playwright and fierce anti-war critic <a href="http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/arthur-miller-biography">Arthur Miller</a>,
the first American president of PEN International, fearlessly stood up
to McCarthyism and was blacklisted. He denounced the Vietnam War. He
decried the invasion of Iraq. PEN, when it embodied Miller’s resistance
and decency, stood for something real and important. As the U.S. bombed
Iraq into submission and then invaded, Miller, who called the war a form
of “mass murder,” said indignantly: “It’s a joke that the U.S.
government wheels out the Geneva Convention when they themselves have
turned away or flouted so many international treaties.”</p><p>The posing of government shills such as Nossel as human rights
campaigners and the marginalization of voices such as Miller’s are part
of the sickness of our age. If PEN recaptures the moral thunder of the
late Arthur Miller, if it remembers that human rights mean defending all
who are vulnerable, persecuted and unjustly despised, I will be happy
to rejoin.</p><p>All systems of power are the problem. And it is the role of the
artist, the writer and the intellectual to defy every center of power on
behalf of those whom power would silence and crush. This means, in
biblical terms, embracing the stranger. It means being a constant
opponent rather than an ally of government. It means being the perpetual
outcast. Those who truly fight for human rights understand this. </p><p>“Whether the mask is labeled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of
the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus—the
bureaucracy, the police, the military … ,” <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nthz3"> Simone Weil</a>
wrote. “No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will
always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample
underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”</p>
<img src="http://www.truthdig.com/images/eartothegrounduploads/6818268658_40318c4229_n.jpg" alt="" border="0" height="202" width="300"><p>Flickr/Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights </p><p>Suzanne Nossel.
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