History you didn't learn: human rights violations by the United States
Written by Coralyn Maguigad
Content warning: violence, war and murder.
The United States is not the human rights defender it claims to be. For most of my life, the United States has been at war with an imaginary enemy. Whether it was terrorists and Osama bin Laden or chemical weapons and Saddam Hussein, the United States occupied Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of Southwest Asia for two decades on the basis of protecting civilians and upholding human rights.
The reality, unfortunately, is not as wholesome as the government and military want you to think it is. Even if the reality was a revenge plot, SEAL Team Six killed bin Laden in 2011, 10 years before President Joe Biden pulled the rest of our troops out of the region. There is nothing noble or defensive of human rights about war. In and of itself, war is antithetical to human rights.
War is nasty and violent. It is expensive and horrific. But many throughout history have deemed it inevitable. So, they came up with some rules of the road to make war less atrocious. This is how we, as an international community, came to what is now known as just war theory. We also have guidelines from the U.N.: war shouldn’t include chemical weapons, torture of prisoners or civilians, etc.
These ideas and restrictions, as well as the responsibility to protect the human rights of civilians when the state refuses to protect them, are meant to justify war and war-like action as well as keep conflict humane.
Again, the reality is not as peachy as history would like us to think it is. The way this all plays out is that small countries, populated and run by people of color, are recipients of these human rights mechanisms for their human rights violations, but large, powerful, white countries are not held responsible for the violations brought about by their actions.
I want to put a quick note in here that all human rights violations are bad and should be accounted for. I am one person who studied human rights in college, but I do not have all the answers on the “how-to” and in regards to the larger justice and accountability conversations that we need to be having.
Case in point: The United States committed innumerable acts of war crimes against prisoners in secret detention camps such as Guantanamo Bay.
Although the actions in these facilities have been known for some time now, only recently has there been a public legal record of the atrocities that have taken place.
A few weeks ago, a former detainee of the CIA during the war on terror publicly described the torture used against him. Majid Khan was captured in Pakistan in 2003 after joining al-Qaeda after 9/11. In his hours-long testimony, Khan described the horrific acts of violence performed against him despite his cooperation with his captors. He described sexual and physical abuse, including forced feeding, waterboarding and being duct taped into a diaper as they transported him between detention centers.
Khan is not the first to share stories of torture by the U.S. government, but he is the first to do so on public record. Carol Rosenberg has covered multiple Guantanamo Bay stories for the New York Times, including Khan’s testimony and the effects of torture on Mohamedou Ould Slahi.
Additionally, books and documentaries have been documenting these atrocities for over a decade. One of the more striking accounts is “Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo” by Murat Kurnaz, who was not a terrorist at all. Kurnaz was arrested without explanation, sold to the U.S. armed forces, then detained and tortured for five years.
Torture is often used as a thought exercise in ethics classes to question the philosophy of utilitarianism. If you torture one person in order to save a city block’s worth of people, is that ethical? Whatever your personal belief is, for the past two decades, this scenario has been much more than a thought experiment.
When put into practice and shared with harrowing testimonies, it is much harder to stomach than a hypothetical. These stories are heartbreaking and sickening. It defies human rights law by breaking international laws as some twisted way to enforce the rule of law.
At the end of the day, torture was not found to be an effective investigative method used by the CIA. In a hypothetical scenario, we choose to torture the terrorist to get information we know they (might) have. Reality, as I have repeated, is not as straightforward and easy. The person being tortured may not have the information and, moreover, are still human at the end of the day.
The torture, abuse and other human rights violations committed by the United States in its efforts to protect citizens of Southwest Asia from human rights abuses is hypocritical at best. Terrorism is bad, we can all agree on that. But it is so much more than a scary cloud threatening our illusion of safety. It is teenagers who are radicalized by anger or by necessity. It can be an outcome of coercion, force or desperation.
At the end of the day, the United States did not prioritize human rights in its endless war in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. War cannot be just whether or not we follow the rules. But it is especially atrocious when the very basic levels of international law are violated.
