America pulled down another notch

US Senate Intelligence Committee's report can bring down the country a notch in terms of its moral& political standing

The report of the United States’ Senate Intelligence Committee detailing the interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was released at an awkward point in the country’s economic trajectory. A few weeks earlier, the International Monetary Fund had issued its recalibration of the ranking of global economies. It showed that the United States had lost its position of being the world’s largest economy to China. Brought down by one step in the global economic ladder, the Senate report made public on December 9 could bring down the country a notch in terms of its moral and political standing. If that were to happen, the consequence of downgrading would be felt most acutely in Asia, the continent where a number of global powers were competing for influence.

With all the details about the way people captured in the areas where the United States was battling extremism now in the public domain, the country will no longer be able to exercise the moral authority it once did. There are many in the United States and also many outside the country who believe that the nation, which was once the sole superpower, is going through a process of relative decline. The word ‘relative’ needs to be underscored since the country it refers to remains militarily the most powerful on earth. It is spending more on defence than the combined expenditure of the 10 largest spenders down the line. Even though taken down a notch by the latest estimate of its ranking in the world economic order, it remains a robust economic entity. America remains the place where most of the iconic companies of the early part of the 21st century got started. The word ‘start-up’ came from America.

America is also the country to which many of those who want to leave the places in which they live want to go. A day after the United States Senate Intelligence Committee released the executive summary of the detailed report on the way the CIA had acted after 9/11, columnist Thomas Friedman reminded his readers why his country continued to attract so many from the world outside. “Why do people line up to come to this country? Why do they build boats from milk cartons to sail here? Why do they trust our diplomats and soldiers in ways true of no other country?” His answer: “It’s because we are a beacon of opportunity and freedom, and also because these foreigners know in their bones that we do things differently from other big powers in history. One of the things we did was elect a black man whose grandfather was a Muslim as our president — after being hit on Sept 11, 2001 by extremists. And one of the things we do we did on Tuesday: we published what appears to be an unblinking examination and expositions of how we tortured prisoners and suspected terrorists after 9/11. I’m glad we published it.”

Carried on the same page as the Friedman article was one by Eric Fair who was teaching a course on creative writing at Leigh University. His previous job was as an interrogator at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. “I tortured,” he wrote, accepting blame for the awful treatment of the many prisoners at that facility. “Most Americans haven’t read the report. Most never will. But it stands as a permanent reminder of the country we once were.” Some of America’s competing powers were quick to respond to the details revealed by the report. “America is neither a suitable role model nor a qualified judge on human rights issues in other countries,’ read an editorial on the state-run Xinhua News Agency of China. “Yet, despite this, people rarely hear the US talking about its own problems, it prefers to be vocal on the issues it sees in other countries, including China.”

The release of the report came at a time when American standing in the world had been harmed by “an array of factors, including revelations about warrantless wiretapping and drone warfare and extensive coverage of racial unrest at home. While many of the abuses in the CIA’s interrogation program were already known the graphic nature of the report’s findings could resonate overseas in a way other discussions have not,” wrote Griff Witte of The Washington Post in a dispatch from London.

The report’s publication also raised the question of accountability. This had not been addressed by the Obama Administration although the president soon after assuming office in January 2009 had banned the use of interrogation devices such as those detailed in the report. Ben Emerson, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, called for prosecution of Bush officials who ordered detainees to be tortured. “as a matter of international law, the U.S. is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice,” he said.

The report’s publication will have many unintended consequences. One of them will be to put pressure on the nations to be more transparent about their own involvement in the programs run by Washington. A study in 2013 by the Open Society Foundation found that 54 countries cooperated in the rendition programme the full extent of which was detailed by the report. This programme involved secretly transporting suspects to countries that routinely practice torture.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 15^th,  2014.

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