{"id":240286,"date":"2023-07-31T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2023-07-31T11:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=240286"},"modified":"2023-07-27T05:34:23","modified_gmt":"2023-07-27T04:34:23","slug":"outlaw-superpower-united-states-refuses-to-play-by-the-worlds-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/07\/outlaw-superpower-united-states-refuses-to-play-by-the-worlds-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"Outlaw Superpower: United States Refuses to Play by the World\u2019s Rules"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here Are Three Ways<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

25 Jul 2023 – <\/em>In 1963, the summer I turned 11, my mother had a gig evaluating Peace Corps programs in Egypt and Ethiopia. My younger brother and I spent most of that summer in France. We were first in Paris with my mother before she left for North Africa, then with my father and his girlfriend in a tiny town on the Mediterranean. (In the middle of our six-week sojourn there, the girlfriend ran off to marry a Czech she\u2019d met, but that\u2019s another story.)<\/p>\n

In Paris, I saw American tourists striding around in their shorts and sandals, cameras slung around their necks, staking out positions in cathedrals and museums. I listened to my mother\u2019s commentary on what she considered their boorishness and insensitivity. In my 11-year-old mind, I tended to agree. I\u2019d already heard the expression \u201cthe ugly American\u201d \u2014 although I then knew nothing about the prophetic 1958 novel<\/a> with that title about U.S. diplomatic bumbling in southeast Asia in the midst of the Cold War \u2014 and it seemed to me that those interlopers in France fit the term perfectly.<\/p>\n

When I got home, I confided to a friend (whose parents, I learned years later, worked for the CIA) that sometimes, while in Europe, I\u2019d felt ashamed to be an American. \u201cYou should never feel that way,\u201d she replied. \u201cThis is the best country in the world!\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, the United States was, then, the leader of what was known as \u201cthe free world.\u201d Never mind that, throughout the Cold War, we would actively support dictatorships (in Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, among other places) and actually overthrow democratizing governments (in Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, for example). In that era of the G.I. Bill, strong unions, employer-provided healthcare, and general postwar economic dominance, to most of us who were white and within reach of the middle class, the United States probably did look like the best country in the world.<\/p>\n

Things do look a bit different today, don\u2019t they? In this century, in many important ways, the United States has become an outlier and, in some cases, even an outlaw. Here are three examples of U.S. behavior that has been literally egregious<\/a>, three ways in which this country has stood out from the crowd in a sadly malevolent fashion.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Protesting Guantanamo by Debra Sweet is licensed under CC BY 2.0 \/ Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

Guant\u00e1namo, the Forever Prison Camp<\/strong><\/p>\n

In January 2002, the administration of President George W. Bush established an offshore prison camp at the U.S.<\/strong> Naval Base in Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba. The idea was to house prisoners taken in what had already been labelled \u201cthe Global War on Terror\u201d on a little piece of \u201cU.S.\u201d soil beyond the reach of the American legal system and whatever protections that system might afford anyone inside the country. (If you wonder how the United States had access to a chunk of land on an island nation with which it had the frostiest of relations, including decades of economic sanctions, here\u2019s the story: in 1903, long before Cuba\u2019s 1959 revolution, its government had granted the United States \u201ccoaling\u201d rights at Guant\u00e1namo, meaning that the U.S. Navy could establish a base there to refuel its ships. The agreement remained in force in 2002, as it does today.)<\/p>\n

In the years that followed, Guant\u00e1namo became the site of the torture<\/a> and even murder<\/a> of individuals the U.S. took prisoner in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries ranging from Pakistan <\/a>to Mauritania<\/a>. Having written for more than 20 years about such U.S. torture programs that began<\/a> in October 2001<\/a>, I find today that I can\u2019t bring myself to chronicle one more time all the horrors that went on at Guant\u00e1namo or at CIA \u201cblack sites\u201d in countries ranging from Thailand to Poland, or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or indeed at the Abu Ghraib prison and Camp NAMA (whose motto was: \u201cNo blood, no foul\u201d) in Iraq. If you don\u2019t remember, just go ahead and google those places. I\u2019ll wait.<\/p>\n

Thirty men remain at Guant\u00e1namo today. Some have never been tried. Some have never even been charged with a crime. Their continued detention and torture, including, as recently as 2014, punitive, brutal forced feeding<\/a> for hunger strikers, confirmed the status of the United States as a global scofflaw. To this day, keeping Guant\u00e1namo open displays this country\u2019s contempt for international law, including the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention against Torture. It also displays contempt for our own legal system, including the Constitution\u2019s \u201csupremacy<\/a>\u201d clause which makes any ratified international treaty like the Convention against Torture \u201cthe supreme law of the land.\u201d<\/p>\n

In February 2023, Fionnuala N\u00ed Aol\u00e1in, the U.N.\u2019s Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, became the first representative of the United Nations ever permitted to visit Guant\u00e1namo. She was horrified by what she found there, telling<\/a> the Guardian<\/em> that the U.S. has<\/p>\n

\u201ca responsibility to redress the harms it inflicted on its Muslim torture victims. Existing medical treatment, both at the prison camp in Cuba and for detainees released to other countries, was inadequate to deal with multiple problems such as traumatic brain injuries, permanent disabilities, sleep disorders, flashbacks, and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThese men,\u201d she added, \u201care all survivors of torture, a unique crime under international law, and in urgent need of care. Torture breaks a person, it is intended to render them helpless and powerless so that they cease to function psychologically, and in my conversations both with current and former detainees I observed the harms it caused.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lawyer for one tortured prisoner, Ammar al-Baluchi<\/a>, reports that al-Baluchi \u201csuffers from traumatic brain injury from having been subjected to \u2018walling\u2019 where his head was smashed repeatedly against the wall.\u201d He has entered a deepening cognitive decline, whose \u201csymptoms include headaches, dizziness, difficulty thinking and performing simple tasks.\u201d He cannot sleep for more than two hours at a time, \u201chaving been sleep-deprived as a torture technique.\u201d<\/p>\n

The United States, N\u00ed Aol\u00e1in insists, must provide rehabilitative care for the men it has broken. I have my doubts, however, about the curative powers of any treatment administered by Americans, even civilian psychologists. After all, two of them personally designed and implemented<\/a> the CIA\u2019s torture program.<\/p>\n

The United States should indeed foot the bill for treating not only the 30 men who remain in Guant\u00e1namo, but others who have been released and continue to suffer the long-term effects of torture. And of course, it goes without saying that the Biden administration should finally close that illegal prison camp<\/a> \u2014 although that\u2019s not likely to happen. Apparently it\u2019s easier to end an entire war<\/a> than decide what to do with 30 prisoners.<\/p>\n

Unlawful Weapons<\/strong><\/p>\n

The United States is an outlier in another arena as well: the production and deployment of arms widely recognized as presenting an immediate or future danger to non-combatants. The U.S. has steadfastly resisted joining conventions outlawing such weaponry, including cluster bombs (or more euphemistically, \u201ccluster munitions\u201d) and landmines.<\/p>\n

In fact, the United States deployed cluster bombs in its wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan. (In the previous century, it dropped 270 million<\/a> of them in Laos alone while fighting the Vietnam War.) Ironically \u2014 one might even say, hypocritically \u2014 the U.S. joined<\/a> 146 other countries in condemning Syrian and Russian use of the same weapons in the Syrian civil war. Indeed, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters<\/a> that if Russia were using them in Ukraine (as, in fact, it is<\/a>), that would constitute a \u201cwar crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now the U.S. has sent cluster bombs to Ukraine, supposedly to fill a crucial gap in the supply of artillery shells. Mind you, it\u2019s not that the United States doesn\u2019t have enough conventional artillery shells to resupply Ukraine. The problem is that sending them there would leave this country unprepared to fight two simultaneous (and hypothetical) major wars<\/a> as envisioned in what the Pentagon likes to think of as its readiness doctrine.<\/p>\n

What are cluster munitions? They are artillery shells packed with many individual bomblets, or \u201csubmunitions.\u201d When one is fired, from up to 20 miles away, it spreads as many as 90 separate bomblets over a wide area, making it an excellent way to kill a lot of enemy soldiers with a single shot.<\/p>\n

What places these weapons off-limits for most nations is that not all the bomblets explode. Some can stay where they fell for years, even decades, until as a New York Times<\/em> editorial put it<\/a>, \u201csomebody \u2014 often, a child spotting a brightly colored, battery-size doodad on the ground \u2014 accidentally sets it off.\u201d They can, in other words, lie in wait long after a war is over, sowing farmland and forest with deadly booby traps. That\u2019s why then-Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon once spoke of \u201cthe world\u2019s collective revulsion at these abhorrent weapons.\u201d That\u2019s why 123 countries have signed the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions<\/a>. Among the holdouts, however, are Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.<\/p>\n

According<\/a> to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the cluster bombs the U.S. has now sent to Ukraine each contains 88 bomblets, with, according to the Pentagon, a failure rate of under 2.5%. (Other sources, however, suggest that it could be 14% or higher<\/a>.) This means that for every cluster shell fired, at least two submunitions are likely to be duds. We have no idea how many of these weapons the U.S. is supplying, but a Pentagon spokesman in a briefing<\/a> said there are \u201chundreds of thousands available.\u201d It doesn\u2019t take much mathematical imagination to realize that they present a real future danger to Ukrainian civilians. Nor is it terribly comforting when Sullivan assures the world<\/a> that the Ukrainian government is \u201cmotivated\u201d to minimize risk to civilians as the munitions are deployed, because \u201cthese are their citizens that they\u2019re protecting.\u201d<\/p>\n

I for one am not eager to leave such cost-benefit risk calculations in the hands of any government fighting for its survival. That\u2019s precisely why international laws against indiscriminate weapons exist \u2014 to prevent governments from having to make such calculations in the heat of battle.<\/p>\n

Cluster bombs are only a subset of the weapons that leave behind \u201cexplosive remnants of war.\u201d Landmines are another. Like Russia, the United States is not found among the 164 countries that have signed the 1999 Ottawa Convention<\/a>, which required signatories to stop producing landmines, destroy their existing stockpiles, and clear their own territories of mines.<\/p>\n

Ironically, the U.S. routinely donates money to pay for mine clearance around the world, which is certainly a good thing, given the legacy it left, for example, in Vietnam. According<\/a> to the New York Times<\/em> in 2018:<\/p>\n

\u201cSince the war there ended in 1975, at least 40,000 Vietnamese are believed to have been killed and another 60,000 wounded by American land mines, artillery shells, cluster bombs and other ordnance that failed to detonate back then. They later exploded when handled by scrap-metal scavengers and unsuspecting children.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hot Enough for Ya?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I write this piece, about one-third <\/a>of this country\u2019s population is living under heat alerts. That\u2019s 110 million people. A heatwave is baking Europe<\/a>, where 16 Italian cities are under warnings, and Greece has closed the Acropolis to prevent tourists from dying of heat stroke. This summer looks to be worse in Europe than even last year\u2019s record-breaker when heat killed more than 60,000<\/a> people. In the U.S., too, heat is by far the greatest weather-related killer. Makes you wonder why Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill<\/a> eliminating required water breaks for outside workers, just as the latest heat wave was due to roll in.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, New York\u2019s Hudson Valley and parts of Vermont<\/a>, including its capital Montpelier, were inundated this past week by a once-in-a-hundred-year storm, while in South Korea, workers raced to rescue people whose cars were trapped inside the completely submerged<\/a> Cheongju tunnel after a torrential monsoon rainfall. Korea, along with much of Asia, expects such rains during the summer, but this year\u2019s \u2014 like so many other weather statistics \u2014 have been literally off the charts. Journalists have finally experienced a sea change (not unlike the extraordinary change<\/a> in surface water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean). Gone are the tepid suggestions that climate change \u201cmay play a part\u201d in causing extreme weather events. Reporters around the world now simply assume that\u2019s our reality.<\/p>\n

When it comes to confronting the climate emergency, though, the United States has once again been bringing up the rear. As far back as 1992, at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, President George H.W. Bush resisted setting any caps on carbon-dioxide emissions. As the New York Times<\/em> reported<\/a> then, \u201cShowing a personal interest on the subject, he singlehandedly forced negotiators to excise from the global warming treaty any reference to deadlines for capping emissions of pollutants.\u201d And even then, Washington was resisting the efforts of poorer countries to wring some money from us to help defray the costs of their own environmental efforts.<\/p>\n

Some things don\u2019t change all that much. Although President Biden reversed Donald Trump\u2019s move to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords, his own climate record has been a combination of two steps forward (the green energy transition funding found<\/a> in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, for example) and a big step back (greenlighting<\/a> the ConocoPhillips Willow oil drilling project on federal land in Alaska\u2019s north slope, not to speak of Senator Joe Manchin\u2019s pride and joy<\/a>, the $6.6 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline for natural gas).<\/p>\n

And when it comes to remediating the damage our emissions have done to poorer countries around the world, this country is still a day late and billions of dollars short. In fact, on July 13th, climate envoy John Kerry told<\/a> a congressional hearing that \u201cunder no circumstances\u201d would the United States pay reparations to developing countries suffering the devastating effects of climate change. Although at the U.N.\u2019s COP 27 conference in November 2022, the U.S. did (at least in principle) support the creation of a fund to help poorer countries ameliorate the effects of climate change, as Reuters reported<\/a>, \u201cthe deal did not spell out who would pay into the fund or how money would be disbursed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Welcome to Solastalgia<\/strong><\/p>\n

I learned a new word recently, solastalgia<\/a>. It actually is<\/em> a new word, created in 2005 by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe \u201cthe distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment.\u201d Albrecht\u2019s focus was on Australian rural indigenous communities with centuries of attachment to their particular places, but I think the concept can be extended, at least metaphorically, to the rest of us whose lives are now being affected by the painful presences (and absences) brought on by environmental and climate change: the presence of unprecedented heat, fire, noise, and light<\/a>; the presence of deadly rain and flooding; and the growing absence<\/a> of ice at the Earth\u2019s poles or on its mountains<\/a>. In my own life, among other things, it\u2019s the loss of fireflies<\/a> and the almost infinite sadness of rarely seeing more than a few faint stars<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Of course, the \u201cbest country in the world\u201d wasn\u2019t the only nation involved in creating the horrors I\u2019ve been describing. And the ordinary people who live in this country are not to blame for them. Still, as beneficiaries of this nation\u2019s bounty \u2014 its beauty, its aspirations, its profoundly injured but still breathing democracy \u2014 we are, as the philosopher Iris Marion Young insisted<\/a>, responsible<\/em> for them. It will take organized, collective political action, but there is still time to bring our outlaw country back into what indeed should be a united community of nations confronting the looming horrors on this planet. Or so I hope and believe.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Rebecca Gordon teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of <\/em>Mainstreaming Torture<\/a>, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9\/11 War Crimes<\/a> and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original – tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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