Jane Smiley: Why Human Rights are More Important than National Security

from HuffPost:




Jane Smiley
Why Human Rights are More Important than National Security
Posted November 19, 2007 | 12:14 PM (EST)


On Friday, the morning after the Democratic debate, I was stunned to read in the War Room column over in Salon that Governor Bill Richardson had said the wrong thing about national security versus human rights. Tim Grieve wrote, "We're not sure which office Richardson is seeking these days, but he came pretty close to disqualifying himself from either of them last night when he insisted that human rights are more important than America's national security." I'm not sure what planet Tim Grieve is living on, but on our planet, it is human rights that are precious and rare and always to be preserved and "national security" that is ever and anon a cant boondoggle. I was not alone in my dismay. I read War Room almost everyday and have liked Grieve's posts in the past. When I first read what he was saying, I thought he was joking; so did other readers. The entry got 57 responses. Almost all of them were outraged, and several called on Tim to explain himself. He never did.

Human rights are defined, most notably in the U.S. Bill of Rights. They are defined because the Founding Fathers realized that if they were not defined, they would be more likely to be abrogated or lost entirely. The Founding Fathers understood the temptation on the part of governments to give and remove human rights arbitrarily, because they had experienced such things before the Revolutionary War -- in the Stamp Act, in the quartering of British soldiers on American households, and in illegal searches and seizures, in no taxation without representation. They recognized that although British Law customarily acknowledged various human rights, it was essential to name, codify, and write them down to make it less likely that they could be taken away.

Human rights are profoundly local -- they reside in individuals. According to humans rights theory, if someone is human, he or she has the same rights as every other human. The rights of American citizens as described in the Bill of Rights have been expanded and extrapolated around the world so that they apply not only to us but to everyone. While in the U.S. this idea is a bit controversial, in other countries it is standard, accepted, and cherished. The codification of human rights, and the widespread acknowledgment of this, is one of the things that makes the modern world modern. To roll back human rights, even for some individuals, is to return to a more primitive, hierarchical, and un-American theory of human relations. One example, of course, concerns women. Can women routinely be imprisoned, sold, mutilated, or killed by their relatives? U.S. law says they cannot; in practice, many are, but no one openly promotes what many secretly do. If a candidate, even a Republican, ran on a platform of reducing the legal rights of women, he wouldn't get far (ask me again in 10 years, though). Or consider lynching. The U.S. has a long tradition of lynching. It was only after the Second World War that the Federal Government and state governments began enforcing their own anti-lynching laws. This was a victory for human rights. Do you want to go back? The Republicans would like you to, in the name of: "national security."

Guess what? There is no such thing as "national security"; it's a concept that not only hasn't been defined, it can't be defined. It is a psychological state. The very phrase describes an impossibility. All boundaries in the U.S. and in every other country are porous. Planes come and go, as do ships, trains, trucks, autos, information superhighways, human relationships, and human emotions. In addition, the smaller any threat becomes, the less safe we are against it. We no longer live in the world of Mutually Assured Destruction, where our thousands of warheads aimed at the Russians protected us, psychologically, from their thousands of warheads aimed at us. Since the end of the Cold War, threats have gotten smaller and more invisible. Where is that suitcase of nuclear material? Where is that vial of anthrax? But as they have gotten less easily detected, they have also gotten more local. 9/11 is what we always think of when we think of a breach of national security, but in fact, the destruction was not national, or even city-wide, or even district wide -- although the World Trade Center was less than a mile from the New York Stock Exchange, the NYSE was only closed for six days after 9/11. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/why-human-rights-are-more_b_73286.html

The bushites have given National Security a really Bad name and the war on terror is as phoney as they are.

her "national security" concept argument is something i never thought about and since reading her reasoning i must agree with her. contarty to hillary clitons concept that national security trumps human rights and even obama`s equality of the two, with out human rights we have nothing.

oh yes richardson is someone that the next president must include in their circle of advisors.

She's my favorite HuffPost blogger.

The Democrats have consistantly and successfully been labled soft on national security since they ended the Vietnam war by removing the funding.

This question was nothing more and nothing less than a trap. It was to get Democrats on record for saying that anything trumped national security and provide endless fodder for Republican comercisals and fund raising campaigns. Anyone who said no will be eviscerated by the progressive left as Bush lite. It was an incredidly smart question by someone who is no friend of Democrats, liberals, progressives, and human rights.

The truth is that the two are snynonymous. The only real national security is to recognize the human rights of every person.

Bill Richardson fell into the trap. Its kind of sad, because it was the best answer of the night.

The citizens never had to worry about any terrorists back then. Of course, they didn't have much in the way of human rights, but boy, were they safe!