Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Human Rights in the Dust

At his AfterDowningStreet website, David Swanson has been writing passionately and brilliantly about why a special prosecutor should be appointed and Bush officials, right up to the former president, should be charged with crimes, while over at Truthout, Elizabeth de la Vega, has offered a provocative discussion of why a special prosecutor should not (yet) be appointed. (Both, by the way, have been TomDispatch regulars.) And don't forget Mark Karlin, who edits Buzzflash.com, and has been penning powerful pieces lately on why Bush and Cheney (et al.) should someday be brought up on actual murder charges. And that's just to scratch the surface of this explosive subject.

And then there's Karen Greenberg, TomDispatch regular, Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, and author most recently of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days. In a piece that is part analytic, part confessional, and totally original, she frames the torture debate in a larger way, in terms of the death of the human rights movement. (To catch an audio interview in which she discusses those "torture memos," click here.) Tom

Kiss the Era of Human Rights Goodbye

What Bush Willed to Obama and the World
By Karen J. Greenberg

These days, it's virtually impossible to escape the world of torture the Bush administration constructed. Whether we like it or not, almost every day we learn ever more about the full range of its shameful policies, about who the culprits were, and just which crimes they might be prosecuted for. But in the morass of memos, testimony, op-eds, punditry, whistle-blowing, documents, and who knows what else, with all the blaming, evasion, and denial going on, somehow we've overlooked the most significant victim of all. One casualty of the Bush torture policies -- certainly, at least equal in damage to those who were tortured and the country whose laws were twisted and perverted in the process -- has been human rights itself. And no one even seems to notice.