The end of human rights

The US government refuses to say that the waterboarding of an American national by a foreign government contravenes the Geneva Conventions--signaling a real problem for human rights advocates, from an interest convergence perspective. There have always been two rationales for the US's commitment to the Geneva Conventions: the "purist" justification, in which human rights are universalist norms that trump everything else; and the "pragmatic" justification, in which the US's adherence to human rights norms triggers reciprocity by other countries to protect American citizens (in particular, American soldiers and POWs.) This is the reason you see Human Rights Watch and many representatives of the US military on the same side of the torture question. But the Bush Administration is now signaling its unwillingness to accept even the pragmatic reasons not to torture, which means a wholesale weakening of the edifice upon which the human rights system was built.

Of course, more to the point, it's pretty difficult for the administration to hold to this line and continue to argue that we are somehow better than our enemies.