Home > Bush’s Empty Words to the U.N.
By Robert Parry
One of the most striking features of George W. Bush’s presidency has been his proclivity to use soaring, idealistic rhetoric that is totally at odds with reality, a tendency that was on display again in his address to the United Nations General Assembly.
Bush framed his Sept. 19 speech in the context of the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “The words of the Universal Declaration are as true today as they were when they were written,” Bush declared.
But it’s hard to believe that Bush had the faintest idea what principles he was embracing - or perhaps he has grown so self-confident in never being challenged on his hypocrisies that he believes he can say anything he wants, no matter how false or deceptive.
Among the 30 rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are these:
— “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”
— “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
— “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”
— “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.”
— “Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.”
— “Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense.”
— “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”
— “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
— “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”
Though Bush is arguably in violation of many if not all the above-cited human rights tenets, he unblushingly cites the Universal Declaration as the foundation for his international policies, from the invasion of Iraq to his handling of the “war on terror.”
Even as Bush criticizes the U.S. Supreme Court for stopping his planned kangaroo courts for terror suspects and as he battles members of Congress over his desire for harsh interrogation of detainees, he invokes principles that bar exactly what he seeks to do.
How does subjecting detainees to simulated drowning by “waterboarding” not violate the prohibition on torture? How does stripping suspects naked and soaking them with cold water in frigid rooms not go against the ban on “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment?”
How does imprisoning an estimated 14,000 people without trial or even charges - and arranging “extraordinary renditions” of others to countries that torture - fit with the U.N. principle barring “arbitrary arrest, detention or exile?”
What about the U.N. mandate that a suspect must get a public trial before an independent tribunal and receive “all the guarantees necessary for his defense?” Instead, Bush wants U.S.-run military tribunals to convict and even execute defendants based on secret evidence that can be withheld from both the public and the defendants.
Bush also insists that his “plenary” - or unlimited - powers as Commander in Chief allow him to tap telephones and spy on Americans and non-Americans without obtaining any form of court warrant. Yet, the Universal Declaration objects to “arbitrary interference with [a person’s] privacy, family, home or correspondence.”
Bush’s hostility toward dissent - even declaring some thinking “unacceptable,” as he did at a press conference on Sept. 15 - and the eagerness of his supporters to smear anyone who opposes the President also don’t match with the principle that human rights includes the “freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information.”
So, why would Bush invoke the Universal Declaration of Human Rights when he is flouting many of its core principles?
There would seem to be two possible explanations for Bush’s chutzpah: either he’s just reading a script without regard to the words or he’s confident that he can speak the opposite of the truth knowing that few people of consequence will call him on it.
Either way, Bush’s cavalier attitude in hailing human rights while simultaneously trashing human rights represents another classic case of Bush’s hubris, which is becoming the defining characteristic of his presidency.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ’Project Truth.’
Forum posts
20 September 2006, 20:39
Bush and the rest of the Neo-CON Nazis claim they "make their own reality" which really can be interpreted as they destroy and murder and then blame it on someone else to use as a pretext for stealing from them and subordinating them. Bush’s insanity I think could go a long way in helping people stay off cocaine as when they watch him they can see what years of using the stuff can do to one’s ability to interpret reality.
21 September 2006, 08:55
Those empty words were not addressed to the world, only for stupid Americans.
21 September 2006, 09:58
C’mon people. Sure he’s about the dumbest president a country could have. A liar. An ideologue. A pseudo fundamentalist. A defiant decider. A bumbling statesman. A rube. A mispronouncing fool. But, be real here, stick with me, stay with the facts: He’s been a very clever and successful Historical Reformer, sort of a new category his deft moves have introduced into the presidential arsenal.
He’s reverse-engineered "the War on Terror" as well as any creative politician could’ve possibly done. In the process he relied on the PNAC strategy for reshaping the world, or whatever he could understand about it, and at first kept it to himself. Why? Because he knew that the plain talking Americans who were going to support him, the hard of thinking, heavy praying kind of people he had to convince wanted to hear just the simple facts. And so he gave them the simple "facts" - WMDS in the hands of a tyrant.
Oh my God, we can’t stand for that. Let’s go get the savage. And that they did, but without finding the WMDs. Then it became, regime change will make the world safer. And to prove it they kept showing, day and night, the fields of Kurds and Iranians who had been gassed by the evil dictator. Well, he won’t be around anymore to gas anyone. But then, the inevitable sectarian violence, al Qaeda actually showing up, or a facsimile of a branch of theirs, in Iraq. And Bush said, see, I told you there were terrorists in Iraq.
But then a few informed people, i.e., not the New York Times and Juith Miller, started telling the truth about what was actually happening. Admittedly, this confused our cocky leader for a while: Yes there were terrorists; no, actually there weren’t; Hussein was tied to al Qaeda; no, actually he wasn’t. That kind of thing. One minute the truth. The next minute the snake oil. Back and forth. Until, finally, more than a year ago, Bush finally pulls out the original rationale - the grand Neocon strategy - and says, unabashedly, after having already given numerous reasons for the war, that it’s really to establish democracy. Wallah!
Press the man hard enough, and presto - the bald truth: Democracy. At the end of a gun. But democracy nonetheless. And like a snake that’s shed its skin a few times over, our fearless leader has transmogrified himself, finally, into the Spreader of Liberty, the Preacher of Freedom, the CEO of all free markets, the Patron Saint of Imposed Democracy. Proving above all, that his remarkable sticktoittiveness, his, as they say down there - Can Do ’Tude - ultimately gets to it.
And, of course, after the world summarily turns democractic and capitalistic in the next 5 - 10 years, all that hard work will have earned him the respect he deserves. Until then, all you leftist pinkos out there - you perpetual malcontents who feel that a couple hundred thousand deaths and a few billion here and there are a waste - go back and read your Federalist Papers. Grab a flag pin and put it in your lapel. Because soon, we Americans - now the object of the world’s scorn - will be revered eveywhere we go after the great Democractic Revolution, begun and conducted by none other than the man we know as W.