Abstract

Playing the Security Card

The author argues that the administration of U.S. president George W. Bush frequently invokes reasons of national security to justify its human rights violations. As the election campaign gets under way, national security has become the ultimate all-purpose trump card. The Bush crowd will play it anywhere. [T]he Administration has invoked national security in appealing a landmark human rights case to the Supreme Court. Urging the Supreme Court to overturn the judgment, the Bush Administration has again played the national security card, arguing that if federal courts enforce international human rights norms, their decisions might interfere with the government's prerogatives in the war on terror. The most recent development along these lines is a Congressional resolution introduced by Republican Representative Tom Feeney, maintaining that the Supreme Court should not look to foreign law at all, much less human rights law, in deciding constitutional cases. It is no coincidence that the resolution has surfaced at a time when the Supreme Court is about to address the detentions at Guantánamo Bay, a practice that many foreign and international legal experts have condemned as lawless. The irony is that when we lock up people without evidence that they are dangerous, treat human rights as mere obstacles to our political prerogatives and dismiss other nations' laws and decisions as entirely irrelevant to our resolution of fundamental issues of justice, we make ourselves less, not more, secure. In the long run, it is this rising tide of anti-Americanism that poses the greatest threat to our security.