Reversing the Rivers: A Memoir of History, Hope, and Human Rights 9781512824049

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1. Welcome to Genocide
Chapter 2. Prisoners of Conscience: The Dynamics of Rescue
Chapter 3. Holding the Whole World in Our Hands
Chapter 4. Into the Maelstrom: Liberia, Northern Ireland, and Darfur, Sudan
Chapter 5. My Country ’Tis of Thee: US Domestic Human Rights Violations
Chapter 6. 9/11 and the Mainstreaming of Torture
Chapter 7. Star Power
Chapter 8. The Inside Scoop
Chapter 9. Despite Cruelty
Common Questions About Human Rights
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Reversing the Rivers

ALSO BY WILLIAM F. SCHULZ The Coming Good Society: Why New Realities Demand New Rights (with Sushma Raman) What Torture Taught Me and Other Reflections on Justice and Theology The ­Future of ­Human Rights: US Policy for a New Era, editor The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary, editor Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of ­Human Rights Making the Manifesto: The Birth of Religious Humanism In Our Own Best Interests: How Defending ­Human Rights Benefits Us All Finding Time and Other Delicacies Transforming Words: Six Essays on Preaching, contributing editor

REVERSING THE RIVERS A Memoir of History, Hope, and ­Human Rights

William F. Schulz

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

PENNSYLVANIA STUDIES IN H ­ UMAN R IGHTS Bert B. Lockwood, Series Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

 Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www​.­upenn​.­edu​/­pennpress Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2403-2 eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2404-9 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

 For Beth, No better companion for the journey

 Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you f­ ree to abandon it. —­Adapted from the Mishnah, Pirkei Avot 2:15–16

CONTENTS

Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Welcome to Genocide

7

Chapter 2. Prisoners of Conscience: The Dynamics of Rescue

24

Chapter 3. Holding the Whole World in Our Hands

38

Chapter 4. Into the Maelstrom: Liberia, Northern Ireland, and Darfur, Sudan

69

Chapter 5. My Country ’Tis of Thee: US Domestic ­Human Rights Violations

104

Chapter 6. 9/11 and the Mainstreaming of Torture

142

Chapter 7. Star Power

167

Chapter 8. The Inside Scoop

194

Chapter 9. Despite Cruelty

213

Common Questions About H ­ uman Rights

231

Notes 237 Index 267 Acknowl­edgments Photographs follow page 166

281

INTRODUCTION

Even at close to eighty, Lauren Bacall turned heads as she swept into the dinner party at an opulent Upper East Side apartment across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She certainly turned mine, though ­a fter almost a de­cade as executive director of Amnesty International USA, I was accustomed to meeting celebrities. “­A ren’t you that dear ­little ­human rights man?” Bacall asked when we ­were introduced, that oh-­so-­familiar voice tremulous and commanding all at the same time. “Why, yes, Ms. Bacall,” I said, “I guess I am,” stunned that she could identify me. (I realized l­ater that since the dinner followed a benefit movie premiere for ­human rights ­causes, odds ­were pretty good anyone she would have met t­ here might be a “dear ­little h ­ uman rights” person.) ­A fter a few moments of chitchat, we went our separate ways, and then every­one was called into the dining room to sample the impressive buffet. We all took our plates to vari­ous corners of the large living room, and I was just about to tuck into the tomato salad when Betty, as her friends called her, reappeared. “May I sit with you?” she asked. “Oh, Ms. Bacall,” I said, “I’d be delighted,” imagining a chance to pitch Amnesty to her or, failing that, to have a long conversation about the making of Key Largo. Betty Bacall’s next words set me straight, however. “Oh, d ­ on’t flatter yourself, dear,” she said. “The truth is I ­don’t know another fucking soul ­here.” And then, apparently recognizing someone she did know across the room, she took off in a flash.

* * * From 1994 to 2006 I was Amnesty International USA’s “dear l­ ittle ­human rights man”—­t he executive director of the American section of the storied ­human rights organ­ization. When young ­people have asked me over the years

2 Introduction

how they too can secure such an august position, I have always told them, “Be sure to know someone extremely stubborn on the search committee.” That’s how I got a job for which I was largely unqualified. It’s not that I knew nothing about ­human rights, but I d ­ idn’t know a lot. I did know about how to run a good-­sized nonprofit organ­ization, having been the chief operating officer and then for eight years the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA), but I was trained as a minister, not a h ­ uman rights specialist. As it happened, one of the UUA’s top donors was a highly successful entrepreneur who was serving on the Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) search committee for a new executive director and was determined that I would be the organ­ization’s next leader. He asked me to submit my name, and e­ very time the rest of the committee quite understandably removed me from consideration, he would convince them to keep me in for one more round. Fi­nally, prob­ably to get him off their backs, the committee agreed that I would be one of three final interviewees for the job. As I was waiting to go into the interview, the previous candidate emerged—­a highly acclaimed ­human rights activist for whom I had the greatest re­spect. My heart sank, and ­after the interview I called my wife, Beth Graham, and told her I ­wouldn’t be ­going to Amnesty. They have a much stronger and more obvious pick, I said. But I should never have underestimated the persuasiveness of my champion on the committee. When I was asked to be the final candidate and accepted, I began a long, complicated journey with Amnesty that lasted for twelve years.

* * * Amnesty International (AI) was founded in London in 1961 as the inspiration of a British barrister named Peter Benenson who, sitting in the Tube one morning, read of two Portuguese citizens who had been arrested simply for having made a critical remark about their government while they ­were dining together in Lisbon.1 Portugal was then ­under the control of the right-­wing dictator António Salazar. Finding such repression infuriating, Benenson gathered a group of his influential friends and pitched them the idea of making written appeals on

Introduction 3

behalf of what came to be called prisoners of conscience. On May 28, 1961, Benenson published an article entitled “The Forgotten Prisoners” on the front page of the London Observer newspaper that announced a one-­year campaign of letter-­writing to governments asking amnesty for anyone “being imprisoned, tortured or executed b ­ ecause his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government.”2 The response to this appeal was staggering. Within a year, local groups of what would eventually be named “Amnesty International” sprang up in close to a dozen countries, with additional individual supporters located everywhere from Argentina to the Congo. It became obvious that a formal organ­ization was called for.3 From the beginning, the way that organ­ization was structured made for tensions that would plague it well into the time I became involved. On the one hand, Amnesty’s policies and decisions, such as who would be designated a prisoner of conscience, ­were set by the central organ­ization in London.4 On the other hand, the genius of the organ­ization was that it was mobilizing thousands of ­people at the grassroots level around the world and hence was highly dispersed and fragmented. It always struck me that this choice of structure reflected the mores of British colonialism—­a central imperium (London) struggling to make the outlying settlements (every­body e­ lse) behave.5 This is hardly surprising given that the found­ers of Amnesty ­were almost all Brits, but it guaranteed no end of conflict since the age of hegemony was fast coming to a close. Other characteristics of the Amnesty I knew ­were also born out of ­t hose early days. A determination to be perceived as po­liti­cally neutral accounted for the requirement that each local group work on three prisoner cases, “one each from the East, the West and the Afro-­Asian countries,” so that no one could accuse Amnesty of taking sides in the Cold War then raging.6 Eventually this evolved into a prohibition on groups working on ­human rights cases or issues in their home countries in order not to be seen as having any domestic po­liti­cal agendas. U ­ ntil it was relaxed during my years at AIUSA, this so-­called “Work on Own Country” restriction diminished the appeal of the organ­ization to groups whose rights ­were being systematically denied in their own countries. What­ever its faults, Amnesty was the first international ­human rights nongovernmental organ­ization (NGO) to take as its purpose enforcement of

4 Introduction

ele­ments of the Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights (UDHR), a document that, a­ fter all, had only been a­ dopted by the United Nations thirteen years before AI’s founding.7 ­Until Amnesty came along, ­t hose whose rights ­were being ­v iolated w ­ ere dependent on the vagaries of their national authorities (who ­were often d ­ oing the violating themselves) or the far-­off bureaucracy of the United Nations, which had plenty of other t­ hings on its plate. Moreover, the vision that propelled Amnesty was an inspiring one: in­de­ pen­dent researchers with no preconceived po­liti­cal interests would find out who was d ­ oing what bad ­thing to whom (“Just the facts, ­ma’am”). Armed with that irrefutable information, average ­people from all corners of the globe would form volunteer groups to shine the light of truth on misbehaving governments and shame them into releasing innocent ­people, stopping their torture, or rescinding ­orders of execution.8 You ­didn’t need to be a soldier, a ­lawyer, a doctor, or an expert of any kind to save other p ­ eople’s lives, and you could do that by something as s­ imple as writing a letter from the comfort of your own community. It was a brilliant concept, and it earned Amnesty International the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. Unfortunately, rarely is anything quite as s­ imple as it seems.

* * * My tenure at Amnesty International USA encompassed a period of enormous challenge for the ­human rights movement. Just a month ­after I took over as executive director, in March 1994, the genocide in Rwanda began, eventually killing approximately eight hundred thousand ­people. The next year the massacre at Srebrenica killed seven thousand Bosniak men and boys, and the first years of the twenty-­first ­century witnessed the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. China was emerging as both a major economic power and, in terms of the number of p ­ eople victimized, the worst h ­ uman rights criminal in the world. And in the United States the aftermath of 9/11 prompted a series of ­human rights violations—­including the torture at Abu Ghraib, mistreatment of Muslims, and the unlawful imprisonment of hundreds at Guantánamo Bay that still plague the country ­today. At the same time, the International Criminal Court was launched; the rights of ­women and LGBTQ+ persons ­rose considerably higher on the h ­ uman rights agenda; and the US Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the execution of juveniles and ­t hose with cognitive

Introduction 5

disabilities. Amnesty and I ­were involved in all ­these developments and many more. My purpose in writing this book, however, is not to recount the history of Amnesty International or the American ­human rights movement.9 It is not to offer a scholarly analy­sis of that movement’s strengths and flaws, many as both of t­ hose may be. This is a memoir grounded in my idiosyncratic perspective but written with the hope that readers may extract some lessons for the current generation from key h ­ uman rights issues we grappled with in the 1990s and early 2000s. I want to reflect on the profound philosophical questions ­human rights violations pre­sent from the standpoint of one who confronted them ­every day: What is the nature of evil? How do we foster the “better angels of our nature”? When may we use force to stop ­people from using force? Is the prohibition on torture as ­simple as it seems? What’s wrong with an eye for an eye? I want to describe some of the p ­ eople I met in my ­human rights journey, both heroes and villains, celebrities and common folk, and fi­nally I want to try to answer the quandary most frequently posed to me during my years at Amnesty: Given all the horrors in the world you see day a­ fter day, how do you retain any hope at all in humanity? Along the way ­we’ll duck an assassination, be puzzled by a pickpocket, get to know Ted Kennedy as a man more than an icon, and tangle with a salmon mousse. The “idiosyncratic perspective” from which I write is that of a white, middle-­class American male. I have tried hard during my years working for ­human rights to be aware of the limitations that identity imposes on me, though I know I have often not succeeded. More impor­tant, I recognize the critique of the ­human rights enterprise itself and Amnesty in par­tic­u­lar as products of a colonialist mentality, intent on imposing its values on o ­ thers in the name of “universality.” This dynamic is especially acute when it comes to the traditional model of white Westerners “rescuing” ­t hose in the developing world from the malicious clutches of their governments or cultures, as I explore especially in Chapter 2, “Prisoners of Conscience.” The predominance of white males in the leadership of the American ­human rights movement, as distinguished from the civil or ­women’s rights movements, during my years at Amnesty USA was striking. Only Gay MacDougall at Global Rights, Felice Gaer at the Blaustein Institute of the American Jewish Committee, and Kerry Kennedy of Robert F. Kennedy ­Human Rights broke that mold among the organ­izations that met together regularly to

6 Introduction

coordinate strategy. Fortunately, that profile has changed not only in the United States but around the world. Amnesty USA consistently fought to expand the organ­ization’s leadership to include ­people indigenous to the Southern hemi­sphere. To the extent to which I have failed to adequately correct for my own racial or gender biases, I can only hope that ­others may use me as a foil or counter-­example for a new generation. The Rus­sian writer Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote to her poet husband Osip before he died in a Siberian gulag, “You know, ­t here is a tendency to accuse you of not reversing the rivers, of not changing the course of the stars, of not breaking up the moon into honey cake and feeding us the pieces. In other words ­people always wanted the impossible from you and w ­ ere angry when you did the pos­si­ble.”10 ­Human rights work often seemed impossible, like trying to reverse the rivers, but then e­ very once in a while a victory would be achieved, a honey cake savored, and a small piece of history at least temporarily redeemed. I read somewhere that the three most popu­lar topics for books in the United States are sex, dogs, and Abraham Lincoln, so for a while I considered trying to write a book about the sex lives of Abraham Lincoln’s dogs. But the data on that topic is scarce, and I’ve settled for writing about the twelve years I spent at AIUSA. They ­were exhilarating, heartbreaking, frustrating, and triumphant. Also exhausting. I was away from home 60 to 80 ­percent of the time (I have an incredibly patient wife). I was ready to leave when my third four-­year term was up, but I w ­ ouldn’t have missed ­those twelve years for anything.

CHAPTER 1

Welcome to Genocide

I had a privileged childhood. My ­family was not wealthy—my ­father was a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and my m ­ other a homemaker—­ but I was well-­loved, food was plentiful, and, valuing education as my parents did, I was sent to the best school in Pittsburgh, a private, all-­boys’ school named Shady Side Acad­emy, for the entirety of my precollegiate schooling. Our ­family had its dysfunction, to be sure, but ­there was nothing Dickensian about my growing up—no alcoholism in my parents, no early opioid addiction for me. Perhaps ­because of my f­ather’s profession and po­liti­cal views—he regarded Dwight Eisenhower as an “overrated general and a worse president”; voted only once for a Republican, stopping afterward in a church to be absolved of his sin; and quizzed me at the dinner t­ able on which Supreme Court justices ­were a “disgrace to the Court” (it was a pretty safe bet the right answer was the conservative ones)—­I came to po­liti­cal consciousness at an early age. Though we lived in a largely monochromatic, white American cocoon, that consciousness included an awareness that the United States was far from the only country in the world and that white ­people ­were far from the only race. The former insight derived from grandparents who had regularly hosted international students, including Rabindrinath Tagore, at the University of Illinois, where my parents grew up, and a favorite ­uncle from Denmark who talked regularly of his home country and the world beyond North American shores. The awareness of race came from experiences closer to home. In 1956, when I was six, I accompanied my parents on a road trip from Pittsburgh to Florida that required us to drive through the segregated South. Our first stop was Washington, DC, where my ­mother took me to the Custis-­Lee

8 Chapter 1

Mansion, now called Arlington House, the home of General Robert E. Lee, perched across the Potomac from the city on a hill near Arlington National Cemetery. The h ­ ouse itself was grander than any I had seen before, but when we emerged from it, we came upon the quarters of the enslaved p ­ eople, hovels that w ­ ere dusty and cramped. “Did ­people actually live in t­ hese?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” my m ­ other said, and gave me a quick lesson about slavery. It was only the beginning of my education on that trip. The next day we crossed into North Carolina and s­ topped somewhere for lunch. At six years old I was very proud of being able to go to the rest­room by myself without my parents’ immediate supervision, and so I headed into the room marked “Colored.” By the reaction of the other patrons—­gasps, shrieks, cries of “No, boy, no”—­you would have thought I had pissed on the lunch ­counter.1 By the time my parents had retrieved me, I’m sure I was in tears at my faux pas, but they took this as what ­today we would call a “teachable moment”—­t he second of the journey. They explained that we w ­ ere now in a part of the country where businesses separated ­people by race. They also made it clear that they d ­ idn’t agree with that policy. All this was dumbfounding to me b ­ ecause when my African American friend Nancy came over to play, she always used our bathroom, and, when we drove her home to Pittsburgh’s Hill District, ­later made famous by August Wilson’s play cycle, I used the one in her ­house, all with no dire consequences to anyone that I could see. It made no sense that Nancy would have to use a dif­fer­ent place to tinkle than any other child. This strange new world of North Carolina felt very alien to me. My parents did their best to reassure me, and then my f­ ather, perhaps thinking of the Montgomery bus boycotts that had begun six months ­earlier, said something that in retrospect has resonated throughout my life: “Bill, it ­won’t always be this way.” At a very primitive level my commitment to justice-­ seeking had begun.

* * * In a paradoxical way Shady Side Acad­emy reinforced that commitment, though it ­d idn’t ­really mean to. I was in ju­nior high school in 1960 when John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon for the US presidency, and I was just



Welcome to Genocide 9

beginning to articulate my po­liti­cal views—or, more accurately, my parents’ po­liti­cal views. In the run-up to that election virtually all the students in the school wore po­liti­cal buttons. It did not take long to figure out that I was one of only two Demo­crats among them. Far from shrinking from this distinction, I began to relish it. I realized that I had to master the facts and hone my debating skills or this Republican horde was ­going to walk all over me. Several teachers encouraged an exchange of po­liti­cal views in the classroom, and, when they needed someone to speak up for liberalism, they ­didn’t have a lot of options to choose from. Verbal jousting became second nature to me. More formative than ­t hese intellectual contests, however, was my repugnance for some ele­ments of the school’s culture. At the high school level, Shady Side had modeled itself on a traditional British boarding school, even though at least half the students w ­ ere day students as I was. This meant that hazing of younger or less “cool” students was commonplace, and I fell squarely into the latter category. Derogatory nicknames and verbal teasing w ­ ere tough enough, but physical abuse was also built into the ethos of the school. For many years a quadrangle on campus had been restricted for the use of se­niors. Should an underclassman be caught trespassing on it, the entire school, teachers and headmaster included, would gather around the Se­nior Campus at the end of the school day to hold what was dubbed a “tea party.” The offender would be stripped of his clothing, with his pants raised up the flagpole, and then he would be chased around the quadrangle by a group of se­niors wielding a ghastly combination of paint, urine, and God knows what ­else with which they would pelt him mercilessly. I found this practice barbaric, and when I became coeditor of the school newspaper, I editorialized against it. N ­ eedless to say, this did not endear me to the jocks in my class, but to my astonishment the newly installed headmaster abolished the tradition shortly a­ fter the editorial appeared.2 The most exclusive club at Shady Side was a highly secretive group called the Sargon Society, admittance to which was predicated on the accumulation of a sufficient number of points through athletic and extracurricular activities. Most of the members ­were star athletes, which I most as­suredly was not, but my responsibilities on the newspaper, in the drama club, and elsewhere ­were sufficient to qualify me to be “tapped” for Sargon in my ju­nior year. For about six weeks Sargon plebes ­were required by se­nior members to

10 Chapter 1

perform vari­ous menial tasks and embarrass themselves by d ­ oing such t­ hings as dressing and walking backward all day. Fi­nally an initiation ceremony was held late at night in the shower room of the gymnasium where, as with a “tea party,” the plebes would be pelted with noxious liquids ­until the attackers’ bloodlust was satisfied. Such experiences fostered in me a visceral hatred of bullies. This would eventually contribute to the emotional appeal of a job in h ­ uman rights, which often entailed calling out the worst kind of bullies. I also, however, learned a valuable lesson about the ­human heart. ­A fter experiencing the debasement of being a plebe, I told myself that when I was a se­nior member of Sargon, I would not treat the new candidates with the kind of ferocity to which I had been subjected. When the time came, however, I too required them to do such t­ hings as load their book bags with bricks or lick the s­ oles of my shoes. In fact, so demanding was I of t­ hose at my command that my fellow se­nior members urged me to lighten up. What had become of me? I asked myself. That was not who I wanted to be—­a ruthless overlord of the less power­ful. Though I attended the final initiation ceremony in the gymnasium for the new inductees, I determined not to participate in the “tea party” ele­ment and instead played the role of that admirable character, the passive bystander to cruelty. Years l­ater, when I was at Amnesty, I met a fascinating psychotherapist named Joan Golston who explained how to make a torturer. The key is to first inflict torture on the trainee. Victimizing someone e­ lse then becomes more appealing to the apprentice torturer. By harming that “other,” apprentices differentiate themselves from their own victimhood, reclaim their power, and, in Golston’s words, are “able to disown and keep at bay [their] own symptoms and psychological status as . . . ​v ictim[s] of abuse and terrorization.” This is what Golston calls “the torturer’s bind.”3 On a very modest scale, that is exactly what had happened to me in Sargon: the nerdy kid who had been initiated into the fraternity of the Cool through a pro­cess of abuse, which a year ­later he in turn inflicted on ­others to assure himself that he was not a victim but a wielder of power. Cruelty lay curled inside my heart, just as it did in the hearts of all ­t hose bullies I hated, like a worm in an apple.4 In addition to providing an excellent academic education, Shady Side had taught me three t­ hings, however unintentionally, that would be very useful



Welcome to Genocide 11

to me in my h ­ uman rights work. It taught me how to debate and defend my position no ­matter how unpop­u­lar. It taught me to despise the mistreatment of the less power­ful. And it taught me that none of us have immaculately clean hearts or hands. Or, as a banner in an East Berlin church put it at the time of the fall of the East German government, “I am both Cain and Abel.”5 I ­don’t mean to suggest for a moment that what I experienced was in any way comparable to what victims of ­human rights crimes experience—­only that the baser impulses of the ­human creature, the complexity of moral action, the nature of evil, and the possibilities of redemption w ­ ere all issues with which I wanted to grapple. Oh, and the real­ity of death. That, too. ­Little won­ der, then, that when I de­cided on a profession, it was the ministry that got the nod.

* * * ­ fter four years at Oberlin College, I headed to gradu­ate school at the UniA versity of Chicago, where I undertook an MA in philosophy and with which Meadville Lombard Theological School, the Unitarian Universalist seminary from which I received my doctorate, was affiliated. A brief stint in the parish ministry was followed by fifteen years at the denominational headquarters, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the last eight as president. Over my years at the Association, I was deeply involved in social justice issues—­from marching for racial justice, reproductive choice, and LGBTQ+ rights to being arrested at a Nevada nuclear test site. But I did not think of myself as primarily a h ­ uman rights activist. On the other hand, the ministry was not a bad background to bring to ­human rights work, though not for the ironic reason Henry Kissinger had cited in a 1975 conversation with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s foreign minister. “I read the briefing paper for this meeting,” Kissinger told Patricio Carvajal, “and it was nothing but ­human rights. The State Department is made up of p ­ eople who have a vocation for the ministry. B ­ ecause t­ here w ­ ere not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State.” 6 My experience with clergy was that they w ­ ere a lot tougher and harder-­headed than Kissinger gave them credit for, but ­human rights had become, in the words of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, “a secular religion,” the closest t­ hing we had to a common worldwide faith. I was e­ ager to serve

12 Chapter 1

that honorable cause.7 Nothing I had done before, however, had prepared me for the horrors I was to learn about at Amnesty.

* * * The first h ­ uman rights case that received significant public exposure shortly ­after my March 1994 appointment at Amnesty USA was a relatively modest one. A nineteen-­year-­old American named Michael Fay, who was living in Singapore with his m ­ other and stepfather, was convicted of vandalizing cars and stealing traffic signs. He was sentenced to a fine, four months in prison, and six strokes on his bare buttocks with a half-­inch-­t hick rattan cane. Amnesty immediately condemned the caning as “cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment,” a violation of the Convention Against Torture (CAT). Singapore was notorious for its rigid, repressive, and puritanical laws. Though ostensibly a democracy, it regularly harassed po­liti­cal opponents of the government and intimidated the press. Cosmopolitan magazine and Madonna ­were banned as being too racy; ­people w ­ ere fined for failing to flush public toilets or discarding chewing gum on the streets; and whenever a slightly provocative scene occurred at a per­for­mance of the Singapore Repertory Theater, a red light would go on alerting the audience members to close their eyes u ­ ntil a bell signaled the all-­clear. Caning, which was administered by martial arts prac­ti­tion­ers and, as the government acknowledged, was designed to split the skin and leave permanent scars, was fully consistent with the ethos of the state.8 ­Because Fay was an American, the corporal punishment ele­ment in his sentence drew wide media interest in the United States, and I was called on to condemn it. I appeared in dozens of media interviews and soon learned two ­t hings that in one form or another I would run into repeatedly over my years in the ­human rights movement: first, that a majority of Americans had no prob­lem with physical punishment if the victim was seen in a discreditable enough light—in this case, someone they perceived as a “spoiled brat”—­ and, second, that many p ­ eople w ­ ere seduced by cultural relativism, by the idea that Singapore had a right to do what­ever it wanted consistent with its own values even if ­t hose values ­were at odds with our own.9 ­Because ­t hese reactions are so commonplace and go to the very heart of the h ­ uman rights enterprise, they are worth a moment’s reflection.



Welcome to Genocide 13

The genius of h ­ uman rights is that they are universal; they apply to every­ one, everywhere. Before the Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights (UDHR) was ratified by the United Nations in 1948, ­t here had been plenty of other lists of ­human rights propagated around the world, from Hammurabi’s Code in 1771 BCE to the American Bill of Rights in 1789 CE. The prob­lem was that Hammurabi’s Code applied only to Babylonians. If you w ­ ere unfortunate enough to be an Assyrian, the Babylonians’ archenemy, you ­were out of luck. The American Bill of Rights is g­ reat for Americans, but it did nothing to protect the rights of Eu­ro­pean Jews, Roma, or gay p ­ eople in the Holocaust. The UDHR was the first attempt by the world community to establish a standard of rights, a shared moral vocabulary, that applied to e­ very person in the world. As such, it is considered customary international law, and ­every nation that joins the United Nations implicitly agrees to abide by it. And what is that standard of rights based on? It is based on the best current thinking of the international community—as articulated not just in the Universal Declaration but in all the subsequent h ­ uman rights treaties and conventions that have been ratified and gone into effect—as to what a good society ­will look like. At one time in ­human history, it was considered perfectly acceptable by just about every­body to pour molten la­va over the heads of your enemies or pull out the fingernails of your prisoners. Castrate your adversaries? No prob­lem. All smart socie­ties do that. T ­ oday a government or military that sanctioned such practices would risk widespread condemnation. It’s not that such t­ hings or worse ones ­don’t still happen. Of course they do, as we have seen all too tragically in the case of Rus­sia’s invasion of Ukraine. But they are no longer considered within the bounds of acceptable be­hav­ior. They violate the norms of a civilized society, as witnessed by the widespread condemnation of Rus­sia’s be­hav­ior. Naturally it’s pos­si­ble to disagree about what constitutes a violation of ­t hose norms. George W. Bush, as we ­shall see, constantly claimed that the United States did not use torture, but that is b ­ ecause he refused to define waterboarding as torture. All laws and standards require interpretation, which is why we have international ­human rights courts, UN ­human rights mechanisms like the Office of the High Commissioner for ­Human Rights, and international h ­ uman rights NGOs like Amnesty to interpret t­hose laws and standards. The one entity whose interpretation does not govern, however, if it flies in the face of rulings by ­t hese international bodies, is the individual

14 Chapter 1

state. The fact that Singapore may have no prob­lem with caning (or the United States no prob­lem with capital punishment) does not make ­t hose practices any less violations of h ­ uman rights b ­ ecause ­human rights are based on inter­ national norms and law, not domestic ones. That is how h ­ uman rights advocates get to say that t­ hose norms are the same for every­one, everywhere, including for obnoxious ­people, disreputable ­people, and even ­those we regard as r­ eally, ­really bad ­people. So Americans who had no prob­lem with the caning of Michael Fay ­because they thought him a smart-­aleck kid who reminded them of their obnoxious nephew or t­ hose who succumbed to cultural relativism and wanted to just “let Singapore be Singapore” ­d idn’t understand what ­human rights ­were all about. It’s prob­ably true that most such p ­ eople d ­ idn’t give a rat’s ass about ­human rights in the first place and ­were content to indulge in schaden­ freude when it came to Michael (“the ­little bastard is getting what he deserves”), but that ­didn’t make Michael’s punishment any less objectionable. Eventually, a­ fter Bill Clinton appealed to the Singaporean government, the caning was reduced from six strokes to four. Michael then returned to the United States where he denied having vandalized cars but admitted to stealing traffic signs. His confession to vandalism, he said, had been coerced. Though he told Larry King that he hoped to work with Amnesty to prevent the kind of abuse he had under­gone, we never heard from him, which was prob­ably just as well.10 Over the next few years he got into a number of minor scrapes with the law, but then—as someone once said, reversing Leo Durocher’s famous quip, “Last guys d ­ on’t finish nice”—­abuse is not a way to cultivate virtue. Michael Fay is prob­ably a very good guy, but fortunately, rights are not reserved for the virtuous.

* * * If the damage done to Michael Fay was relatively mild, other cases I encountered in my first few weeks at Amnesty ­were anything but. I was horrified to read in one report, for example, that the Mujahideen in Af­ghan­i­stan ­were tying their prisoners to dead corpses and leaving the two “companions” to rot together in the searing sun. The ­human imagination’s capacity to conjure up methods of harming other h ­ uman beings appeared to have no limit.



Welcome to Genocide 15

That quickly became apparent in early April 1994, when word began filtering out of the Central African country of Rwanda that following the April 6 downing of a plane carry­ing the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, members of the Hutu tribe had begun slaughtering members of the Tutsi tribe. The facts of the Rwandan genocide and the world’s anemic response to it are well documented.11 The majority Hutus, who made up about 84 ­percent of the Rwandan population, had historically been dominated by the Tutsis, thanks to arbitrary decisions by the German and Belgian colonial powers.12 With in­de­pen­dence in 1962 came Hutu-­controlled governments and outbreaks of sporadic vio­lence between the two tribes, resulting in a flow of Tutsi refugees to neighboring Uganda. ­After almost three de­cades of relative calm, in 1990 a Tutsi military force, the Rwandan Patriotic Army, made up of Tutsi based in Uganda, invaded Rwanda but ­were unable to overthrow the government. Two consequences of the military stalemate ­were pivotal to the onset of genocide. First, a cease-­fire was negotiated at Arusha, Tanzania, which called for a shared government and the presence of a UN peacekeeping force, UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda), to monitor the implementation of the accord. Second, a band of Hutu extremists, operating ­under the appellation of “Hutu Power” and fired by a vicious paramilitary group called the Interahamwe (“­those who fight together”), determined to undermine the government (even though its president was a Hutu) and effect a “final solution” to the Tutsi “prob­lem.” When on April 6 the presidents’ plane was brought down by a missile, the origin of which is still not definitively known, the extremists pounced on the opportunity to put their diabolical plan into action. A week passed before the full extent of the carnage became known. What was known right away, however, was that no Tutsi, moderate Hutu leader, or member of UNAMIR was safe. The day ­after the plane was shot down, the moderate Hutu prime minister, intending to make a radio appeal for calm, was murdered, and the ten Belgian peacekeeping soldiers assigned to protect her w ­ ere tortured and killed, their genitalia cut off and stuffed in their mouths. For the next six weeks and to a lesser extent continuing into June, the Interahamwe, assisted by Hutus from e­ very walk of life who had been incited by propaganda broadcast over Radio Mille Collines assuring them, as such propaganda often does, that they ­were the victims of Tutsi

16 Chapter 1

provocations, slaughtered Tutsi “cockroaches” at random, often with weapons no more sophisticated than machetes. Among the most common venues for the bloodfests ­were churches and missions where Tutsis would go to seek shelter and safety. The attack at Rukara parish church on April  12 was typical. About a thousand Tutsis had barricaded themselves in the parish recreational hall, a one-­story brick structure with small win­dows and a metal door. First the militia and their local allies threw grenades into the hall, killing many; then they managed to break through the bricks on one side of the door. About thirty militia members entered, encouraged by the chants of a crowd outside shouting the names of ­those who should be killed. What happened next is like a picture from hell. The killers moved about, hacking and beating ­people to death. They then poured gasoline about and started fires. ­Those who . . . ​tried to run outside through the now open door to escape the fires ­were killed outside. [One witness] claims that of a thousand persons hiding in the recreation building, only ten survived: ­t hose who, like herself, had smeared themselves with blood and crawled u ­ nder corpses. . . . ​Her ­mother’s head [was] beaten so savagely it came off her neck ­after which her killers—­a Mr. Rukondo and a Mr. Minani—­k icked the decapitated head, remarking that the ­woman had not even cried out.13 As it became more and more obvious how widespread the brutality was, virtually ­every official entity wrapped itself in shame. One who did not was General Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general in command of 2,500 UNAMIR peacekeepers. Dallaire begged the United Nations to send him another 2,500 troops. He felt certain that with a mere 5,000 soldiers he could put an end to the slaughter. “Give me the means,” he pleaded, “and I can do more.”14 Instead the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, headed by ­future secretary general Kofi Annan, spooked by the killing of the Belgians, de­cided to withdraw UNAMIR from Rwanda and then do . . . ​nothing.15 The most crucial proponent of that “strategy” was the United States. Fearful it would be drawn into any expanded UN mission; terrified of a repeat of the loss of American soldiers as had taken place the year before in Somalia (“Black Hawk Down”); and seeing no American “national interest” implicated in what­ever was g­ oing on in Central Africa, President Clinton and the State



Welcome to Genocide 17

Department made it clear t­ here would be no international response to genocide. They would not even agree to block the radio broadcasts that ­were whipping p ­ eople into a frenzy. Indeed, US officials turned themselves inside out not to call what was happening “genocide,” which would have triggered an obligation to intervene, only acknowledging ­after more than a month that “acts of genocide,” though not genocide itself, had taken place—­a distinction without a difference. Such callousness was only reinforced by the American media, which had covered the caning of an American teenager with encyclopedic thoroughness but was slow to make what was happening in Rwanda a front-­page story. Even worse, when it did, it mimicked the Clinton administration’s line exactly. Agreeing that the United States has “no recognizable national interest” in stopping the terror, the Washington Post chose a homely meta­phor with which to observe that “in theory, international fire-­engine ser­v ice is available to all ­houses in the global village. . . . ​But in a world of l­imited po­liti­cal and economic resources, not all of the many fires ­will be equally tended. Rwanda is an unpreferred class.”16 The New York Times did l­ ittle better, lamenting that “absent [a mobile, quick-­response UN force], the world has l­ittle choice but to stand aside and hope for the best.”17 Among ­those who did not cover themselves in glory was Amnesty. ­Under the orga­nizational structure in place at the time, which, as I have described, was fostered by the colonial model of central authority dispersing information to the dependencies, all decisions about Amnesty’s responses to ­human rights crises w ­ ere made at the international level, that is, by the International Secretariat in London. The national sections, such as Amnesty USA, w ­ ere required to conform our public statements and actions to London’s lead. On April 14, eight days a­ fter the downing of the presidents’ plane and six days ­a fter the executions of the prime minister and Belgian peacekeepers, Amnesty International (AI) fi­nally put out a statement drawing attention to the wide-­scale nature of the killing ­going on in Rwanda.18 The next public statement would not come ­until twelve days l­ater, April 26, by which point tens of thousands had already been killed, including ­those at the parish complex in Rukara.19 What accounted for this laggardly response? In part it was b ­ ecause centralized as its bureaucracy was and therefore lacking researchers based in Central Africa, much less Rwanda, AI was handicapped in its ability to procure real-­time information. In part it was ­because

18 Chapter 1

AI had always valued accuracy more than timeliness and hence hesitated to make pronouncements without multiple confirmations—­something that is hard to obtain during genocide when ­t here are so few surviving witnesses. And in part it was ­because a historical predilection for lifting up the plights of individuals (prisoners of conscience) squared poorly with a need to focus on massive numbers of nameless dead. Moreover, Amnesty had tied its hands ­behind its back by refusing, again by policy, to ever call for military intervention on humanitarian grounds. Instead, when the UN Commission on ­Human Rights fi­nally met on May 24 to address the situation in Rwanda, AI was ­limited to advocating for such ­t hings as the appointment of a special rapporteur, “strengthening of h ­ uman rights guarantees in the peace accords,” and ensuring that “individuals who commit ­human rights violations are brought to justice.”20 But the slaughter was still ­going on; a UN special rapporteur who tried to enter the country risked the fate of the Belgian peacekeepers; the peace accords w ­ ere in a shambles; and accountability was months, if not years, off. What was needed was a voice condemning the United Nations for its withdrawal of troops and demanding that General Dallaire’s request for more soldiers be honored, but Amnesty could not bring itself to say so. Even if Amnesty had taken a more proactive role, however, the fundamental prob­lem in the United States was that virtually nobody cared. This pointed up a basic weakness in the American h ­ uman rights movement as a ­whole. When representatives of ­Human Rights Watch, the other major international h ­ uman rights organ­ization, secured an appointment on April 21 with Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s national security adviser, and begged for a change in the American policy of passivity, Lake shrugged his shoulders and told them, “If you want to make this [US policy] move, you w ­ ill have to change public opinion. You must make more noise.”21 In other words, if we in the administration are to do the right t­ hing, you must force us into it by putting p ­ eople on the streets. We d ­ on’t intend to expend any po­liti­cal capital by leading. But H ­ uman Rights Watch had no grassroots constituency— it was not or­ga­nized that way—­and Amnesty, the only major ­human rights organ­ization that did, could not turn out thousands and thousands of ­people to demand an end to genocide in a country that even Secretary of State Warren Christopher required an atlas to locate.22



Welcome to Genocide 19

Having said all this, I need to acknowledge that my own inexperience did not help. I had been on the job about six weeks. I ­didn’t know much about Rwanda. I ­didn’t know the players at AI in London; I ­didn’t have personal contacts at the United Nations or in the US administration or in the media. And I ­didn’t even know much about mobilizing AIUSA’s members. I was reduced to having our press office release statements paralleling the International Secretariat’s and writing letters to the editor. On May 1, the Washington Post published my response to its fire-­engine editorial from two weeks e­ arlier. (Why it delayed the publication that long, I have no idea.) I expressed shock at the Post’s endorsement of the inevitability of the catastrophe and the West’s impotence in its face, and I contrasted that with its spirited editorial support for intervention in Bosnia a few years ­earlier. “As the tragedy [in Rwanda] unfolds,” I wrote, “one has to won­der why the atrocities in Bosnia receive the widespread attention they do while the massacre of tens of thousands in an African country is met with a collective denial of responsibility and a hasty retreat.”23 The answer seemed self-­evident. Eventually the French interceded in one sector of the country, and the Rwandan Patriotic Army, the Tutsi-­dominated militia, managed to seize control of the capital, Kigali; put an end to the genocide; and establish a government. The killing had lasted for three months and taken 800,000 lives. The Holocaust is generally said to have cost 6,000,000 souls. If we count the active years of the Holocaust to be 1941 to 1945, that figure would be 12,800,000 if the Nazis had exterminated their victims at the same rate the Hutus did theirs. Though Amnesty was ineffectual in putting a dent in the Rwandan genocide, I personally learned several impor­tant lessons. First, I learned not to rely on the International Secretariat alone to guide AI’s response to crises. This would be the beginning of a long strug­g le to decentralize Amnesty’s work, make its policies more flexible, and empower the “colonies” (the national sections) to take a greater role in decision-­making. ­Because the findings of h ­ uman rights organ­izations are often challenged by perpetrators, t­ here is understandably a high premium on getting the facts straight and appearing unbiased. C ­ ouple this with a large bureaucracy that values rules in order to enforce uniformity, and you have created a formula for failure to adapt to changing circumstances, no m ­ atter how dire.

20 Chapter 1

The International Secretariat had initially resisted calls to document the genocide committed against the Tutsis b ­ ecause, among other t­ hings, it feared that “if [such documentation] ­were used in prosecutions resulting in death sentences, [such sentences] would be against AI’s [opposition to the death penalty].” It also feared that documenting the terror perpetrated on the Tutsis without an equally vigorous effort to document atrocities committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army and its aligned Tutsi-­dominated government would jeopardize Amnesty’s reputation for po­liti­cal neutrality, despite the disproportionately large number of instances in which Tutsis w ­ ere the victims of crimes.24 Amnesty’s overscrupulousness was not just missing the forest for the trees; it was trying to save one or two “trees” (rules) at the expense of a conflagration of the w ­ hole forest. I often thought of the perpetually overworked staff at the International Secretariat as mirroring Alice’s be­hav­ior in Through the Looking Glass in which, schooled by the Red Queen, she runs faster and faster just to stay in place. The second lesson I learned from the tragedy of Rwanda was that the US government had a very narrow conception of what constituted the “national interest” and that countering even the worst kind of h ­ uman rights violations could easily fall outside that definition. The only way to change that was to mobilize a larger constituency for ­human rights. Unfortunately, however, the third lesson that struck me was how modest the active grassroots support for international ­human rights in the United States r­ eally was, especially in comparison to movements for racial justice, reproductive rights, environmental ­causes. Part of the reason for that, I thought, was ­because ­human rights ­were seen as an esoteric concern, even elitist, and not germane to the lives of everyday Americans. To reverse that, we in the h ­ uman rights community needed, in addition to expressing moral outrage, to draw connections between h ­ uman rights and their impact on American lives. We needed to appeal to the machinist who feared the loss of his job to a country that denigrates ­labor rights or the ­mother who trembled for her child’s life in a military unit at risk of being the target of war crimes or committing them. We needed to reach the consumer who d ­ idn’t want to buy products tainted by child l­abor and the taxpayer who d ­ idn’t want tax dollars spent on foreign military assistance that ended up subsidizing torture and po­ liti­cal killings. We needed ­people to understand that the odds for transmission of disease from one country to another increase dramatically when the



Welcome to Genocide 21

source country stifles a f­ ree media and intimidates whistle­blowers, as was to happen so dramatically in China with the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2019. To do all this meant putting h ­ uman rights talk in language every­body understood and welcoming to the strug­gle a far more diverse constituency, racially, eco­nom­ically, and po­liti­cally, than made up the typical Amnesty audience, which tended to be white, ­middle class, and left wing. Reaching such an alternative audience became a major preoccupation of my tenure at Amnesty and included a large increase in the number of persons of color on the staff (the only group in the organ­ization whose makeup I could control), frequent appearances in media that appealed to both the right wing on the one hand and communities of color on the other,25 intentional outreach to the business and l­ abor communities, and most especially a book entitled In Our Own Best Interest: Why Defending ­Human Rights Benefits Us All, which became a best seller—­for one week!26 Fi­nally, ­because of the Rwanda genocide, my perspective on the use of military force shifted markedly. As a child of the anti–­Vietnam War era, I had been reflexively skeptical of the use of military power. As president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, I had strongly opposed the rush to war in the Persian Gulf in 1991. In both cases such opposition proved prescient. Th ­ ere is wide consensus now that the Vietnam War was a disaster, and a strong case can be made that the precipitous US intervention in the Persian Gulf led to the formation of al-­Qaeda and, ultimately, the quagmire of Iraq, 9/11, and the twenty-­year war in Af­ghan­i­stan. But Rwanda convinced me that sometimes the only moral course is military intervention. I understood all the reasons why Amnesty and other h ­ uman rights organ­ izations ­were reticent to make such a call—­for one ­t hing, military force often exacerbates h ­ uman rights abuses—­but the insistence on hands that bore no blemish at all often gave cover to t­ hose whose hands w ­ ere dripping in blood. I often wondered in retrospect if I would have opposed a hy­po­t het­i­cal US intervention in Iraq in 1988 had it been undertaken to stop Saddam Hussein’s genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds as I had opposed the 1991 war to reverse his occupation of the oil fields of Kuwait. In any case, I vowed I would keep an open mind on the use of military force when large numbers of lives ­were at stake. If ­t here is time, other coercive options ­ought to be tried first. The objectives of intervention must be clear and have high likelihood of success. Force

22 Chapter 1

must be ­limited to stopping the atrocities and be applied proportionally. ­There must be an exit strategy that is likely to leave the country better off rather than worse. Often the United States is not the most appropriate country to lead a humanitarian military intervention; having a co­a li­tion of forces, especially from the region, is always better. And some international body needs to authorize the action even if, as in the case of Rwanda and, as we s­ hall see in Chapter 3, Kosovo, it is not the United Nations.27 All ­t hese criteria call for tough judgments, but had Roméo Dallaire been correct that five thousand troops could have put an end to the butchery of eight hundred thousand ­people in Rwanda, t­ here is no moral calculus in the world by which that would not be an obligatory investment.28

* * * I have often felt guilty about my inadequate response to Rwanda. It is a stupid guilt, actually, almost arrogant, since even if I had done every­thing within the power of an experienced head of Amnesty USA, it is unlikely to have saved even one life. But guilt is a common characteristic—­maybe even a common indulgence—of h ­ uman rights advocates. “Why ­didn’t we do more?” The one enduring truth I took away from the genocide was the incomparable value of heroism. I would meet a lot of heroic ­people during my years at Amnesty, but Rwanda introduced me to two. One was Roméo Dallaire, who suffered a breakdown ­after returning to Canada from Africa, so bereft was he by his inability to stop the slaughter. ­After his recovery, he addressed an annual meeting of Amnesty USA. He ­didn’t say anything unexpected, but his dignity and his very presence, his witness to duty and decency, brought tears to my eyes.29 And the other hero was Paul Rusesabagina. In 2004 the director Terry George arranged for an early showing of his film ­Hotel Rwanda to take place as a benefit for Amnesty USA at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The film starred Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo, who w ­ ere both pre­sent at the screening, as w ­ ere Angelina Jolie and Harrison Ford, strong supporters of h ­ uman rights who w ­ ere tasked with introducing the film. Jolie was as articulate and impassioned as she had always been reputed to be. (Harrison Ford, on the other hand, stood beside Jolie while she spoke but never said a word.) I was happy to meet t­ hese four celebrities, but the person whose pres-



Welcome to Genocide 23

ence r­ eally thrilled me was Paul Rusesabagina, the proprietor of the H ­ otel des Mille Collines (no relation to the radio station) in Kigali. The movie tells the story of Rusesabagina, who was said to have saved more than 1,200 ­people from the génocidaires through his cunning and courage. I have photo­graphs with Don and Angelina and Harrison, but the one I cherish is the one that includes Paul. I know that in recent years doubts have been raised about Rusesabagina’s actions during the genocide and afterward—­that he may not have saved anywhere near the number of p ­ eople he claimed and that he has advocated the violent overthrow of the current Rwandan government.30 I am in no position to weigh in on t­ hose charges, but, even if they are true, what he did in ­those days of duress is far more than most of us could ever imagine ­doing. In the last two pages of his magnificent book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We W ­ ill Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch tells of an attack by 150 Hutu militants on two girls’ schools, one in Gisenyi and one in Kibuye. The teen­agers w ­ ere rousted from their beds in the m ­ iddle of the night and ordered to separate themselves, Hutus from Tutsis, so that presumably only the Tutsis would die. But none of the students in ­either school moved. Fi­nally, they explained to the militants that in their schools, they w ­ ere all simply Rwandans . . . ​at which point all of them “­were beaten and shot indiscriminately.”31 ­Those girls are also my heroines, and what a legacy they leave: exemplars of the sentiment that underlies all ­human rights ideals. “I’m sorry, sir,” I can hear them say, voices trembling. “I’m sorry, sir, but we cannot separate ourselves ­because you see, sir, in this school, we are not Hutus; we are not Tutsis; w ­ e’re all just ­little Rwandan girls.”

CHAPTER 2

Prisoners of Conscience The Dynamics of Rescue

When, as a child, I encountered that segregated bathroom in North Carolina and wondered why my friend Nancy c­ ouldn’t pee in the same place I did, I was engaging at a very elementary level in one of the psychological dynamics on which ­human rights activism depends. I was extrapolating from my experience to that of another. I was thinking to myself, “Nancy may be dif­ fer­ent from me in some ways—­she’s a girl and she has darker skin—­but one ­t hing we have in common is that we both need to pee and, when you need to pee and you ­can’t, that’s painful.” I was identifying with another individual’s feelings, and, b ­ ecause I w ­ ouldn’t want to experience the discomfort of not being allowed to pee when and where I needed to, I d ­ idn’t want my friend to experience it e­ ither. This is customarily thought of as empathy. Empathy is almost always considered a good ­t hing, but the truth is that it is a value-­neutral trait. Psychopaths excel at it, and torturers depend on it. Psychopaths are experts at perceiving and mimicking exactly what other ­people feel. Torturers know just as well as I do that not being able to pee (or having your fingernails pulled out) is extraordinarily painful, but, instead of not wanting ­others to experience that pain, they are e­ ager to inflict it. Clearly empathy alone is not enough. So what ­else is required? Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom, who wrote a book called Against Empathy, says what is needed is “rational compassion.”1 Bloom contends that emotionally we can feel empathy for only one or two p ­ eople at a time and usually t­ hose are p ­ eople we know or who appear to be like us. Empathy w ­ ill lead us astray, he says, by encouraging us to iden-



Prisoners of Conscience 25

tify with a narrow segment of sufferers (my friend Nancy) who may or may not be at greatest risk. If we ­really want to reduce the maximum amount of suffering, we need to employ compassion in a rational way, that is, we need to care for other ­people and want them to thrive based not on acquaintance with them or how much their story is like ours but on an informed judgment of which groups are suffering the most. Bloom’s reasoning is at heart a utilitarian argument for reducing the maximum amount of suffering for the largest number of ­people. The prob­lem is that making a complicated calculation about the relative suffering of one group of strangers versus another is not how you motivate ­people to act. To sustain broad-­based ­human rights change requires that ­people both feel outrage at injustice and recognize how such change w ­ ill benefit them and their ­children, as I described in the last chapter. This is especially true if you are trying to summon large numbers of ­people into the streets. Most h ­ uman rights revolutions throughout history have been focused on a demand for repair of ­people’s living conditions: the right to vote, a reduction in the price of bread, or an end to corruption, po­liti­cal fear, and police repression. But just as impor­tant as self-­interest is the spark that ignites the h ­ uman rights revolution and that is more often a name than a statistic: Rosa Parks; the Stonewall Rebellion; Mohammed Bouazizi, the street vendor whose self-­ immolation set off the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia; George Floyd. Or if not a specific name, then a dramatic image: the naked ­little girl ­running from a napalm cloud in Vietnam; dead bodies in the streets of Bucha. This visceral dimension is also what makes for long-­term ­human rights activism. Replacing empathy with compassion is fine—no one could argue that a psychopath or a torturer feels compassion for their victims—­but the way to stimulate that compassion is to tell what the late phi­los­o­pher Richard Rorty called “sentimental stories.” Rather than invoke some fundamental essence common to all ­human beings, Rorty said, and rather than appeal to some abstract sense of good, tell poignant, touching stories of real p ­ eople that make ­others sit up and say, “I know that feeling. That could be me.” In this way we evoke what Rorty called “solidarity,” which he describes as “the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with re­spect to pain and humiliation—­t he ability to think of p ­ eople wildly dif­fer­ent from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us.’ ”2

26 Chapter 2

Compassion is what ­we’re ­after, Rorty would say, but compassion starts not with some utilitarian calculation but by putting a ­human face on suffering—­prob­ably first the f­ aces of t­ hose we know or who look like us, and then extrapolating to ­others in a way that produces feelings of solidarity. Sure, some ­people ­will not respond to ­t hose sentimental stories. According to the historian Margaret MacMillan, “­Women at Hitler’s mountain home of Berchtesgaden . . . ​apparently ate the gravel he had just walked on.”3 ­People who are that devoted are inured to sentiment. We could have told the Hutu géno­ cidaires hundreds of such stories about the Tutsis, and it ­wouldn’t have ­stopped the massacres. The Tutsis had been defined as outside the circle of humanness itself. Compassion and solidarity are not enough when it comes to stopping huge, systemic h ­ uman rights crimes, as we s­ hall see in the next chapter. That requires institutional power. But sentimental stories generally move ­people to action far more readily than sterile calculation.4 In fact the historian Lynn Hunt has argued that the idea of ­human rights was first “in­ven­ted” in the eigh­teenth c­ entury when novels about w ­ omen in distress first became popu­ lar and readers began to identify with their suffering.5 Wilbert Rideau, who served forty-­four years for murder at Angola State Prison in Louisiana before becoming a prizewinning author, indirectly confirmed Hunt’s observation: it was reading, he said, that “allowed me . . . ​to emerge from my cocoon of self-­centeredness and appreciate the humanness of o ­ thers.” 6 What­ever its source, what we are looking for is the mobilization of compassion for individuals in order to trigger solidarity with strangers. It’s sort of the opposite of Linus’s observation in the Peanuts comic strip, “I love humanity; it’s ­people I ­can’t stand.” For ­human rights to work, we need to care about par­tic­u­lar ­people, a feeling that with any luck ­will blossom into caring about a larger number of p ­ eople even if we c­ an’t stand humanity as a w ­ hole. That is one of the profound insights that Amnesty gleaned from the beginning. Tell a story. Paint a picture. Describe a person in trou­ble, and o ­ thers ­will want to help.

* * * ­ ill their help make any difference, though? Ah, that requires a second W touchstone of the h ­ uman rights dynamic: the evocation of shame.



Prisoners of Conscience 27

Mad with jealousy b ­ ecause I suspect my lover of being unfaithful, I crouch one night at the bedroom door, peering through the keyhole, e­ ager to secure proof of the unseemly deed. I am utterly absorbed in the drama, the gathering of evidence, to the extent that I almost forget where I am. But all of a sudden I hear footsteps ­behind me. Someone is looking at me; someone has caught me in my trespassing. I am embarrassed; even more than that, I am ashamed. This is the scenario the phi­los­o­pher Jean-­Paul Sartre cites in his classic text Being and Nothingness to solve the prob­lem of solipsism, the hypothesis that only the Self exists in the world, that ­others are merely figments of our imagination.7 ­Were that the case, Sartre says, or ­were we truly able to live as if that w ­ ere the case, we would not care when another’s look catches us in an act of which we are ashamed. But we do care. We care how we are seen by the other. The fact is that the only way we truly know we exist is ­because we respond to the “looks” of o ­ thers—­t he baby to the smile of the m ­ other, the adolescent to the taunting eyes of peers, the lover to the “come hither” glance of a mate. This experience is as old as the story of Adam and Eve who, having eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, suddenly become aware of their nakedness, are ashamed, and try to hide from the sight of God. Of course shame is a multiedged sword. Many p ­ eople are made to feel it needlessly, being ashamed of their looks, for example. Some p ­ eople, on the other hand, ­will appear to feel no shame at all for committing self-­evidently evil deeds. They may even feel proud and righ­teous about what they rationalize as defending their own ­people. Their compassion, to the extent they have any, has not grown beyond identity with their own kind, has not ripened into solidarity. Many Hutus slaughtered their Tutsi neighbors in full view not only of other Hutus but of Catholic priests from beyond their community and appeared to feel no remorse or shame for it at all. But one t­ hing that always intrigued me was that most ­human rights violators try to hide their unsavory actions. Torture, po­liti­cal imprisonment, po­liti­cal killings—­t hese almost never take place in the light of day, and their perpetrators almost never voluntarily admit to the crimes. Why not? Virtually every­one who defends torture claims it is necessary to save lives—­the so-­called “smoking gun” argument that ­we’ll examine in Chapter 6. Politicians who do away with their adversaries almost always insist that their victims w ­ ere terrorists who needed to be eliminated

28 Chapter 2

to protect the state. Fidel Castro was one of the few who owned up to his repression, acknowledging to the New York Times in a 1995 interview that Amnesty was correct when it said he held six hundred po­liti­cal prisoners in his custody, though, true to form, he defended his actions by saying he was “not alone in jailing t­ hose who fight against the state.” 8 The reason h ­ uman rights abuses are usually concealed is b ­ ecause their authors e­ ither truly do on some level feel shame or, even if they ­don’t, recognize that h ­ uman rights norms have gained enough currency that their blatant violation casts the perpetrators in a negative light. This is actually a major reason for hope, as I’ll explain in Chapter 9. As a g­ reat Italian poet supposedly put it, “The secret to a civil society is that its members are as ashamed to do harm as they are to appear in public with a stain on their shirts.” For that development the world has h ­ uman rights organ­izations to thank.9

* * * The prisoner of conscience (POC) was Amnesty’s stock in trade. Relying on compassion and shame, the organ­ization claimed to have helped ­free at least forty thousand such p ­ eople, although I was never quite sure where that number came from. In the original 1961 article that spurred the founding of Amnesty, Peter Benenson had defined a POC as “any person who is physically restrained (by imprisonment or other­wise) from expressing (in any form of words or symbols) any opinion which he honestly holds.”10 Sounds straightforward enough. But who got to be labeled a POC and who did not was often fraught with controversy, as it still is t­ oday. In the first place, ­there was more to Benenson’s definition than I have just quoted. Benenson went on to say that a POC was someone who “does not advocate or condone personal vio­lence.” On its website AI has expanded that prohibition to include “hatred,” describing a POC as “someone who has not used or advocated vio­lence or hatred but is imprisoned b ­ ecause of who they are (sexual orientation, ethnic, national or social origin, language, birth, colour, sex or economic status) or what they believe (religious, po­liti­cal or other conscientiously held beliefs).”11 Two years ­after being designated a POC, for example, Nelson Mandela was stripped of that appellation in 1964 when he was convicted of supporting the use of vio­lence against the apartheid state. True to the self-­interested views on revolt held by the British imperium from



Prisoners of Conscience 29

whose culture and values Amnesty had sprung, the organ­ization regarded vio­lence or revolution as absolute deal-­breakers when it came to POC status, no ­matter how repressive the regime against which it was directed. I often wondered if Claus von Stauffenberg, the German army officer who tried to assassinate Hitler, would have been denied POC status if Amnesty had been around in 1944. Then t­ here was the prob­lem of politics. If Benenson’s definition was to be adhered to strictly (“any opinion which he honestly holds”), then a prisoner of conscience could theoretically be the author of the most noxious broadsides, even be an advocate of genocide, and as long as the beliefs w ­ ere never accompanied by violent acts, POC status was inviolate. That’s no doubt why “hatred” has been added to the con­temporary definition, but that word too is complicated, as witnessed recently by the controversy regarding the Rus­sian dissident Alexei Navalny. He was first declared a POC; then, when it was discovered he had made xenophobic remarks in the past, that status was revoked, only to be reinstated with the clarification from Amnesty that designating someone a POC “in no way . . . ​implies endorsement of their views.”12 While that may technically be true, at the very least t­ hose views are not supposed to involve hatred of which, one presumes, xenophobia is an example. And in any case ­there is a difference between a po­liti­cal prisoner (which Navalny certainly is) who is detained for po­liti­cal beliefs of what­ever nature, and a prisoner of conscience who, at least it is commonly assumed, holds views congruent with the ­human rights ideal. Indeed, that is why POCs set the gold standard when it comes to the po­liti­cally incarcerated and why that designation is so eagerly coveted. As head of Amnesty in the United States, I was occasionally lobbied to get someone named a POC, even though the decision was entirely in the hands of the International Secretariat. Two instances w ­ ere particularly memorable. In 1995 an American citizen named Lori Berenson was arrested and subsequently convicted in Peru of aiding the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), a violent Marxist guerrilla organ­ization that had planned to storm Peru’s parliament, take hostages, and demand an exchange for po­ liti­cal prisoners. Though t­ here appeared to be evidence that Berenson was indeed involved with the organ­ization, she was tried in a special terrorism court in which her ­lawyer was denied opportunity to cross-­examine witnesses and the judge was hooded. This meant that her conviction and sentence of life imprisonment ­v iolated international due pro­cess standards and ­were

30 Chapter 2

therefore suspect.13 It did not help Berenson’s case, however, that in January 1996 she appeared before the press and shouted that the MRTA, which had committed serious crimes, was not a terrorist organ­ization. ­Matters became even worse when in December 1996 the MRTA invaded the home of the Japa­nese ambassador to Peru during a party and held hostages for 126 days, demanding that Berenson, among ­others, be released. Naturally Lori’s parents, Mark and Rhonda, professors in the New York City area, w ­ ere e­ ager to see her freed from prison, and in March 1999 they met with me to ask me to prevail upon Amnesty in London to declare her a POC. Not only did I not have the power to do that, but I knew that AI would be very hesitant to award that designation to someone associated with violent acts. I felt sorry for ­t hese anguished parents who ­were focused less on their ­daughter’s politics or Amnesty’s bureaucratic niceties than on simply extracting their child from a foreign jail. It was indicative of Amnesty’s prestige that they thought a POC designation might change minds in Peru about the case, though that was prob­ably a dubious assumption. In any case, the best I could do was to arrange for the Berensons to meet with the staff person in London who covered Peru and whose opinion on the ­matter would have direct bearing on Lori’s POC status. While Rhonda was gracious and seemed to understand the limits of my authority, Mark was very angry with me. Amnesty did indeed criticize the fairness of the trial and, when Lori was held in isolation for four months, declared her the victim of cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. But it never named her a POC.14 Eventually she was given a new trial, her sentence was reduced, and in 2015 she returned home. The other notable attempt to enlist me to secure POC status for a prisoner was undertaken by a far better-­k nown character than Rhonda or Mark Berenson. At the invitation of Ted Kennedy, with whom I had become good friends (see Chapter 7), I attended the 2001 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC. Among ­t hose seated at our ­table was Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan. When she learned of my Amnesty affiliation, Bhutto began imploring me to arrange for her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, to be declared a POC. I knew that Zardari was in prison in Pakistan on corruption charges and, indeed, that the New York Times had published a major story three years ­earlier outlining the ways in which both Bhutto and Zardari had accumulated as much as $1.5 billion through graft.15 The International Secretariat, I felt confident, knew all about Zardari and



Prisoners of Conscience 31

would want no part of him or Bhutto. Fortunately, the senator, seated to my right, appraised the situation quickly and managed to launch into another of his delightful stories about Paddy the Boston Irishman, thus rescuing me from Ms. Bhutto’s entreaties.

* * * Some POCs ­were quite famous, and at least two of them eventually became presidents of the countries that had imprisoned them: Václav Havel of Czecho­ slo­va­k ia (­later the Czech Republic) and Kim Dae-­jung, who served as president of South K ­ orea from 1998 to 2003. A ­ fter Kim had been elected president, one of the guards who had been assigned to paw through his garbage when he was u ­ nder ­house arrest recalled that originally he had thought Kim an evil man ­because that’s what his superiors told him. Then one day he found a paper Kim had written called “Resolving Regional Hatreds.” “I was deeply impressed” the guard recalled. “In fact, I thought Kim was a genius. I used to look forward to sorting through his garbage in hopes of finding more of his writings. But eventually the Kim ­family caught on and threw out nothing but wet stuff. I c­ an’t tell you how deeply disappointed I was.”16 What almost all POCs had in common was that they ­were principled and stubborn. A good example is the fabled Rus­sian physicist, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and ­human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov, who, along with his wife Yelena Bonner, was cast into internal exile in the city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) from 1980 to 1986. A few years ­after Sakharov was freed and just as the revolutions in Eastern Eu­rope w ­ ere coming to a head, I was invited to attend a luncheon at the American Acad­emy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts, hosted by Jerome Wiesner, who had been president of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology and who was helping to launch a new foundation in Sakharov’s name. ­After the meal had been served, Wiesner explained the purpose of the foundation and then invited Sakharov to endorse it. Sakharov pulled himself up, and much to Wiesner’s consternation and the audience’s amusement, he said, “I am sorry but I cannot say anything about the foundation ­because it has not done anything yet. I do not know if it is good or bad. When it does something, then we ­will know and I w ­ ill comment.” Unfortunately, Sakharov never got a chance to see if the foundation was “good or bad” since he died a few months ­later.

32 Chapter 2

The mentality of most POCs is dif­fer­ent from yours and mine. Most of us put a premium on personal security, if not comfort. We may express unpop­u­lar po­liti­cal views; we may even march in a demonstration and shout po­liti­cal slogans, hoping ­t here is safety in numbers, but we calibrate our actions to avoid risking our freedom, much less our very lives. We want to avoid being singled out for par­tic­u­lar attention by the authorities ­because we know that is dangerous. Our princi­ples ­matter but not more than our ­family’s welfare or our personal health. Even if we are arrested for civil disobedience, we expect quick release; we certainly d ­ on’t want to spend years ­behind bars. At the end of the day none of ­t hese t­ hings is true of POCs. I ­don’t mean that they take foolish risks—­most of them are highly strategic in their actions—­but at some point they have opted for a purpose they regard as more impor­tant than job, ­family, reputation, or personal well-­being. Some are motivated by their religious faith, some by the suffering of p ­ eople like themselves, some by their po­liti­cal idealism, and some by their fury at injustice. But rarely have I met a POC who was naïve enough to think the authorities would not eventually retaliate against them. They do what they do with open eyes. Egyptian sociologist and h ­ uman rights defender Saad Eddin Ibrahim was accused of misusing Eu­ro­pean Union funding to monitor Egyptian elections and then defaming the Egyptian government by describing ­t hose elections as fraudulent, which they most certainly w ­ ere.17 Layla Zana, a Kurd, was prosecuted for wearing the Kurdish colors of red, yellow, and green and speaking a sentence in Kurdish, an outlawed language, when she took her oath of office as a member of the Turkish Parliament.18 Mexican general José Francisco Gallardo was placed u ­ nder military arrest for calling for an ombudsman to investigate h ­ uman rights crimes committed by the Mexican military.19 Uighur businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer was charged by the Chinese government with providing secrets to foreigners when she was on her way to meet with US congressional researchers to talk about the conditions of Uighur Muslims.20 All t­ hese POCs knew that what they w ­ ere d ­ oing would generate the ire of the power­f ul, but they did it anyway. I was often asked how Amnesty knew ­whether its campaigns truly affected the release of prisoners. We certainly knew our appeals often irritated governments: a Sudanese official once wrote us that “it is continually observed . . . ​[that] your members’ letters arrive daily to this office which constitutes an obstacle to tackling our duties.”21 We smiled at that. And when



Prisoners of Conscience 33

they w ­ ere released, POCs often attested to the campaigns’ efficacy. When Wei Jingsheng, often called the “­Father of Chinese Democracy,” was exiled to the United States in 1997 a­ fter eigh­teen years in prison, he told me that though he had never received a single letter of the tens of thousands that had been sent on his behalf, he knew they w ­ ere arriving b ­ ecause, when they did, conditions of his confinement would improve. The light in his cell, usually turned on twenty-­four hours a day, for example, would be switched off. This mystified him ­until one day a guard slipped up and said, “Old Wei, you get so many letters.”22 So we had intimations of success but rarely direct proof. No government acknowledged forthrightly that they had been shamed into releasing a prisoner by the attention Amnesty International or o ­ thers had generated, but, on the other hand, imagine how many more po­liti­cal prisoners ­t here would be and how much worse their conditions of confinement if no one knew of them or spoke their names at all. Though I c­ an’t prove it, I think many h ­ uman rights defenders lived longer or are still alive t­oday ­because their public profiles, generated by multiple forms of recognition, including from Amnesty, made it more trou­ble than it was worth to kill them. I’m thinking, for example, of several I had the privilege to meet, such as Nataša Kandić, founder of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, who provided evidence against Bosnian Serbs to the International Criminal Court. Though she ner­vously smoked cigarette ­after cigarette as she told me her story, her resolve never faltered. Or Wangari Maathai, ­Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who maintained a smiling countenance when she spoke to our staff, despite being u ­ nder constant threat of physical harm 23 from her government. Or another Nobel laureate, Shirin Ebadi, an Ira­nian ­lawyer who regularly defended t­ hose accused of crimes against the state, including members of the Baha’i faith. In contrast to Maathai, Ebadi exhibited a somber mien for which she had good reason b ­ ecause eventually even her husband was forced to denounce her u ­ nder torture. Or Sergei Kovalev, a renowned Rus­sian biologist who had been sentenced to hard l­abor a­ fter he cofounded an Amnesty group in Moscow in 1974. Appointed h ­ uman rights commissioner by President Boris Yeltsin, he subsequently broke with Yeltsin ­after unabashedly criticizing Rus­sian h ­ uman rights crimes in Chechnya. Or Frank Mugisha, champion of LGBTQ+ rights in the wildly homophobic country of Uganda—­a physically slight man but morally a lion. P ­ eople like ­t hese made me proud to be a member of the h ­ uman race.

34 Chapter 2

I ­don’t mean to suggest that Amnesty alone was responsible for protecting them. Often what was more effective than our letters or emails or postings on social media was coordination with other wielders of power. Saad Eddin Ibrahim was freed from prison ­after Amnesty mobilized twenty-­six US senators and sixty-­one members of the House of Representatives to write Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak asking for his release. US embassies, be they u ­ nder Republican or Demo­cratic presidents, and many Eu­ro­pean embassies ­were often willing to make inquiries about prisoners whose names ­human rights organ­izations supplied them. US secretaries of state and even presidents, at least prior to Donald Trump, ­were sometimes willing to share lists of po­liti­cal prisoners about whom the United States had concerns when they met with foreign leaders. Some sixty thousand actions w ­ ere taken on behalf of Rebiya Kadeer, for example, but she was fi­nally released, prob­ably as a gesture of diplomatic courtesy, right before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Beijing in 2005. Nor w ­ ere public officials the only successful advocates for t­ hose ­u nder threat of ­human rights violations. Amina Lawal was scheduled to be stoned to death in Nigeria for committing adultery ­until Oprah Winfrey featured her case on American tele­v i­sion. When Koigi wa Wam­were, a prominent critic of autocratic K ­ enyan ruler Daniel arap Moi, visited AIUSA headquarters following his release from prison, he told us that Moi liked to quote the old ­Kenyan saying, “The voices of the frogs cannot keep the cows from drinking,” meaning that vocal objections alone could not persuade the more power­f ul to change their practices. But, said wa Wam­were with a knowing grin, when donor nations and institutions—­t he ones who supplied ­water to the c­ attle—­began questioning his imprisonment, the cows took notice and changed course.24 This ­doesn’t happen in ­every case of course. In some instances governments or special interests got rid of troublemakers, killing them or making them dis­appear rather than risk their becoming international celebrities. Two of the most tragic incidents during my years at Amnesty involved a twelve-­ year-­old Pakistani boy named Iqbal Masih and a brave Mexican ­lawyer named Digna Ochoa. Like many c­ hildren in Pakistan, Iqbal had been put to work at age four to weave carpets, often bound to the carpet loom with chains. When he was ten, he learned that such bonded l­abor was in fact illegal in Pakistan and,



Prisoners of Conscience 35

with the help of the Bonded L ­ abour Liberation Front, escaped the factory, went to school, and began educating other slave c­ hildren about their rights. It is estimated that he helped f­ree some three thousand kids from their ­owners.25 What is certain is that this ­little boy, less than four feet tall and weighing sixty pounds at age twelve, his growth having been stunted by the grueling nature of his childhood, became an out­spoken champion of enslaved ­children. I attended the 1994 dinner in Boston at which Reebok presented him its annual ­Human Rights Award, and I ­will never forget the joy and won­ der on his face as he rushed up to the dais to accept the award.26 From a dreary village and a soul-­destroying workplace in Pakistan, this young boy, who liked nothing better than watching Bugs Bunny cartoons, had been swept up into the glitter of a corporate gathering. “What Abraham Lincoln did for the slaves of Amer­i­ca, I want to do for the slaves of Pakistan,” he told us that night. He never got a chance. About a year l­ ater Iqbal was shot to death as he rode his bike with some friends. A local farmer was accused of the crime, but few p ­ eople in Pakistan believed that. Iqbal had been threatened repeatedly by the so-­called “carpet mafia” who had prob­ably seized the chance to eliminate a charismatic young critic. Digna Ochoa suffered a similar fate. She was a courageous h ­ uman rights ­lawyer as well as a nun who regularly pursued cases against Mexican police and military officials and defended the Zapatistas of Chiapas when they ­were accused of crimes against the state.27 Having been abducted and tortured and the subject of constant death threats, Digna took refuge in the United States in 2000 during which time the actor Martin Sheen and I presented her AIUSA’s Enduring Spirit Award in Los Angeles. It was a festive eve­ning; Digna felt safe, honored, and among friends. But like so many ­human rights advocates, she could not stay away from her community, no ­matter how much danger lurked ­t here. She returned to Mexico City in March 2001 and took up her work again, but this time she paid with her life. In October she was shot dead in her office, with wounds in her leg and her head and a note left warning her h ­ uman rights colleagues that a similar fate could befall them. Absurdly, Mexican officials tried to claim she had committed suicide—­ despite the note, the fatal bullet having entered the left side of her head though Digna was right-­handed, and the wound to her leg which, u ­ nder the suicide theory, must have been a practice shot! But then one ­ought not to underestimate the venality or folly of h ­ uman rights–­offending regimes. In China the

36 Chapter 2

state made the families of ­t hose it executed pay for the bullet that killed their loved one. When security officials in Nepal returned a po­liti­cal prisoner to his home, they insisted that his wife sign a return receipt for the “package.”

* * * It is ­really rather remarkable that over the years tens of thousands of ­people affiliated with Amnesty have experienced strong enough feelings of solidarity to try to help perfect strangers who find themselves u ­ nder duress. That is one of the most admirable ­things about the organ­ization. And yet the dynamics of rescue are not always as straightforward as they seem. Occasionally Amnesty activists would refer to a prisoner of conscience on whose case they had worked as “our prisoner.” They might adopt almost a possessive feeling ­toward the individual, though, if the case appeared to be stalled, they might get discouraged and request a “new prisoner.” With a few members it almost seemed as if they relied on “their” prisoner to inject meaning, honor, and drama into their own lives. When a POC is released, he or she often expresses enormous gratitude to ­t hose who have not forgotten them. Speaking to AIUSA staff and members, Koigi wa Wam­were put it poignantly: ­ ere are a lot of ­things that ­people take for granted. ­There was a time Th when ­people talked about freedom of movement and I ­didn’t r­ eally know what it meant ­until I was kept in solitary confinement for years. The freedom just to move about, even within prison walls, had been denied me. The freedom to be able to look up at the stars, I had been denied for such a long time. So when I thank you for returning my freedom, you prob­ably ­won’t be able to gauge the depth of my gratitude, precisely b ­ ecause you have never been denied t­ hese t­ hings. . . . ​ When one gives you freedom, one cannot give you a greater gift, and that is what you have given me.28 ­ ere w Th ­ asn’t a dry eye in the room, and every­one was thinking to one degree or another, “Damn, ­we’re good!” And we are! I’ve already noted the praiseworthiness of the generous Amnesty heart. But at the same time, all this o ­ ught to trigger reflection on the



Prisoners of Conscience 37

dynamics of rescue: of (mostly) white North Americans or Eu­ro­pe­ans seeing themselves as “saviors” of (mostly) persons of color from (mostly) regimes in the developing world. This dynamic carried the danger of reinforcing existing global power structures, duplicating the colonial trope of “civilizer” and “barbarian,” and trumpeting a bipolar morality. “I owe my very life to you” automatically put the “rescued” person in a one-­down position in relation to the “rescuer” and could feed a degree of self-­righteousness among us in Amnesty. It could place former POCs in a position of obligation that we had to be very careful not to exploit—­for fund­rais­ing purposes, for example. And it could make POCs into the bo­dhi­sat­tvas of the ­human rights movement. But they are not bo­dhi­sat­tvas, and they may or may not have “achieved Enlightenment.” Often POCs have been deeply traumatized and need not reverence but understanding and healing and space. ­After their release, they may sometimes engage in be­hav­ior or advocate po­liti­cal views at odds with Amnesty’s own values. Former Chinese POC Harry Wu, with whom AIUSA and I aligned closely in exposing Chinese ­labor camps (laogai) as well as the sale of the internal organs of executed prisoners, was accused t­oward the end of his life of both serious financial and sexual improprieties. Chen Guangcheng, a ­human rights l­awyer who had courageously pursued rights for ­women and laboring p ­ eople in China and, ­after his ­house arrest, had affected a dramatic escape to the US Embassy in Beijing in 2012 before being exiled to the United States, became an out­spoken opponent of abortion rights and a strong supporter of Donald Trump, even speaking at the 2020 Republican National Convention. No doubt the most notorious example is Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been hailed (by me, among many ­others29) as the very model of a h ­ uman rights heroine but who was completely discredited by her tolerance for her country’s genocide against the Rohingya population in Rakhine State—­a posture that did not prevent her from being arrested and charged with crimes by the Myanmar generals in 2021—­crimes of which she was convicted the next year. None of this is meant to disparage e­ ither the devotion of most Amnesty members or the integrity of the vast majority of h ­ uman rights defenders. It is only to say that even compassion is complicated.

CHAPTER 3

Holding the Whole World in Our Hands

A ­mother cat and her three kittens w ­ ere walking along the street one day when a large, vicious dog ran up, drooling and snarling. The kittens ­were terrified, but the ­mother cat just narrowed her eyes, arched her back, and hissed at the dog, “Bow wow! Bow wow!” The dog, startled, turned and ran away. Much relieved and very impressed, the kittens looked up at their m ­ other admiringly. “You see, my darlings,” the m ­ other cat instructed them, “that’s the advantage of knowing a second language.” I used to tell this story when I spoke around the country for Amnesty not only b ­ ecause fewer than 10 ­percent of multiple-­generation Americans ­were fluent in a second language (and that included me with my schoolboy French) but also b ­ ecause, as I’ve noted before, Americans’ attention to the world beyond our shores was distinctly underwhelming. In 1997 just 15 ­percent held passports.1 Two-­thirds said what happened in other countries had no impact on their lives.2 Even when Americans did pay attention to foreign affairs, h ­ uman rights ­were not seen as a particularly impor­tant issue. When asked in 1995 what the chief goal of US foreign policy should be, 85 ­percent said “stopping the flow of illegal drugs”; 83  ­percent said “protecting American jobs”; and only 34 ­percent said “promoting and defending ­human rights.”3 When I began working at Amnesty in 1994, it was an organ­ization that focused more on international than domestic m ­ atters, and it was of course a ­human rights organ­ization. How, then, to overcome American indifference? Doug Clifton, executive editor of the Miami Herald, a newspaper that did a relatively good job of covering foreign affairs, captured this dilemma perfectly



Holding the Whole World in Our Hands 39

in a candid memo he sent to his staff in the ­middle of the Bosnian War: “If anyone has an idea on what to do with the Bosnia story, I welcome it,” he began. I’m embarrassed to say I long ago s­ topped reading this story of enormous ­human tragedy and global consequence. Why is that? Some of it is my personal failure. I’m callous, shallow, parochial and maybe even stupid. But more of it may be my—­our—­professional failure. We dutifully report each day’s events, one a bit more horrible than the other, and pretty soon they all begin to look and sound alike. I h ­ aven’t ­really “read” a Bosnia story in two years. . . . ​Yet this is an impor­tant story that a newspaper must tell. I would argue that we must tell it in a substantially dif­fer­ent way than we have if we are to fulfill our obligation to inform readers about the impor­tant issues of the day. . . . ​I’m not sure readers cared so much that “terrified Muslims” w ­ ere “rounded up, deported,” as our headline and story reported. Yes, I care about man’s inhumanity to man, but I care more about ­whether this latest event brings the world or the U.S. closer to a brink. A reader—­even a high-­minded, liberal-­thinking one with a world view—­wants to know “What does this mean to ME?” If we ­can’t make that clear in type and visuals, the story becomes one of faraway strangers killing other strangers in cities with unpronounceable names.4 Much as I hated to admit it, I thought Clifton was right, and I saw only two solutions: first, to tell t­ hose “sentimental stories” in as dramatic and morally compelling a way as pos­si­ble, linking them to eye-­popping visuals and actions; and second, as I’ve said, to draw the connections Clifton called for between ­human rights violations and Americans’ self-­interest. Amnesty activists often excelled at the former—­staging street theater on Valentine’s Day at DuPont Circle in Washington, DC, for example, featuring a blood-­soaked bride descrying the diamond ring—­a “blood diamond”—­her groom had purchased for her that was financing the horrendous civil war in Sierra Leone. Neither of ­t hese approaches swayed large numbers of Americans to take up the cause of international ­human rights, however, to the same degree average citizens had rallied around other ­causes. The plight of Chinese dissidents in detention camps or environmental defenders in the Nigerian delta

40 Chapter 3

just felt too far away or abstract to claim average Americans’ attention, much less their concern. But that was not necessarily true of po­liti­cal or corporate leaders. Whereas foreign governments could often ignore ­human rights pleas with relative impunity, American politicians and international business leaders w ­ ere sometimes more responsive. This was not necessarily b ­ ecause they wanted to do the “right ­t hing,” though that was true of some of them; it was often ­because they could not be entirely certain w ­ hether failing to do the right t­ hing might eventually come back to bite them. Amnesty’s chief “competitor” among ­human rights NGOs was ­Human Rights Watch (HRW), which grew out of Helsinki Watch, founded in 1978 to monitor implementation of the Helsinki Accords. Among other t­ hings, the Accords, which w ­ ere signed by thirty-­seven countries, including the Soviet Union and all Eastern Eu­ro­pean (“Iron Curtain”) states except Albania, affirmed ­human rights and fundamental freedoms. Eventually Watch Committees ­were formed for similar purposes in the Amer­i­cas, Asia, Africa, and the ­Middle East, and in 1988 they all formally a­ dopted the inclusive name H ­ uman Rights Watch. Unlike Amnesty, HRW was an American-­based organ­ization and had no appreciable grassroots constituency. What it did have was robust and timely research documenting h ­ uman rights violations around the world, a highly effective media strategy, and deep connections with opinion leaders in philanthropy, politics, and the arts. Both its original director, Aryeh Neier, and its director during my years at Amnesty, Kenneth Roth, ­were hard-­nosed, hard-­driving, whip-­smart leaders who took no prisoners when it came to advancing ­human rights.5 ­Under their direction HRW, often beating Amnesty to the punch, issued ground-­breaking reports that invariably ended up in the New York Times and other top media outlets and w ­ ere then used by the organ­ ization to pressure and shame foreign governments and US po­liti­cal and corporate officials into taking action. To a large extent such pressure was a form of Kabuki theater not only on HRW’s part but on that of the entire h ­ uman rights movement as well. Given the relatively small constituency for ­human rights in the country and the fact that even Amnesty could mobilize only a ­limited number of citizens, the po­ liti­cal consequences of ignoring a h ­ uman rights plea w ­ ere usually inconsequential, as was the impact on a corporation’s bottom line. But public and



Holding the Whole World in Our Hands 41

business officials ­couldn’t be entirely certain of that, and both tended to shy away from unnecessary conflict in any case. Politicians and corporations are exquisitely sensitive to their public images, and the fact that relatively few ­people ever cared about what was g­ oing on in an obscure country overseas meant that a handful of communications to a member of Congress or corporate CEO on the ­human rights situation in Bhutan, say, could seem like a deluge. Moreover, corporations liked meddlesome shareholder resolutions on their annual stockholder meeting agendas even less than politicians liked being confronted by an angry grand­mother raving against Chinese prison camps at their hometown meet and greets. The paucity of leverage that ­human rights activists could themselves wield in most cases, however, meant that making alliances with other institutions of power became especially impor­tant. The movement against apartheid in South Africa, for example, had been materially aided by international campaigns encouraging divestment in South African corporations like DeBeers or boycotts of sporting events in which South Africa was scheduled to take part. Students played a major role in the anti-­sweatshop campaign against Nike. And celebrities regularly used their visibility and reach to highlight ­human rights abuses, as George Clooney and Don Cheadle did with genocide in Darfur, Sudan. As a member of Congress once admitted to me, “Holly­ wood stars like to hobnob with po­liti­cal figures ­because it makes them feel power­f ul, and we in Washington like to meet Hollywood stars ­because it makes us feel glamorous . . . ​a nd God knows we could use some glamour around ­here.” This was one reason Amnesty regularly partnered with “big names” to amplify its message (see Chapter 7). With ­these relatively fragile arrows in our quiver—­reliable research, touching tales, appeals to conscience and/or self-­interest, the threat of bad publicity, a reputation for power that far exceeded the real­ity, and occasionally a formidable partner on our side—­the h ­ uman rights movement went out to slay the dragons of iniquity. During my twelve years at Amnesty ­t hose dragons seemed to proliferate at an astounding rate.

* * * Each year Amnesty published an annual report on the h ­ uman rights situation in approximately 150 of the world’s 194 countries.6 Though the organ­ization

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never rated countries on their ­human rights rec­ords (was it worse to execute ten ­people or torture fifty?), the report did chart the direction in which ­human rights crimes w ­ ere trending. Over my years at Amnesty, the number of countries holding prisoners of conscience or using the death penalty declined while the number in which we found instances of torture or disappearances increased.7 Naturally it was impossible for me to keep the details of all 150 countries’ ­human rights rec­ords in my head at the same time. One of my pre­de­ces­sors at Amnesty, I was told, had a practice, when asked about a country with whose ­human rights rec­ord he was not thoroughly acquainted, of muttering “Terrible prisons, terrible prisons”—­a pretty safe bet. (I was reminded that the British author Stephen Potter counseled that if you ­were ever at a loss for words at a cocktail party, you could appear erudite by simply remarking on any subject at hand, “Yes, that’s true. But not in the south.”) A day or two a­ fter the annual report was issued e­ very spring, I would go on Voice of Amer­i­ca and take calls from all over the world asking me to declaim about one country or another. Fortunately, this was radio, and so I was able to quickly flip to the relevant page of the report, scan the headlines on the country at hand, and thereby appear remarkably conversant with ­human rights cases in Mali, Kazakhstan, or Nepal. For the most part, only two or three key countries or situations dominated the public discourse about h ­ uman rights at any one time. One of t­ hese 8 was almost always China. Given the ferocious repression fostered in China by Xi Jinping, to say nothing of the deep freeze in current US-­China relations, the era of the 1990s and early 2000s seems almost quaint and pacific in comparison. But China managed even then to win the championship when it came to the sheer number of victims of h ­ uman rights crimes. Amnesty documented at least 3,000 po­liti­cal prisoners; tens of thousands of p ­ eople in so-­called “re-­education through ­labor,” or forced ­labor, camps; widespread crackdowns on Christians who ­were not part of official state churches; Tibetan Buddhists who w ­ ere suspected of sympathizing with the much-­hated Dalai Lama (“a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” according to the Chinese government); and Uighur Muslims accused of “separatism” for wanting to maintain their cultural traditions.9 Torture was endemic to Chinese prisons, and forced abortion or sterilization commonplace in the general population. In 1996 a minimum of 4,367 ­people w ­ ere executed—­more



Holding the Whole World in Our Hands 43

than all t­ hose executed in the rest of the world combined—­often for such petty crimes as stealing a cultural artifact worth thirty-­six dollars or sticking pins in the buttocks of bicycle riders.10 Sometimes the executions ­were carried out in sports arenas or auditoriums in front of large crowds.11 Amnesty representatives w ­ ere not permitted to enter China; the closest we could get was Hong Kong, where t­ here was even an Amnesty International section. In April 1997, three months before the “handover” of Hong Kong from the British to the Chinese, I de­cided to go to the territory to educate myself so I could speak with some authority back in the United States should the transfer of power not go smoothly.12 Hong Kong is one of the world’s most fascinating cities: thirty stories of ancient bamboo construction scaffolding propped up against the most modern glass skyscrapers; En­glish as the common language of a population that was 98  ­percent Chinese; sophisticated international corporations whose buildings had been sited according to the princi­ples of feng shui; a culture that follows both the Western and Chinese lunar calendars (1997 was the Year of the Ox); crowds as prolific as in any ­great city but an urban setting punctuated by some of the most glorious parks and public spaces in the world. Despite t­ hese contrasts, t­ here was one t­ hing that characterized every­one I talked with in 1997—­NGOs, journalists, and politicians of all stripes—­and that was anxiety. That G ­ reat Britain had l­ ittle choice but to transfer Hong Kong to China, given the way the territory had been acquired and the diminished strength of the British Empire by the late twentieth c­ entury, did not make the deed more felicitous to ­t hose who cherished long-­established freedoms.13 Most ­people looked with considerable skepticism on China’s commitment to the concept of “one nation, two systems,”14 but at the end of the day, if China chose to violate its commitment to preserve the traditional protection of rights that Hong Kong had enjoyed ­under the British, ­t here was ­little that anyone outside of the city, including the United Kingdom, could do about it. It was promising of course that Hong Kong had a vibrant pro-­ democracy movement, but Hong Kong law ensured that pro-­democracy legislators would remain a minority in the legislature and the chief executive of the city a pawn of Beijing’s for years to come. In retrospect, it is surprising that it took twenty-­two years, that is, ­until 2019, for China to fundamentally breach Hong Kong’s freedoms. Many of ­t hose democracy activists I met (or their spawn) are now in prison.

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One reason the outside world could do so ­little to protect Hong Kong or address China’s many ­human rights violations was ­because international trade and investment had taken distinct pre­ce­dence over all other concerns except security by the late 1990s. As the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong candidly told me, “Be it representatives of the US government or of the business community, our approach to ­human rights in meetings with the Chinese is to talk through what­ever our agenda is and then, as we are ­going out the door, to shout back over our shoulders, ‘Oh, and ­human rights too!’ ”15 That assessment was prob­ably not entirely fair, but ­human rights appeared to fall low on the list of concerns the US government levied in relation to China. No one reflected this ambivalence more than Bill Clinton. I met Bill Clinton five or six times during his ­career. The first two instances w ­ ere in Boston when he was governor of Arkansas and gearing up to run for the Demo­cratic nomination for president. I had been asked to provide the prayer before dinner at an event at which Clinton was the keynote speaker. You would have thought that prayer had brought Jesus back for the Second Coming for all the praise Clinton lavished on it ­after I sat down. Two days ­later, when I met him again at a private reception, he was still commending my praying chops. “Goodness,” I thought to myself, “that man is good.” As many ­people have observed, Clinton was arguably the most intellectually astute of our modern presidents and certainly the best retail politician among them. Each of the times I spoke with him ­after he was in the White House, he called me by name, heralded Amnesty (even though we ­were constantly criticizing him), and listened intently to my “wisdom,” though I am pretty certain he barely knew who I was.16 Despite ­t hese many skills, he had a decidedly mixed rec­ord on ­human rights.17 I ­don’t doubt that on some level Clinton cared about ­human rights in China, and certainly he appointed two of the best assistant secretaries of state for democracy, ­human rights, and ­labor who ever served in that position: John Shattuck (1993–1998) and then Harold Hongju Koh (1998–2001). But Clinton was handicapped by two false tenets he had ­adopted, one rhetorical and one philosophical. The rhetorical tenet was to frame the issue of ­human rights in China as a question of ­either “engaging” China or “isolating” it. No one I knew in the ­human rights movement ever thought that isolating China, the second or



Holding the Whole World in Our Hands 45

third largest economy in the world, depending on how you mea­sured it, and a significant military power even in t­ hese years, was e­ ither feasible or desirable. What we ­were looking for was “strategic engagement” that integrated ­human rights more consistently into the larger matrix of US-­China relations. For Clinton, however, posing the issue in zero-­sum terms made the h ­ uman rights ­angle appear more unreasonable and hence less potent, even though when the United States confronted China over other issues—­t he pirating of US intellectual property or the sale of nuclear technology to Pakistan, or even when it sailed the Seventh Fleet into the Straits of Taiwan—­t he action was never described as seeking to “isolate” China. This rhetorical ploy was complemented by a philosophical assumption about the nature of history. In 1994 Clinton announced that contrary to commitments he had made during the 1992 presidential campaign, he was g­ oing to delink trade and h ­ uman rights, granting China most favored nation trade status without requiring the annual scrutiny of China’s h ­ uman rights rec­ord that had previously taken place.18 This decision removed a useful vehicle the ­human rights community had employed to keep eyes focused on the kind of violations I’ve described. Perhaps to salve his conscience, Clinton ­adopted a conviction, common in the western business community, that economic growth in China would inevitably lead to greater po­liti­cal freedom. He articulated this faith in 1996 in response to a question at a press conference about that year’s US State Department ­human rights report—an annual compilation of the ­human rights rec­ords of dozens of countries around the world—­which had noted that no known dissidents ­were still active in China, that all dissenting voices had been effectively silenced. How could he defend his policy of delinking ­human rights from trade in the light of this embarrassing finding by his own government? This was his answer: “I believe that the impulse of [Chinese] society and the nature of the economic change ­will work together along with the availability of information from the outside world to increase the spirit of liberty over time. I ­don’t think ­there is any way that [China] can hold back that, just as eventually the Berlin Wall fell. I just think it’s inevitable [emphasis added].”19 This response absolutely fascinated me. It proved that Clinton was as much of an economic determinist as Karl Marx. But even the Marxists recognized that despite the power of the dialectic to shape history, sometimes it needed a push. The Berlin Wall did not fall just b ­ ecause some mysterious

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t­ hing called the “spirit of liberty” had worked its won­ders. It did not fall ­because the United States opened trade ties with East Germany or its sponsor, the Soviet Union. It fell through a combination of consistent criticism from the West regarding Soviet and Eastern Eu­ro­pean repression, economic and military competition, internal rot, and a man named Gorbachev. China had its own singular characteristics of course, and h ­ uman rights advocates often acted as if ­human rights could be pursued in­de­pen­dent of other interests—­economic and security interests above all—­t hat had to be considered when dealing with another power­f ul state. But divorcing t­ hose interests from ­human rights has proven short-­sighted. Not only has it not resulted in that “increase . . . ​of liberty over time,” which Clinton thought inevitable, but the lack of transparency in Chinese society—­t he muzzling of the press, the stifling of dissenting voices, the fear of speaking truth to power—­has had dire consequences not just for China but for the world as well, most recently, as I’ve noted, in the form of the coronavirus, which might well have been detected and warned about ­earlier in a freer polis. I did not relish aligning myself with right-­wing forces in the United States that thought “Communist China” the source of all evil on the planet, but the massive numbers and gruesome nature of China’s violations sometimes made that inevitable. In May 1995, for example, I testified before Senator Jesse Helms’s Committee on Foreign Relations about the use of organs transplanted from executed prisoners. I despised the racist Helms, but China’s practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners without their prior consent and, even more ominously, the likelihood, given the lucrativeness of the market in healthy organs, that China was executing p ­ eople at least in part in order to harvest their organs, was repugnant as well. When combined with the utter lack of due pro­cess standards in China, this raised the possibility that many innocent ­people w ­ ere being killed to satisfy a profit motive.20 Prisoners whose corneas w ­ ere to be harvested w ­ ere shot through the heart; t­ hose whose internal organs w ­ ere needed ­were shot through the head. Fortunately, most of our allies in the movement to improve h ­ uman rights in China w ­ ere far more reputable than Helms and none more so than the Dalai Lama. ­Today the movement to “­free Tibet” has taken a backseat in public consciousness to outrage over the treatment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province in western China, but in the 1990s and early 2000s, Tibet was front and center for ­those who wanted to confront injustice. This was in good mea­



Holding the Whole World in Our Hands 47

sure ­because of the personality and omnipresence of Tenzin Gyatso, the ­fourteenth Dalai Lama and spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism who has been in exile in Dharamsala, India, since 1959. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is among the most charming world leaders I have ever been privileged to meet. His eyes sparkle, his aphorisms enchant, and he wears a look of perpetual bemusement on his face. On one occasion, ­after one supplicant in our group had ravished him with praise, he looked at us with barely repressed jollity. “­Don’t forget,” he said, “Dalai Lama use toilet just like you!” Merry as he appeared, his burden was g­ reat. The Chinese government was flooding Tibet with Han Chinese, thereby trying to dilute the influence of native Tibetans. It did every­t hing it could to discourage the practice of Tibetan culture. Knowing of the reverence in which the Dalai Lama was held and fearful of a revolt, it regarded him as a “terrorist” and not only refused to meet with him but extracted a price for any other prominent individuals who did so. This is why in 1997, for example, when His Holiness went to the White House, he met with Vice President Al Gore while President Clinton just happened to “drop by” for twenty minutes (“My goodness, look who’s ­here!”), thereby avoiding a formal appointment on the president’s calendar.21 Amnesty’s relationship with the Dalai Lama was a complicated one. On the one hand, AI took no position on the po­liti­cal status of Tibet, regarding that as outside its purview. It was, however, keenly attuned to h ­ uman rights violations committed against Tibetans, and the Dalai Lama had signed one of AIUSA’s fund­rais­ing appeals, thus linking the organ­ization to His Holiness rather indelibly. When the six-­year-­old child whom the Dalai Lama had designated as the next Panchen Lama, the person second in spiritual authority to the Dalai Lama himself, was kidnapped in 1995 by the Chinese government and vanished, AIUSA held a press conference at which a Tibetan boy of the same age spoke on the Panchen Lama’s behalf. None of this endeared Amnesty to the Chinese authorities, and in 1996, when the organ­ ization launched an international campaign against China’s h ­ uman rights abuses, the Amnesty staff members who had researched the campaign report ­were taken into custody in Bangkok at the behest of the Chinese government before they could speak at the press event at which the report was to be released. (Fortunately, Amnesty’s secretary general, also in Bangkok, managed to elude arrest and pre­sent the report unencumbered.)

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The person in the Dalai Lama’s orbit to whom we in AIUSA w ­ ere closest was the actor Richard Gere. A practicing Buddhist since the 1970s, Gere was a devotee of His Holiness and the most prominent American to take up the Tibetan cause. Like many who make their living disappearing into roles, he was a shy and private person in the presence of strangers. ­After meeting with him one day at AIUSA’s headquarters in New York City to discuss a Tibet-­ related proj­ect he was funding for us, I asked him if he would mind strolling around the office with me for a few minutes just to thank many of the line staff who rarely got to interact with the many celebrities with whom we worked. I could tell this was prob­ably the last ­thing he wanted to do—­perhaps I should have asked him to double his contribution in exchange for skipping the walk-­a round—­but he was gracious and agreed. You can imagine how startled and then thrilled a finance clerk or communications assistant was to look up from their desks to find Richard Gere sticking out his hand! In contrast to a few other movie stars, Richard was the real t­ hing when it came to caring about ­human rights—at least ­human rights in Tibet and China. (I could never interest him in other parts of the world.) He showed up when he was asked to, he had the facts at his fingertips, and he sacrificed some enticing parts in movies b ­ ecause the studios w ­ ere afraid the Chinese would bar his films from its well-­paying market.22 One movie that certainly never made it to the Chinese screen was Red Corner (1997). (I’m not sure how many Americans saw it ­either since it garnered only a 30 ­percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) Richard starred as an American businessman arrested for murder in China who is eventually exonerated a­ fter his female l­awyer proves his innocence and uncovers the real culprits: corrupt high-­level Chinese officials. At Richard’s behest, Amnesty received the proceeds for the premiere of the movie in Washington, but what interested me more was the actress, Bai Ling, who played the ­lawyer and who had gained significant public visibility when ­People magazine named her one of the “fifty most beautiful p ­ eople in the world” in 1998. As a Chinese-­born performer, Bai had been widely acclaimed in China for her role in a movie called The Shining Arc. I thought she might be a very effective spokesperson about ­human rights in China, and over lunch in Los Angeles I tried to convince her to help us. She considered it seriously but eventually de­cided it would be too dangerous for her m ­ other and s­ ister who w ­ ere still in China.



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Other than Patrick Stewart, about whom I’ll have more to say in Chapter  7, no celebrity was more consistently helpful to us than Richard. In May 1994, for example, he and I, along with a Tibetan victim of torture named Tsultrim Dolma, held a press conference at which we displayed the very instruments of torture that China used in its prison camps. They had been smuggled out of the country by the Dutch AI section. I purposely d ­ idn’t ask how the Dutch had done it, but the torture tools provided exactly the kind of visuals I referred to e­ arlier as being so impor­tant in attracting attention to ­human rights crimes, if only momentarily. Mea­sured by the state of ­human rights in China ­today, I ­can’t say that Amnesty or the h ­ uman rights movement at large has much of anything to crow about. Over the past twenty-­five years some dissidents have been freed and some academic critics of the regime left alone b ­ ecause of the attention we shone on their cases. Perhaps the crackdown on Hong Kong would have come ­earlier had we not been vocal, and domestically China is in fact a more volatile place than it appears, t­ here being dozens of disputes ­every year at the local level about such t­ hings as economic inequities or environmental degradation. But China is too power­f ul a country and its leaders too fearful of democracy to yield ground on ­human rights without concerted international pressure and perhaps not even then.23 This d ­ oesn’t mean that it should be left to its own devices. Quite the contrary: it means that per­sis­tent documenting of violations is more impor­tant than ever. It also means, however, that success ­will prob­ably need to await a new regime or even a new system of government. In the meantime, h ­ uman rights actors must remember that only occasionally do we act in the interests of immediate reward but more often in an effort to rec­ord and, if we are lucky, eventually to redeem the tragedies of history.

* * * Among ­t hose tragedies are wars, and wars ­t here ­were aplenty during my twelve years at Amnesty—­two in the Balkans (Bosnia and Kosovo), as well as wars in Af­ghan­i­stan and Iraq, plus internal armed conflicts in Colombia, East Timor, Israel/Palestine, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Uganda, and elsewhere. Wars always produce h ­ uman rights violations, and each of ­t hese wars kept us busy.

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Having learned its lesson in Rwanda about the need for a rapid response to mass casualties, Amnesty dispatched a research mission to Tuzla, Bosnia-­ Herzegovina, within weeks of the July 1995 slaughter of Bosniak Muslims by the Bosnian Serb Army in Srebrenica. The leader of that mission was Curt Goering, se­nior deputy executive director of AIUSA, who along with two colleagues interviewed about two hundred of the ten thousand refugees, mostly ­women and ­children, who had fled from Srebrenica to refugee camps in Tuzla. To get to the camps from Split, Croatia, where they had rendezvoused with one another, the del­e­ga­tion had to avoid ongoing shelling in the area and navigate crude mountain roads through rocks and crevasses.24 Their report was one of the first definitive accounts of the massacre of what they estimated to be at least four thousand Bosniak men and boys—­t he number turned out to be closer to seven thousand—by forces of General Ratko Mladić ­under the Bosnian Serb po­liti­cal leadership of Dr. Radovan Karadžić and in collaboration with Serb president Slobodan Milošević.25 Once again, as in Rwanda, the United Nations had proven utterly ineffectual in stopping the ethnic cleansing despite the presence of a Dutch peacekeeping force charged with protecting the alleged “safe haven” in Srebrenica.26 A few weeks a­ fter the Amnesty mission returned home, the Bosnian Serb Army intentionally bombed the marketplace in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, killing forty-­t hree ­people. Two days l­ater a NATO bombing campaign forced the parties into peace talks, which resulted in the Dayton Accord ending the war. Th ­ ose talks ­were brokered by Richard Holbrooke, US assistant secretary of state for Eu­ro­pean and Eurasian affairs. Richard Holbrooke was one of the most fascinating characters to ever serve as an American diplomat, as attested to by the fact that he is one of the few ­people in the foreign ser­v ice to have warranted a 550-­page biography, even though he never achieved his dream of becoming secretary of state.27 Holbrooke was both audacious and brilliant. He was also very kind to me. I met him in 2001 through his wife, the author and h ­ uman rights activist Kati Marton. Hoping that she and her husband would host a book launch party for my first h ­ uman rights book, In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending H ­ uman Rights Benefits Us All (Beacon), I asked Kati to lunch, and she chose Café des Artistes on West 67th Street run by her fellow Hungarian émigré George Lang.28 On that occasion I made one of the worst faux pas of my life when, spying ABC News anchor Peter Jennings entering the restaurant, Kati said,



Holding the Whole World in Our Hands 51

“Why, ­t here’s Peter.” Impressed that they ­were on a first-­name basis and always looking for an entrée to someone in the media who might promote Amnesty, I replied, “Oh, do you know him?” ­There was a long pause, and then Kati made one of the most gracious remarks I have ever received: “It’s so refreshing being with someone who d ­ oesn’t run in my circle,” she said. “Yes, I know him. He is my former husband.” Despite my stupidity and poor preparation for our lunch, Marton and Holbrooke hosted the party at their apartment in the Dakota. Five minutes before the event was to begin, Holbrooke took up the book, skimmed it, and then gave a completely accurate ten-­minute synopsis of its thesis to the gathered guests, which spoke ­either to his quickness or to the book’s lack of originality. “My ­mother loved Amnesty,” he told me on another occasion, “and made me promise I’d support ­human rights.” Among the provisions he negotiated for the Dayton Accord was Annex 6, which committed the parties to enforce fourteen key h ­ uman rights.29 Of course, committing to ­human rights on paper is far dif­fer­ent from realizing them in practice, and one of the parties to the Accord was Slobodan Milošević, the author of some of the worst crimes committed during the war. In 1993 the United Nations had established the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugo­slavia (ICTY) in The Hague to try ­t hose accused of such crimes. In order to do so, the tribunal needed to get its hands on the accused, and the three most notorious—­Milošević, Karadžić, and Mladić—­ remained at large, Milošević still being president of Serbia. For years a­ fter Dayton, Amnesty and H ­ uman Rights Watch pressed NATO, which had troops in the region, to take Karadžić and Mladić into custody. NATO resisted, claiming such action would jeopardize the peace pro­cess and put its soldiers at risk.30 This was like saying a domestic police force ­ought to give a murderer a pass b ­ ecause taking him into custody might rile up the neighbors and be dangerous. Karadžić, who, it turned out, had frequently passed through NATO checkpoints, was fi­nally taken into custody in 2008 by Ser­ bian security forces and extradited to The Hague. A similar fate befell Mladić in 2011. Both ­were ultimately convicted of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. Milošević fared differently. In 2000 he was defeated in a bid for reelection by a combination of forces, including a student-­led organ­ization called Otpor. Drawing on princi­ples of strategic nonviolent re­sis­tance championed by the

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po­liti­cal scientist Gene Sharp, Otpor used e­ very tactic from street theater, to ridicule (“He’s finished!”), to blockades of highways by bulldozers to consolidate the opposition and vote Milošević out of office.31 A year l­ater, u ­ nder pressure from the United States, he was sent to The Hague, although he escaped justice by ­dying in his cell in 2005 before the completion of his trial. If wars can ever be said to produce beneficial by-­products, the Bosnian war provided more than its share. The nonviolent removal of Milošević from office served as something of a model for the subsequent “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine and even the Arab Spring. The United States, the Eu­ ro­pean Union, and international financial institutions all used their power, albeit tardily, to force the extradition of previously power­f ul war criminals. The conviction of t­ hose criminals by the ICTY strengthened the credibility of international justice mechanisms. Moreover, by finding other defendants guilty of sexual vio­lence committed during the course of war, the ICTY established for the first time that rape is a war crime—­a category into which, astonishingly, it had not previously fallen.32 Fi­nally, I would cite one more salutary effect of the Bosnian War (though I know this w ­ ill be a controversial one), and that was the war in Kosovo—­not the war itself but the fact that NATO undertook armed intervention to stop a humanitarian crisis. For historical reasons, Kosovo had been a sacred place to Serbs, even though its population was overwhelmingly Albanian, and Kosovo had been granted constitutional autonomy within Serbia. Seeking to reassert his strongman credentials following the end of the Bosnian War, Milošević began encroaching on Kosovo’s autonomy in 1998, thereby prompting an in­de­pen­dent militia called the Kosovo Liberation Army to begin provocations against Serbian targets in the region. Milošević took t­ hese forays as excuse to launch a massive crackdown on Kosovar Albanians, which ultimately killed about ten thousand and displaced up to one million—­close to half of its population. ­After peace talks (conducted once again in good mea­sure by Richard Holbrooke) broke down, NATO, well aware of the international community’s failure to protect innocents in the Bosnian War, began a bombing campaign that eventually included Belgrade before Milošević agreed to peace terms. The lesson of Rwanda, as far as I was concerned, was that when it comes to genocide and mass killings, failure to act may carry as ­great a moral risk as military intervention. Such intervention ­ought to be deployed rarely, but, if the conditions I described in Chapter 1 are met, as I personally thought they



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­ ere in Kosovo, intervention is justified, if not required. I never said that pubw licly, however, given the restrictions of Amnesty’s policy. In fact, when NATO bombed the headquarters of Serbian Radio Tele­vi­sion in order to halt Serb propaganda, Amnesty labeled the attack, which killed sixteen civilians, a war crime. The ICTY got wind of Amnesty’s impending charge and preempted it by announcing that NATO had nothing to answer for. This put Amnesty in a tough spot: it disagreed with the tribunal but ­didn’t want in any way to discredit its work, and so ­didn’t press the m ­ atter as forcefully as it might have.33 In 2000 the In­de­pen­dent International Commission on Kosovo reported its findings to the United Nations. They paralleled my own view. The commission concluded that “the NATO intervention was . . . ​i llegal but legitimate.” It was illegal b ­ ecause it did not receive approval from the UN Security Council, but it was legitimate ­because all diplomatic ave­nues had been exhausted and t­ here was no other way to stop the killings and atrocities in Kosovo.34 Despite that, NATO’s action was not popu­lar among US foreign policy mavens though 62 ­percent of the American ­people approved of it.35 I was curious why the Kosovo War, undertaken almost solely to stop mass killing, attracted so many critics among the foreign policy establishment while George H. W. Bush’s Persian Gulf War of 1990–91, designed to roll back Saddam Hussein’s incursion into Kuwait and protect the Kuwaiti oil fields, was so widely lauded. Both interventions achieved their objectives relatively quickly, but the United States and its allies sustained 290 casualties in the Persian Gulf War with at least 60,000 Iraqi deaths while no NATO soldier and only around 500 Serbs died in the Kosovo conflict.36 I suspected I knew the answer to my question—­t hat economics trumps ­human rights e­ very time—­but a few months a­ fter the end of the Kosovo conflict, I had the opportunity to put it directly to General Wesley Clark, NATO commander in Kosovo, when I met him at a conference. Clark is a handsome, compact man, with a crisp, precise military bearing. It was obvious that my question had hit a nerve. “It’s ­because Clinton ceded the Pentagon to the Republicans when he appointed [former Republican US senator William] Cohen as secretary of defense,” Clark told me, implying that Republicans supported the Republican president’s response to aggression on geo-­economic grounds but not the Demo­cratic president’s intervention on humanitarian grounds. “Clinton had to go through four generals before he could find one who was willing to fight the war in Kosovo, and that was me,” Clark added.

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I was struck by his bitterness. In return for having won a war, taken no casualties of his own, and saved an untold number of lives among Kosovar Albanians, he had in his view been badly treated by the press and the Pentagon.37

* * * The politics of war are complicated for h ­ uman rights ­people. The right wing opposes humanitarian military intervention ­because it sees no national interest implicated in such action and resists subordinating American military resources to international purposes. The left wing opposes intervention ­because it mistrusts almost every­thing the United States and its military does and sees h ­ uman rights as a cover for neo­co­lo­nial­ism. Many h ­ uman rights organ­izations, including Amnesty, as I have said, refused to take a position for or against military action to stop ­human rights violations for fear of being labeled warmongers, allies of invidious interests, or complicit in war crimes. Moralists regarded such refusal to commit to a position as too cute by half and failure to intervene in the face of genocide as a repudiation of “Never again!” When the UN World Summit of 2005 a­ dopted the “Responsibility to Protect,” committing member states to intervene, even with force if necessary, to stop genocide and similar crimes, it put h ­ uman rights NGOs on the spot. If the United Nations was theoretically committed to intervention—­even if it turned out to be more theory than commitment—­could organ­izations like Amnesty refuse to give their advice in the face of mass slaughter? Navigating ­t hese complex dynamics around ­human rights and war was made even more difficult for me by falsehoods spread by left-­wing propagandists. In June 1999, the newsletter Counterpunch asserted that I and other ­human rights leaders had met with Assistant Secretary of State Harold Koh “as the US stepped up its bombing raids in Yugo­slavia” and that Amnesty and I had “hopped to State’s tune” in supporting the Kosovo War.38 This was completely untrue. I had not even laid eyes on Harold Koh at the time I was alleged to have swallowed his Kosovo Kool-­Aid. Further, I never shared my private approval of NATO’s intervention with anyone, and Amnesty as an organ­ization certainly never ratified it. The one ­t hing Counterpunch got right was a reference to Amnesty’s error in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War in 1990 when it confirmed the



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charge by a young Kuwaiti w ­ oman that Iraqi soldiers w ­ ere removing Kuwaiti babies from incubators and killing them. George H. W. Bush and his associates cited this report repeatedly as evidence of Saddam Hussein’s brutality, but the young ­woman turned out to be the ­daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and the charges proved false. Amnesty corrected its ­mistake, but this made its leadership even more sensitive to any misuse by the US or allied governments of Amnesty’s research. Since 9/11, ele­ments within the US government had been ­eager to use the terrorist attacks as a reason to target Iraq despite the lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein had collaborated with al-­Qaeda. That impulse, coupled with a conviction—­later found to be spurious—­t hat Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, provided the rationale for intervention. Apparently wanting to bolster the case, however, and reinforce humanitarian reasons for its proposed action, the United States and its allies began citing Saddam Hussein’s atrocious ­human rights rec­ord as an additional f­actor. In December 2002, for instance, the British government, standing squarely with the American administration, issued a twenty-­three-­page report drawing on research provided over the years by Amnesty and other h ­ uman rights groups describing a wide range of h ­ uman rights violations in Iraq.39 This put Amnesty in a delicate position once again. Th ­ ere was no question that Saddam Hussein was one of the world’s g­ reat tyrants whose regime had committed mass atrocities against its own citizens, but the Reagan administration had stood by him, its then ally in his war with Iran in 1988 and ignored the plight of the Iraqi Kurds. All subsequent sanctions against Iraq stemmed not from h ­ uman rights concerns but from the country’s 2001 invasion of Kuwait and the suspicion that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. It was more than a touch con­ve­nient that George W. Bush and his collaborators w ­ ere suddenly championing h ­ uman rights just as they sought to justify a military incursion. As I put it on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, “The [US and British] governments often use h ­ uman rights like a bad cook uses a spice. ­They’re sprinkled on at the last minute to justify some other . . . ​motives.” 40 But Amnesty’s unwillingness to take a position one way or the other on the legitimacy of the war left us vulnerable to the charge, articulated a few years ­later in another left-­wing publication, New Statesman, that we had favored Bush’s “pre-­emptive war” when nothing could have been further from the truth.41

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Dealing in subtleties had never been the media’s forte, and ­human rights law often demanded intellectual suppleness. This was illustrated dramatically in 2003 when Saddam Hussein was taken into custody by US forces. “No one who cares about ­human rights can be anything but grateful for [that] fact,” I said in an interview with Salon, citing his ­human rights crimes, but I also called for him to be “tried before a responsible tribunal . . . ​[that is] seen by the world as having been fair and equitable.” 42 Unfortunately the US-­backed Co­ali­tion Provisional Authority established an Iraqi Special Tribunal that did not meet international due pro­cess standards. Saddam Hussein was convicted and executed in December 2006.

* * * While the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq received widespread media attention, many other conflicts with profound ­human rights implications raged on during my years at Amnesty. Some of them ­were ones on which we could have ­little impact. The Lord’s Re­sis­tance Army, for example, operating in East Africa ­under the maniacal leadership of Joseph Kony, sometimes called “Africa’s David Koresh” a­ fter the leader of the Branch Davidians at Waco, was notorious for its kidnapping of ­children to become soldiers and sex slaves. In fact, ­children made up something like 90 ­percent of its “soldiers.” Kony was not someone who was susceptible to the entreaties of h ­ uman rights organ­ izations, and Amnesty had few tools at its disposal to stop his rampages. (As of 2022, he is still at large.) In other contexts, however, we found means to address h ­ uman rights prob­ lems, at least temporarily. Among the most brutal conflicts was the civil war in Sierra Leone. The rebel Revolutionary United Front became infamous for chopping off the hands and limbs of its alleged adversaries, most of them civilians. Nearly a hundred p ­ eople w ­ ere being sheltered for more than two weeks in the small office of Amnesty Sierra Leone in the capital city of Freetown. Eventually the office was overrun, ransacked, and burned by United Front soldiers. ­People ­were stripped naked to ensure they had no valuables before they ­were mutilated or killed. Five AI leaders w ­ ere murdered; ­others had their eyes cut out.43 ­These atrocities w ­ ere fueled in good mea­sure by the diamond trade in the country and in neighboring Liberia. That trade provided ­human rights advocates a point of leverage ­because, while the raw diamonds ­were mined in West



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Africa, they w ­ ere cut and refined by large merchandisers such as DeBeers in South Africa and marketed through Antwerp, Belgium, the so-­called diamond capital of the world. We felt if we could convince the diamond industry that it would pay a high price for ignoring the sourcing of its diamonds and the bloodshed underwritten by its trade, the Revolutionary United Front might be deprived of the funding it needed to buy arms and maintain its combatants. The ­human rights organ­ization Global Witness took the lead in trying to restrict the sale of what came to be called “blood diamonds,” but with its grassroots membership Amnesty played an impor­tant role too. A ­ fter viewing a dramatic flash animation that depicted a young ­woman sporting an engagement diamond only to have her hand severed, young Amnesty members would go into jewelry stores in vari­ous countries around the world and ask the merchants if they ­were selling blood diamonds. At first many of the retailers had no idea what their “customers” ­were talking about, but they knew it d ­ idn’t sound good. I can just imagine some of the conversations the o ­ wners of Mom and Pop jewelry stores had with their suppliers: “Look, Jack. I got kids coming in ­here asking me if we sell blood diamonds. How the hell do I know? And then they tell me that our diamonds are responsible for ­people’s hands getting chopped off in some place I never heard of. You got to fix this!” Eventually, a­ fter the United Nations passed a resolution supporting a diamond certification pro­cess, the industry agreed to a mechanism by which the source of diamonds was to be identified. The Kimberley Pro­cess, as it was called, was initially seen as a promising step, and the war in Sierra Leone came to a close in 2002, but a­ fter a few years it became evident that the loopholes in Kimberley ­were not preventing diamonds from sustaining conflicts in Congo and Central African Republic. (Global Witness withdrew its support for Kimberley in 2011.) Nonetheless, the publicity around blood diamonds, including a 2006 movie of that name starring Leo DiCaprio, significantly depressed the diamond market in the United States, where it grew less than 2 ­percent between 2004 and 2013 and caused millennials in par­tic­u­lar to think twice about the ­human rights abuses their purchases might be subsidizing.44

* * * No conflict was more consistently controversial for Amnesty than that between the Israeli government and the Palestinian community. No m ­ atter

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which side we criticized for ­human rights violations (and we regularly criticized them both), its backers would accuse us of bias. The arguments always boiled down to the same complaints: criticisms of Israel w ­ ere invalid b ­ ecause they failed to take into account that Israel is the only democracy in the ­Middle East and that it lives ­under existential threat ­every day; criticisms of the Palestinian Authority w ­ ere invalid b ­ ecause they failed to reckon with the stress and injustice of Israeli Occupation and the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948. In addition, supporters of Israel noted that Amnesty and ­Human Rights Watch seemed to issue more reports on Israel and hold that country to a higher standard than they did far more egregious offenders such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, or North ­Korea.45 One of the critics who accused ­Human Rights Watch (and by implication Amnesty) of giving succor to ­those who would turn Israel into a “pariah state” was Robert Bern­stein, a cofounder of HRW and its chair emeritus. The president of Random House for twenty-­five years, Bob was an ardent ­human rights defender and had welcomed me warmly to New York City when I took up the Amnesty position. Unlike some o ­ thers in both HRW and Amnesty, he encouraged as much collaboration between the two organ­izations as pos­si­ble. He would take me to lunch and quiz me as to how I thought HRW and its CEO, Ken Roth, w ­ ere d ­ oing. I found that a bit awkward and always gave high marks. It saddened me when I read in 2009 that Bob had broken with the organ­ization he loved over its coverage of Israel.46 On the one hand, I agreed that in Amnesty’s case at least its attention to Israeli violations was disproportionate in sheer number of reports to that given to the Palestinian Authority or some other h ­ uman rights–­offending countries. Partly that was b ­ ecause Israel was far more power­ful than the Palestinian Authority and hence had far more opportunities to commit h ­ uman rights violations. Partly it was b ­ ecause it was easier to gather information about Israel, which sported robust domestic h ­ uman rights organ­izations like B’Tselem, than about more secretive socie­ties such as Iran.47 And it is certainly pos­si­ble that some ­human rights researchers did bear a bias ­either against Israel (or Zionism) or in f­ avor of the Palestinians, which by the 2000s had become a cause célèbre for the po­liti­cal left around the world. Bob Bern­stein, on the other hand, had argued that h ­ uman rights organ­ izations o ­ ught to “draw a sharp line between the demo­cratic and nondemo­ cratic worlds” and maintain “an impor­tant distinction between open and



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closed socie­ties.”  48 If that meant that “open socie­ties” should be graded on a curve when it came to their ­human rights violations, all pretense to the universality of ­human rights would be tossed out the win­dow. That Saudi Arabia or Iran may have had more egregious h ­ uman rights rec­ords than Israel offered no exculpation to Israel for its sins. Israeli law codifies discrimination against its own Arab citizens in a variety of ways, and u ­ nder international law Israel has been illegally occupying the West Bank since the Six-­Day War of 1967. The country may well be u ­ nder existential threat, but the laws of war apply even in the midst of combat. ­Those are simply facts. Did Israel’s ­free elections, f­ ree press, and vibrant civil society, at least for Jewish Israelis, exempt it from accountability for ­t hese and other transgressions against international standards? If so, many other democracies, not least the United States, would receive any number of passes for their ­human rights abuses. In 1993, a year before I joined Amnesty, I had led a congressional del­e­ga­ tion to the ­Middle East that met privately with Shimon Peres, among many other ­people. Peres, who was serving then as Israel’s foreign minister ­under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was an impressive person not least for his candor. “We Israelis,” he said, “are excellent soldiers but we make very bad policemen.” 49 If Peres was right, then it was up to ­human rights organ­izations to bell the police. Personally, I wished that had not been necessary. I was strongly committed to Israel’s right to exist. I had long-­standing ties to the American Jewish community, including from my years as president of the Unitarian Universalist Association. One of my most moving travel experiences with Amnesty had been sitting with my wife, Beth, in a restaurant on the Sea of Galilee on the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s founding, watching celebratory fireworks explode over that iconic place. But I could not rationalize away Israel’s mistreatment of many Palestinians, and ­earlier on that very trip, which was taken in conjunction with a meeting of all directors of Amnesty national sections around the world, Israel had tried to deny my colleagues and me entry into the Gaza Strip to meet with Palestinians living t­ here, even though the visit had previously been cleared with the Israeli government and we certainly ­were no security threat to anyone.50 That unfortunate incident only reinforced my conviction that h ­ uman rights enforcement depends on retaining as much evenhandedness as pos­si­ble, personal predilections be damned. Both sides in this conflict suffer from deeply rooted emotional trauma, and trauma is

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only exacerbated by outsiders using unnecessarily provocative language or allowing themselves to be cast as partisan.51

* * * Among the other places where occupation had led to enduring grievances was in East Timor (or Timor-­Leste), an island nation in Southeast Asia that had been colonized by the Portuguese in the sixteenth c­ entury, declared its in­ de­pen­dence in 1975, and was promptly occupied by neighboring Indonesia nine days ­later. In 1999 a UN-­sponsored plebiscite resulted in an overwhelming vote in ­favor of in­de­pen­dence. The Indonesian military refused to re­ spect the result of the plebiscite and occupied the country, killing more than 1,000 ­people and displacing around 250,000 before the UN Security Council authorized a humanitarian intervention led by Australia that put an end to the mayhem and allowed in 2002 for recognition of East Timor as a sovereign state. The ­human rights implications of the strug­g le for in­de­pen­dence ­were manifold. Unlike in the case of Kosovo, the Australian intervention was authorized by the UN Security Council, thereby establishing that at least occasionally that body could act to protect victims of h ­ uman rights crimes. It’s true of course that such action was unlikely to be taken by the United Nations against any major powers or their allies (such as Rus­sia’s ally Serbia), but any action is better than none in such cases. Some have argued that Australia did not act out of altruistic motives but self-­interested ones, such as a desire to avoid a flood of refugees, and that may be true. But it’s acceptable for motives to be mixed as long as the endgame is the achievement of h ­ uman 52 rights goals. The day a­ fter the intervention authorized by the Security Council, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and then UN high commissioner for ­human rights, informed the Indonesian government that some kind of commission of inquiry into war crimes might be necessary if the killing continued.53 This was a credible threat given that the UN International Tribunal for the Former Yugo­slavia had been established, as we have seen, in 1993 and another one created for Rwanda in 1995. Robinson’s warning contributed to Indonesia winding down its re­sis­tance to in­de­pen­dence for East Timor and reflected one of the most promising ­human rights developments in the 1990s,



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namely, the creation of an international architecture of accountability for ­human rights crimes, of which the International Criminal Court, which would not be formally launched u ­ ntil 2002, was the most notable example.54 Amnesty’s role in the East Timor strug­gle was principally one of sounding the alarm, but we did build a relationship with the country’s first foreign minister (and ­later prime minister and president) José Ramos-­Horta who had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for laying the groundwork for the plebiscite and ultimate in­de­pen­dence. I was party to a revealing incident involving the foreign minister in 2002. For several years, as part of its outreach in Hollywood, AIUSA hosted an Acad­emy Awards gala, and in 2002 Ramos-­ Horta was our special guest. As the eve­ning wore on and Hollywood stars began to gather, the hour approached when Ramos-­Horta would need to speak in order to make it to LAX to catch a plane back to East Timor. Just as I was introducing him, the Acad­emy began the climactic segment of the eve­ ning when the Best Picture was to be announced. I knew our guests ­were desperately interested in the se­lection, but we ­couldn’t defer Ramos-­Horta’s departure any longer and I d ­ idn’t expect the Acad­emy would delay its schedule to accommodate us! This clumsy moment provided an unintentional test of which Hollywood notables took h ­ uman rights as a priority and which did not, some keeping their eyes fixed on the revered Nobel Peace Prize winner and h ­ uman rights champion with only an occasional sideways glance at the tele­v i­sion and ­others not even pretending to listen to Ramos-­Horta who, blessedly, understood the dilemma, kept his speech short, and made his plane on time. (The Best Picture award went to A Beautiful Mind.)

* * * When G ­ reat Powers a­ ren’t fighting wars themselves or via their surrogates, they are often subsidizing them through arms sales. Sadly, this is as true as I write in 2022—­see the war in Yemen, which is being sustained by US arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—as it was in the late 1990s.55 ­Under the US Foreign Operations Assistance Act, it was illegal for the United States to provide arms to any foreign military unit responsible for “a gross violation of ­human rights.”56 Amnesty regularly tracked such military assistance, even sometimes breaking down by US state the taxpayer dollars that w ­ ere being spent in this disreputable way. We had par­tic­u­lar concern

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about two recipients of aid—­Turkey and Colombia. Turkey was involved in a long-­term strug­gle against its Kurdish citizens in the eastern part of the country and was using US-­supplied he­li­cop­ters to kidnap Kurdish leaders, bomb villages, and commit other crimes.57 ­A fter we had lobbied CBS’s premiere news program, 60 Minutes, to look into the story, correspondent Ed Bradley traveled to the M ­ iddle East and met secretly with Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, who told him, ”All the villages have been burned by the American weapons on an everyday basis.”58 Öcalan and his Kurdistan Workers’ Party ­were themselves gross violators of h ­ uman rights, but they w ­ ere not being underwritten by the United States. As I put it on 60 Minutes, “This year Turkey ­w ill receive $320 million in military loans. That’s $320 million that is not ­going for anything ­here at home, and it’s not ­going to build democracy and ­human rights around the world. It’s ­going to the Turkish government for the purpose of killing [its] own citizens.” Bradley’s story, in which Amnesty was prominently featured, was one of the first to expose this complicity.59 The link between US arms sales and ­human rights atrocities was even more direct in Colombia’s ostensible “war on drugs.” In early 1994 we issued a report estimating that in the previous eight years more than twenty thousand ­people—­peasant farmers, trade u ­ nionists, h ­ uman rights activists—­had been killed in Colombia ­under the guise of fighting narcotics but r­ eally for po­liti­cal reasons, b ­ ecause somebody wanted them dead. We did more than make charges, however; we supplied the State Department with a list of Colombian brigades and battalions we believed w ­ ere guilty of crimes. Both in testimony to Congress and in reply to us, the State Department denied our claims outright, insisting that none of ­t hose units w ­ ere receiving US assistance. That was the last we heard of the m ­ atter u ­ ntil October 1996, two-­and-­ a-­half years l­ ater, when three documents ­were leaked to us from a US official in Colombia whom ­today we would call a whistle­-­blower. Among t­ hose documents was a memo to the commander in chief of Southern Command from his staff judge advocate acknowledging that US-­supplied equipment “may be used in counter-­insurgency operations during which h ­ uman rights violations might occur” along with a list of each of the brigades Amnesty had identified and the US military equipment supplied to them. ­These documents directly contradicted the State Department’s denials and implicated the US government as both a supplier of weaponry used to commit h ­ uman rights violations and a scofflaw of its own laws.60



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* * * Governments w ­ ere not the only ones who facilitated ­human rights abuses. Throughout the 1990s, as globalization expanded the reach of multinational corporations, businesses became more and more entangled with discreditable regimes. This was particularly true of the extractive industries, as we have seen in the case of the diamond trade. Even when the consequences ­were not as dire as a full-­scale war, corporate alignment with repressive governments could be damaging to the interests of local communities as well as t­ hose of the corporations themselves. This was especially the case where environmental degradation was at play. One of the earliest such cases during my Amnesty tenure occurred in Nigeria where the tele­v i­sion producer and environmental activist Ken Saro-­ Wiwa had been leading a campaign on behalf of the Ogoni p ­ eople of the Nigerian delta to protect that fragile ecosystem from exploitation by Royal Dutch Shell. Nigeria was in the hands of the kleptocratic dictator Sani Abacha whose regime derived enormous profits from oil while the Ogoni p ­ eople themselves, with their land and ­waters degraded, remained destitute. Saro-­ Wiwa was very popu­lar in Ogoniland, becoming president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni P ­ eople and considered a royal nuisance by Shell and the Nigerian government. It was therefore not surprising that in May 1994, he was charged with inciting the murders of four Ogoni elders, even though he had been denied entry to the region at the time of the crimes. ­After a rigged trial, he and eight other members of the Movement ­were sentenced to death. Amnesty swung into action right away and worked tirelessly to prevent the executions. An obvious target was Royal Dutch Shell, and we sought to prevail on the com­pany to exert its considerable influence with the Abacha government to mitigate the sentences. The Dutch Amnesty section met with top officials at Shell, and AIUSA tried to buy billboards in Houston, home of Shell’s US headquarters, calling on the com­pany to intervene with Abacha. Interestingly enough, no billboard com­pany would sell us space, so fearful ­were they of Shell’s purchasing power in the city. Unfortunately, in my view, Amnesty’s internal policies at that time—­they have since been liberalized—­ precluded calling for consumer boycotts of companies or economic sanctions against them ­because, among other reasons, Amnesty feared it lacked s­ ufficient

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expertise to evaluate complicity and worried about the impact on the livelihoods of p ­ eople dependent on employment by the targeted companies. Fi­nally, with all ave­nues exhausted, Saro-­Wiwa and his compatriots ­were put to death on November 10, 1995. Shortly before he was hanged, Saro-­Wiwa wrote a friend, “I’m in good spirits. . . . ​­There’s no doubt my idea ­will succeed in time, but I’ll have to bear the pain of the moment. . . . ​I think I have the moral victory.” 61 At the last minute Shell had issued a statement urging clemency but to our knowledge never appealed directly to Abacha and never condemned the government for its actions.62 As the much-­hailed Nigerian playwright and poet Wole Soyinka, recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Lit­er­a­ture, put it ironically at the 1987 AIUSA annual meeting, ”We often hear it asked, ’Is Africa ready for democracy?’ but why do we never hear ‘Is Africa ready for dictatorship?’ ” 63 I spoke frequently during my Amnesty tenure to corporate leaders about the dangers they put their companies in by cavorting with h ­ uman rights violators, and ultimately Shell paid a price for its complicity. The Saro-­Wiwa ­family sued the com­pany in the United States ­under the Torture Victims Protection Act for complicity in the deaths, and in 2009 Shell settled the case for $15.5 million.64 The lead attorney for the families was the former chair of AIUSA’s board and eminent Los Angeles h ­ uman rights attorney Paul Hoffman. A similar case is still being litigated in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, Sani Abacha was never held accountable for any of his crimes. He died on June 8, 1998, allegedly of a heart attack while in the com­ pany of two prostitutes. It was rumored that he had been poisoned by foes in the Nigerian military who w ­ ere e­ ager for an end to his notorious regime, but a friend of mine with broad contacts in Africa assured me that Abacha had just taken too much Viagra that night and it had overtaxed his cardiovascular system! Coincidentally, one month l­ater, on July 7, 1998, Abacha’s main po­liti­cal rival, Chief Moshood Abiola—­who had won the 1993 election but been denied the opportunity to take office and was subsequently imprisoned when he tried to do so—­died while meeting with US Undersecretary of State for Po­liti­cal Affairs Thomas Pickering and Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Susan Rice.65 I came to know one of Abiola’s ­daughters, Hafsat, a leader against gender-­based vio­lence, who was naturally suspicious about the cir-



Holding the Whole World in Our Hands 65

cumstances of her ­father’s death. A ­ fter all, her ­mother, Kudirat, had been assassinated in 1996 while leading protests of her husband’s imprisonment. Hafsat would have liked Amnesty to investigate how her ­father died, but that was beyond the organ­ization’s capacity or remit. In any case, a reputable autopsy revealed that he too, like his archrival, had died of a heart attack.

* * * If corporations had been late to the party when it came to ­human rights, right-­ wing religious institutions in the United States ­were too. Many Jewish and mainstream Protestant leaders ­were dependable allies, and, when it came to the death penalty, few religious leaders ­were more helpful than ­t hose in the Roman Catholic faith. A ­ fter 9/11 in par­tic­u­lar, Muslim imams became more out­spoken about ­human rights violations by extremist groups, but in most re­spects conservative Catholics and Protestants ­were missing in action when it came to ­human rights. This began to change in 1997–1998 when, primarily at the behest of Republicans, though ultimately with the support of Demo­ crats, Congress created both a Commission on International Religious Freedom and an ambassador-­at-­large for international religious freedom in the State Department to elevate concern about violations of the right to practice the religion of one’s choice and to make recommendations for how the United States should respond to such abuses. Initially this legislation was controversial within both the business and ­human rights communities. Business objected ­because the legislation allowed for recommendations of economic sanctions against countries like China where they ­were heavi­ly invested. Some in the ­human rights movement objected ­because they saw this as privileging one right (religious freedom) and one religion (Chris­tian­ity) over o ­ thers. They also resented the champions of the legislation for having criticized h ­ uman rights organ­izations for neglecting violations of religious freedom out of a secular bias, and ­human rights leaders w ­ ere uncomfortable with an alliance with groups that on other issues ­were out of step with ­human rights “doctrine.” Ken Roth of ­Human Rights Watch was quoted as saying that while he’d be happy to welcome the Christian Co­ali­tion into the h ­ uman rights movement, he would “not embrace it ­because it rejects certain h ­ uman rights, which is what its position on abortion reflects.” 66 It was a subtle distinction.

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I had a dif­fer­ent view, perhaps in part ­because of my background in the ministry where I had worked with religious leaders of all stripes. Personally, I had distaste for virtually every­t hing the religious right stood for, and some of ­t hose who ­were pushing this legislation did so in ways that ­were counterproductive. One of the principals, Nina Shea, for example, insisted that “with the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid and the democ­ ratization of South Amer­i­ca, the h ­ uman rights movement [in the United States] fell apart at the grassroots level” and that this new initiative would presumably fix that. Given that Amnesty, the only US h ­ uman rights group with a grassroots membership, still had close to 350,000 members when I came on board in 1994, this assessment was sheer nonsense.67 Nor, as far as I could see, was Shea’s frequently repeated claim that more Christians had suffered persecution in [the twentieth] c­ entury than in all previous centuries combined a verifiable assertion.68 Nonetheless, I agreed that religious persecution was not as high on the list of h ­ uman rights priorities as it deserved to be, less b ­ ecause of any inherent bias (though it’s pos­si­ble some felt that) but more ­because most h ­ uman rights researchers ­didn’t know much about religion. I thought they should learn. Most h ­ uman rights organ­izations other than t­ hose directly associated with a religious perspective, such as American Jewish World Ser­v ice, Catholic Relief Ser­v ices, or the Unitarian Universalist Ser­v ice Committee, maintain a secularized cast to them, as reticent to appear sectarian as po­liti­cally biased. But that should not mean that violations of religious freedom carry less moral valence than other rights offenses. More to the point, I thought the ­human rights community should be open to the support of anyone who genuinely cared about h ­ uman suffering, no ­matter what their theological views. Yes, we could disavow ­t hose ele­ments of their faith that contradicted basic ­human rights princi­ples, such as on LGBTQ+ issues. But if we made abortion, for example, a litmus test of our alliances, we would need to stop marching beside all t­ hose Roman Catholic priests, nuns, and laity who protested the death penalty with us. ­People could be allies on one issue and disagree vehemently on ­others. A ­ fter all, while ­human rights treaties established the baselines of law, they w ­ ere not a straitjacket; ­human rights stood for freedom of thought, and ­people w ­ ere ­free to disagree about interpretations of princi­ples, just as Americans and Eu­ro­pe­ans did over ­whether or not advocacy of hate was protected speech.



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While the h ­ uman rights movement had not “fallen apart,” it had always been too small to be overly catechistic about its compatriots. Ironically, a perfect example of the need to tolerate diversity of ­human rights views came in the person of Congressman Tom Lantos, a California Demo­crat, the only Holocaust survivor to ever serve in Congress, one of the lead Demo­cratic sponsors of the religious freedom legislation, and someone regarded as such a champion of ­human rights that a­ fter his death from esophageal cancer in 2008, the h ­ uman rights caucus in the House of Representatives was renamed in his honor. I met with Lantos a good many times ­because he was often helpful to Amnesty, particularly around legislative issues. He was always nattily dressed, the lilt of his Hungarian origins still evident in his speech. Despite his generally liberal voting rec­ord and deep commitment to international ­human rights, Lantos was peculiarly resistant to criticisms of US ­human rights violations and was an ardent supporter of the death penalty. When Amnesty launched a campaign in 1998 against American ­human rights abuses, Lantos called it “preposterous and unacceptable.” 69 It was a marvel to me that some ­human rights champions ­were able to distinguish in their own minds the abuses they abhorred overseas from similar abuses committed at home. Having lived ­under an oppressive regime, Lantos seemed to feel that American freedom somehow excused American misbehavior ­toward its own residents, but I ­wouldn’t want to have written him out of the ­human rights movement ­because of that. Let’s see, I said, ­whether the religious right can extend its sympathies—­its solidarity—­ beyond its own parochial interests. That was why I sided with my ­human rights colleagues on one crucial issue in the legislative dispute: no government program ­ought to limit itself to the protection of only one religious group. If you ­were g­ oing to monitor and protect religious freedom, it had to be every­one’s religious freedom, Muslims as well as Christians, Buddhists as well as Jews. In fact, on a per capita basis, members of the Baha’i faith and Ahmadiyya Muslims ­were prob­ably maltreated far more frequently than Christians, but protection of someone’s ­human rights was not predicated on their having reached a certain threshold of persecution. Every­body’s pain mattered. More than twenty-­five years ­after this controversy, it is pos­si­ble to draw some conclusions. Ultimately the legislation required attention to persecution of all religious groups and neither the commission nor the ambassadors

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have l­ imited themselves to protecting Christians. On the other hand, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, an attempt by the Trump administration to narrow the range of rights the United States recognized, gave privilege to freedom of religion over virtually all other rights concerns, and, with the exception of China, Trump’s policies largely ignored other h ­ uman rights abuses around the world without evoking much outcry from his supporters on the religious right.70 Be that as it may, I wish ­human rights w ­ ere not seen as such a partisan issue simply b ­ ecause it makes it harder to save lives. Some years a­ fter I left Amnesty, I coauthored an article in the conservative journal Policy Review with my friend Mark Lagon who had been ambassador-­at-­large ­u nder George W. Bush with special responsibility to combat ­human trafficking. We called for liberals and conservatives to find common ground on the h ­ uman rights issues on which they o ­ ught to agree, such as opposition to terrorism, protection of civil liberties, promotion of democracy, opposition to autocracy, and support for antitrafficking.71 In my view the ­human rights movement needs all the help it can get! ­Human rights work can be enormously discouraging. Th ­ ere can be five or ten losses for e­ very victory, and h ­ uman rights folks are often not very good at pausing to celebrate the victories. ­Needless to say, ­t here is always a new horror just around the corner. Moreover, victories rarely come neatly packaged and wrapped in bows. They are more like gifts of long-­term bonds that take years to mature. As former Secretary of State Dean Rusk is alleged to have observed, “­There ­will always be trou­ble in a world in which at any one time two-­t hirds of the ­people are awake.” Racism, to take the most insidious example, remains as pervasive as ever, as revealed starkly, among other instances, by police vio­lence in the United States. The creation of a civilized society—­a nd that’s what ­human rights are all about—­proceeds in fits and starts. What it requires are ­people willing to put up with the fits and generate the starts. As St. Teresa advised, “The world is on fire. Do not bother God with affairs of ­little importance.” At the very least, ­human rights campaigners could say they had not. Our work was not trivial. The next chapter describes three places where I was personally involved in efforts to staunch the fires.

CHAPTER 4

Into the Maelstrom Liberia, Northern Ireland, and Darfur, Sudan

My first trip outside of North Amer­i­ca took place in the summer of 1981 when I attended a religious conference in the Netherlands. I ­don’t remember a lot about the conference, but I do remember that as the KLM jet banked over the flat green fields of the lowland countries prior to landing at Schiphol airport ­after an overnight flight, my eyes unexpectedly filled with tears. It was my first glimpse of Eu­rope and, just as movingly to me, of the Netherlands, the country my paternal grand­mother’s f­ amily had left for the United States several generations before. I had not realized how much I had yearned to live in the ­whole world, not just the American part of it. That refulgent land beneath me represented a promise to myself that I would experience as much of the world as I could and do my best to diminish American chauvinism whenever I encountered it. Having touched the ground of ninety-­six countries since then, I’ve kept the first part of that promise to myself and done my best to keep the second. Over my fifteen years at the Unitarian Universalist Association, I traveled the world widely, including several trips to Japan, India, the ­Middle East, and Eu­ rope. ­Because Unitarianism arose in Eastern Eu­rope and had religious cousins in Czecho­slo­va­k ia, Hungary, and Romania, I began with some regularity to go “­behind the Iron Curtain” in order to keep connected with our coreligionists who ­were u ­ nder constant pressure from the Communist regimes. Entering the police states of Eastern Eu­rope was always a somewhat harrowing experience ­because it was wise to assume you w ­ ere being watched by state officials and you always had to be cautious about what you said or did

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lest you endanger your local compatriots. Crossing the border was especially fraught b ­ ecause I was usually carry­ing medical phar­ma­ceu­t i­cals that our friends needed and Bibles and other religious publications they wanted—­a ll of which ­were banned. I had an unnerving, if mordantly amusing, encounter with anonymous state security on one trip when our party consisting of my wife and I and another ­couple arrived in Cluj-­Napoca, the “capital” of Transylvania, the part of Romania where the Unitarians, all of them of Hungarian ethnicity, w ­ ere found. We four w ­ ere h ­ oused at the ­Hotel Transylvania, a decrepit pile on the top of a hill overlooking the city but prob­ably the best accommodations available in that era of Communist scarcity. One night the wife of the other c­ ouple said to her husband, “Melvin, run into town and see if you can get me some Western toilet paper. The wood chips in this Romanian stuff are d ­ oing me damage!” “Natalie,” Mel said. “It’s ten o ­ ’clock at night; every­thing is closed; and ­t here ­wouldn’t be Western toilet paper in the stores even if they ­were open. Just go to bed!” The next day the four of us went on our rounds of ten or twelve churches, each visit punctuated with toasts of palinka, a horrendously potent fruit brandy with alcohol content anywhere from 30 to 80 ­percent. When we fi­nally got back to the ­hotel, t­here in the other ­couple’s room, but not in my wife’s and mine, was Western toilet paper. “Tomorrow,” I said into the lampshade, “I’d like a 10-­ounce New York strip steak medium rare.” I d ­ idn’t get it. In 1985 Nicolae Ceaușescu, the ruthless Romanian dictator, facing a collapsing economy, had announced a program called “systematization” to eliminate dozens of rural villages in order to reclaim agricultural land for production. The residents would be moved into collectives in the larger cities, torn from their roots and their neighbors.1 Among t­ hose affected would be many communities with Unitarian populations; in fact, we suspected, the more Hungarians in a village, the more likely it was to be reclaimed.2 By 1989 the government had started carry­ing out this plan, even flooding some villages to drive out the population. Dramatic pictures began appearing of church steeples rising out of newly created lakes.3 In the face of this threat, I de­cided to see if I could do more than merely visit the Transylvanian Unitarians or slip them some contraband. If I could convince several Unitarian Universalist members of Congress to come with me to Romania to meet with government ministers, it might send a signal that US officials would be watching. Ultimately only one member, Chester



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Atkins, Demo­crat of Mas­sa­chu­setts, agreed to join me, though at the last minute we w ­ ere also able to add a member of the Canadian Parliament, making it an international del­e­ga­tion. We arranged our trip for early January 1990. ­Little did we know how events would intervene to change the ­whole tenor and purpose of the mission. László Tökés, a Reformed minister of Hungarian ethnicity, had been a critic of the Ceaușescu regime since at least 1981. In early 1989 Tökés had given an interview that appeared on Hungarian tele­v i­sion and was highly critical of the Romanian government. This sparked an attempt by his bishop to remove him from his church in the Transylvanian city of Timișoara and evict him from the parsonage. The crisis came to a head on December 15, 1989, when Tökés refused to leave the parsonage and hundreds of p ­ eople, at first mostly Hungarian but soon joined by Romanian students, formed a circle around the ­house to protect the pastor. Two days l­ ater thousands took to the streets of Timișoara where they w ­ ere met by Ceaușescu’s much-­feared secret police, the Securitate, as well as military troops. In the subsequent confrontation, about seventy-­five ­people w ­ ere killed. It was rumored that some p ­ eople had held up their ­children in front of them, not imagining the authorities would fire on babies, and had been wrong. What­ever the case, the revolution soon spread to Bucharest. Ceaușescu had been on a state visit to Iran when the uprising occurred and had left the country in the hands of his monomaniacal wife, Elena. When he returned, he assumed he could quickly regain control of the situation and called for an im­mense rally in Bucharest on December 21, like many he had held before, at which he would denounce the “hooligans” of Timișoara. What he had not counted on was the presence of tens of thousands who sympathized with the revolution, many of them students. ­There is still a fascinating video on YouTube of the moment Ceauescu realized he was being booed, that the crowd was chanting “Timișoara! Timișoara!” 4 A stunned look crosses the dictator’s face. He had never faced such public revolt before. “Keep calm! What are you ­doing? Keep calm!” he shouts before quickly ending his speech, fleeing with Elena to the roof of the palace where, terrified, they are whisked away in a he­li­cop­ter. At that point many of his erstwhile po­liti­cal and military allies turned on the dictator. Captured in the countryside, the Ceaușescus ­were both executed ­after a two-­hour show trial on Christmas Day 1989. As the dissident

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poet, Mircea Dinescu, told us, “His was the fiercest secret police in the world, and yet the dictator lost his courage in one day.” But the ­battle for the revolution was not yet over. For the next few days the Securitate and other Ceaușescu loyalists battled the revolutionary students. Fi­nally, a new government, dubbing itself the National Salvation Front, took power. More than a thousand p ­ eople had died that Romania might be freer, if not yet entirely f­ ree. This was the situation we ­were confronting when we flew to Bucharest in early January 1990. Our del­e­ga­tion, which included a journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and, as a last-­minute addition at his own request, Radu Florescu, a professor at Boston College and the world’s leading expert on Dracula (!), was the first group of foreign officials to enter Romania ­after the revolution. “The last revolution—in 1848,” Dinescu observed when we met him in Bucharest shortly ­after our arrival, “was something of an operetta. One of the leaders told the crowd, ‘The revolution is postponed for a day due to bad weather.’ But for us in 1989 the weather was warm—­warm enough to allow the students and protesters to be out on the streets for hours at a time. . . . ​Nature did her job.”5 But by the time we got to Romania, the weather had turned bitterly cold. Snow had fallen on the makeshift graves of many of t­ hose killed just a few days before—­most of the graves surrounded by flickering candles. The front of the Intercontinental ­Hotel, where we stayed, was pockmarked with machine gun bullets. An atmosphere of anxiety pervaded the city: no one was certain if the vio­lence was truly over or ­whether the Securitate, which appeared to have gone under­ground but was assumed to still be active, would strike again. Over the course of the next few days in Bucharest, we met with US and Canadian embassy officials; student leaders at the Polytechnic Institute (who described in dramatic detail the fatal confrontations with the Securitate); and religious leaders, leading dissidents, and key officials of the new government. The latter included the new minister of culture, Andrei Pleșu, a phi­los­o­pher who three weeks ­earlier had been ­under ­house arrest. He told us, “The job of this ministry in the old regime was to make sure that culture ­didn’t work. My job is to make this ministry a lonely one, to assure the newspapers w ­ ill publish, dancers dance, actors act, writers write, all without my ‘assistance.’ ” 6 Most impor­tant, we met with the new director of the Department of Religious Affairs (previously the notorious Ministry of Cults7) and secured a series of commitments: that Bibles and other religious materials would be



Into the Maelstrom 73

freely available; that contacts with coreligionists in the West could take place without difficulty; that ­t here would be no limits to how many students could study for the ministry, priesthood, or rabbinate; and that denominations could construct or renovate their religious buildings without onerous restrictions. Most of ­these commitments ­were met, though many of the other promises of the revolution have been far from realized. Our group then left for Transylvania by night train, reaching Cluj-­Napoca around 4:30 a.m., but despite the hour, ­t here to greet us was the Unitarian bishop and his lieutenants. It was a heartwarming reunion with the promise on the horizon of a far less repressive world for our Unitarian friends and colleagues. A ­ fter a shower and some breakfast at the familiar listening post, the ­Hotel Transylvania, where we ­were staying once again, we set out on the standard round of palinka-­soaked visits to churches. The next day we participated in a Sunday ser­vice at the Unitarian Church in Târgu-­Mureș, where we had the only truly unnerving experience of the trip. The church was jam-­packed that Sunday with worshippers e­ ager to celebrate their hoped-­for freedom and to welcome t­ hese “impor­tant” guests from North Amer­i­ca. The local minister, the bishop, Congressman Atkins, a few o ­ thers, and I ­were crowded onto the altar, each waiting to have a chance to speak to the gathered. About thirty minutes into the ser­v ice, t­ here was a commotion at the back of the church, and an armed guard of some half-­dozen men, r­ ifles poised, started walking down the center aisle t­ oward the pulpit. Could this be a remnant of the Securitate come to shut down the ser­v ice or worse? The minister and the bishop looked worried. Atkins turned to me and whispered, “Do something.” I whispered back, “­You’re the damn congressman. You do something!” Fi­nally, a­ fter an eternity—­perhaps fifteen seconds—­ people in the back of the church started applauding. When the armed guard got to the front of the altar, it parted to ­either side and ­t here stood László Tökés, the hero of the revolution, who with his own security had come to greet this North American del­e­ga­tion and thank us for offering our support to the cause of a new Romania. It was a touching moment.

* * * The weather we had encountered in Bucharest in 1990 was balmy compared to Syktyvkar, Rus­sia, where I journeyed in November 1993, a few months before I

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took up the Amnesty job, as part of a team that had been invited to introduce conflict resolution techniques to leaders of ethnic groups in the region. Syktyvkar is the capital of the Komi Republic, which lies six hundred miles northwest of Moscow—­a region so remote and forbidding that when I told the heralded Rus­sian scholar Marshall Goldman I was g­ oing t­ here, he said, “Nobody voluntarily does that! That’s where they sent the po­liti­cal prisoners, and they ­didn’t even need guards or prisons ­because they figured if anyone wandered away into the tundra, they ­wouldn’t get very far.” At the time of our visit, a Hungarian-­Finnish minority that called themselves “Komis” and had founded the republic, made up about 23 ­percent of the population. Gradually over the years they had been displaced and subsumed by a Rus­sian majority and ­were now struggling to preserve their culture, land rights, and po­liti­cal power. At the same time, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the former Soviet republics ­were trying to reconceptualize their relationship to a central state that had previously controlled all major decision-­making. The situation was ripe for conflict both between ethnic groups and between the Komi Republic and Moscow. At the initiative of a member of the Komi Parliament who was acquainted with Roger Fisher’s Harvard Negotiation Proj­ect, the parliament invited an NGO called Search for Common Ground to send a team to Syktyvkar to both teach techniques for “getting to yes,” in Fisher’s famous phrase, and potentially set up an ongoing conflict resolution institute. Following my departure from the Unitarian Universalist Association, I had taken the Harvard Negotiation Proj­ect’s course on conflict and negotiation and was thinking of g­ oing into the field. That was how I ended up sitting beside a goat on a late-­night Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Syktyvkar. In t­ hose years Aeroflot, the Rus­sian state airline, had the worst safety rec­ord of any airline, with 18.62 fatal accidents per million flights, according to some Condé Nast Traveler article I had read and a statistic that, thanks to my flying phobia, I had memorized. Nonetheless, having been invited by Search for Common Ground to help lead the workshop on conflict resolution, I tucked my fear away and boarded the flight, not expecting to have a farmer follow me onto the plane and deposit his goat on the seat beside me. Actually, the goat, which quietly curled up and went to sleep, was far better behaved than the flight crew. Shortly a­ fter takeoff, I noticed a flight at-



Into the Maelstrom 75

tendant uncork a large b ­ ottle of vodka. Encouraged by the thought that I might soon be receiving a salve for my nerves, I was surprised and rattled when the attendant turned her back on us passengers and promptly delivered the vodka to the pi­lots. As we ­were descending into Syktyvkar ­after the two-­hour flight, one of the pi­lots came on the PA system to make the prelanding announcements, which ­were only in Rus­sian, but one did not need to speak Rus­sian to conclude that he had consumed his share of the ­bottle. That he had had good reason to do so was revealed when I stepped off the plane, the farmer and goat preceding me, into minus 29 Fahrenheit cold. I had never experienced such cold before, cold so ferocious that your breath turned to slivers of mist the moment it was out of your mouth. Ten-­to fifteen-­ foot walls of snow lined the sidewalks in embankments no army would want to scale; the light from the streetlamps barely pierced the fog-­filled night; the win­dows of the ­hotel ­were covered from top to bottom with gorgeous crystalline patterns of frozen condensation. And most startling of all? Through this bleak and shivery world walked dozens of young ­women wearing mini­ skirts, then fash­ion­able in Rus­sia, and high heels. The ­women might be sporting fur hats and bulky coats, but from mid-­t high to ankle was bare! Over the five days I spent in Komi, I began to appreciate the loveliness of the forested countryside. Yes, the city of 250,000 p ­ eople was so isolated that it possessed only one public telephone from which calls outside its borders could be made. And, yes, nighttime arrived at 3:00 p.m., and if the temperature ­rose above minus 10 between September and May, it was cause for cele­ bration. And, yes, the w ­ ater smelled of sulfur and the main food staples w ­ ere pickles, cole slaw, and smoked moose or smoked moose, with cole slaw and pickles served at ­every meal including breakfast. But the land was magnificent and rich, and ­because it was rich and full of oil and gas and lumber, it was about to be stripped by Occidental Petroleum and other industrial pickers. The ­people of the region, both the Komis and the Rus­sians, wanted to stop them, and in fact that was a major reason we w ­ ere t­ here. Why would p ­ eople in this remote outpost, most of whom had never heard of “conflict resolution” before our visit, have been intrigued enough about it to invite a cadre of Americans to teach them the techniques? Partly it was ­because in such a secluded place, the ­people are more dependent on one another, regardless of ethnicity, for mutual aid, and if they can resolve their differences peacefully, their neighbors may be ­there to help the next time the

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tractor breaks down or the harvest fails. Partly it was ­because of the cold: when it’s minus 29 degrees outside, survival becomes more impor­tant than fighting. But mostly it was ­because, for what­ever the trou­bles between the two main ethnic groups (and ­t here ­were trou­bles—­would the native Komi language be taught in the public schools? who would fund the Komi cultural center?), even more impor­tant to both groups was how they would stop the deforestation and pollution of their land and restructure their relationship with the federal government. When we asked the workshop participants to list the ten most impor­tant prob­lems facing the region, five of the prob­lems had to do with interethnic strife but the other five had to do with big corporations and Moscow. I ­don’t know if much ever came of this initiative ­after we flew home, sans goat, from Syktyvkar. A few weeks a­ fter our visit, I was asked to head AIUSA and so opted for the ­human rights world rather than a ­career in conflict resolution. Actually, the two have l­ittle in common. Some years a­ fter I took the helm at Amnesty, former president Jimmy Car­ter, who was interested and active in both ­human rights and conflict mitigation, invited the heads of the major American h ­ uman rights organ­izations and an equal number of leaders of dispute resolution programs to meet at the Car­ter Center in Atlanta to discuss working more closely together. It was one of the most contentious meetings I ever attended. The conflict resolution folks insisted on a nonjudgmental approach to differences: each side’s interests are valid; compromise is essential. The ­human rights contingent, which was mostly made up of l­awyers used to advocating on behalf of victims against power­f ul perpetrators, was committed to moral clarity and following the letter of the law. The conflict between the two perspectives was, ironically, unbridgeable. In my only other encounter with President Car­ter before this meeting, he had been far more successful in bringing harmony to a disparate group but not quite in the way he intended. As president of the UUA, I and a group of other denominational heads met occasionally with a bevy of business CEOs to try to negotiate resolution of vari­ous issues of corporate responsibility. At one meeting at Avon headquarters in New York City, Jimmy Car­ter was the guest of honor. ­After lunch, we all gathered around him and the former president began the conversation by saying, “You corporate chieftains ­don’t ­really care about poverty in this country. If you did, you could almost eliminate it by sacrificing a modest portion of your profits.” We religious leaders



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glanced at one another smugly, trying to suppress our smiles, but then Car­ ter turned to us. “And you religious folk are even worse,” he said. “You claim to follow the Gospel, but the value of your properties alone could feed the multitudes.” When he had left, both the CEOs and the religious leaders quickly agreed that the president had been far too simplistic in his analy­sis . . . ​ far too simplistic. Some years l­ater, when AIUSA was holding a board meeting at the Car­ ter Center in Atlanta, President Car­ter dropped in, and I introduced him to the board by recounting this story. He got that famous grin on his face (I have a trea­sured photo­graph of this moment), and then he said, “I guess you can see why I ­wasn’t reelected.”

* * * Given ­t hese and other international experiences, I felt well prepared for the kind of global travel and foreign encounters the Amnesty job would entail. From Romania and Transylvania, I had learned that authoritarian governments are often far more fragile than they appear and sometimes an intervention by a courageous individual like László Tökés or by nosy outsiders like our del­e­ga­tion could make a difference. From Syktyvkar I had learned that if you focused on common interests, you could occasionally entice other­wise antagonistic groups like Komis and Rus­sians (if not conflict resolution specialists and ­human rights advocates) to make pro­gress together. So I felt reasonably ready for what I would meet in my international work for Amnesty, but, as it turned out, I had no idea. I went overseas for Amnesty an average of a dozen times a year. Many of ­these trips w ­ ere to the International Secretariat in London, which was h ­ oused in a large office building in the King’s Cross section of the city, with vacuum-­ locked doors for security and a perpetually disgruntled staff who ­were rarely happy to see me. Some of the journeys w ­ ere to meet with the directors and members of other Amnesty national sections around the globe. Most of t­ hese ­were routine, but one to Tunisia produced a baffling incident. It was unusual for an Arab government to permit an indigenous Amnesty section to exist, particularly when that government was as repressive at that of Ben Ali, president of Tunisia from 1987 to 2011, but for some reason AI Tunisia had managed to function relatively undisturbed for many years. That

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began to change in 2000 as the Ben Ali government started to harass the leaders of the section. The International Secretariat thought that if several directors of other sections attended the Tunisian annual meeting, the show of international solidarity might help, and I was only too happy to oblige. I arrived in Tunis a day before the meeting in order to see a bit of the city. It had been my practice to carry my passport in a security pouch attached to my ­belt and tucked inside my pants, but I had forgotten the pouch on this trip and so had my passport in my left front pants pocket. As my American staff colleague and I ­were walking through the central souk in Tunis, I felt a tap on my shoulder and a very official-­looking man handed me my passport. Had I dropped it? No, that was impossible. I had been pickpocketed, but ­because Tunisian security had been following us and seen the pilfering, my passport had been restored, though I hated to think what they had done to the poor pickpocket. Most authoritarian governments did not provide as efficient surveillance as Tunisia, but what they lacked in efficiency, they made up for in drama as I was to find on the three major missions I led for Amnesty: to Liberia in 1997, Northern Ireland in 1999, and Darfur, Sudan, in 2004. What all three places had in common was extreme vio­lence.8

* * * Mambas are among the most venomous snakes on earth, and they are plentiful in sub-­Saharan Africa. When I learned that I was leading an AI mission to Liberia in May 1997 and that we w ­ ere staying at the Mamba Point H ­ otel in the capital, Monrovia, I ­couldn’t help but consider the irony of the name in light of the viperous context in which we ­were about to find ourselves. The reason I, as director of the American section of Amnesty, was selected to head the mission was in good mea­sure a m ­ atter of Liberia’s history and the role the United States had played in it. Formed in 1822 by f­ ree Blacks and freed enslaved persons from the United States, Liberia was the destination to which the American Colonization Society, unable to countenance a racially diverse country in North Amer­i­ca, encouraged the deportation of Africans ­a fter their manumission. Ironically, the descendants of ­these American Blacks, known as Americo-­Liberians, established an eco­nom­ically exploitative relationship with indigenous Africans and a rigid hierarchy: ­free Black



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families on top; the enslaved who had been emancipated just below; Congos (Africans taken into slavery but released before their slave ships reached the Amer­i­cas) at a third level; and indigenous tribes, regarded largely as savages in need of missionizing, on the bottom. The Americo-­Liberians ruled without interruption ­u ntil 1980, when a low-­ranking indigenous army officer named Samuel Doe overthrew the last Americo-­Liberian government, executing thirteen members of its cabinet. Samuel Doe was a madman who ruled with a kind of otherworldly viciousness. He would, for example, take a disliking to one of his subordinate’s style of dress; have the underling shot on the spot; and hours l­ ater ask to see the unfortunate person, only to burst into tears when told he had been executed. What kept Doe in power was support from the United States and its CIA, which used Liberia as its base of operations in Africa throughout the 1980s. But the American alliance could protect Doe only so long, and in 1990 he too was deposed, though not before being tortured, dismembered, and, it was rumored, having some of his internal organs consumed by his killers.9 That coup launched six years of one of the most complex and destructive wars in Africa, resulting in an estimated two hundred thousand killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.10 Four ”warlords” from dif­fer­ent tribes and factions competed for control of the country’s natu­ral resources, as well as for first prize in the category of ­human rights criminal. The winner was Charles Taylor. As a member of Doe’s government, Taylor had been sacked for embezzling $1 million. He fled to the United States in 1983 (where, years ­earlier, he had graduated from Bentley College, in Waltham, Mas­sa­chu­setts); was taken into custody for extradition; and escaped from the Plymouth, Mas­ sa­chu­setts, House of Correction in 1985, eventually ending up back in Liberia as head of a brutal militia that included child soldiers to whom Taylor gave such names as ”General Fuckyou.” By 1996 Taylor controlled about 90 ­percent of the country and had plundered the capital city. That predominance led to peace accords being negotiated in Nigeria and elections scheduled for mid1997.11 The peace treaty and pause in the fighting offered an opportunity for Amnesty to send a three-­person del­e­ga­tion to Monrovia consisting of an expert in international ­human rights law, the researcher for Liberia, and me. Our principal goal was to place ­human rights on the po­liti­cal agenda both during the campaign and a­ fter the election, including the appointment of a

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­ uman rights commission to assess crimes committed during the six-­year h war and to establish standards of be­hav­ior ­going forward. This was not ­going to be easy in light of the fact that of the thirteen parties contesting the election, three w ­ ere headed by warlords, one of t­ hose being Taylor whose catchy campaign slogans ranged from “I killed your Pa; I killed your Ma; now vote for me” to “Vote for Taylor or ­he’ll kill you.” Just getting to Monrovia was complicated. The only direct flight at the time was from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, via Freetown, Sierra Leone, which was still convulsed in war (see Chapter 3). I arrived late after­noon in Abidjan from Paris and took a taxi to the Novotel, one of the better mid-­rate h ­ otels in the city. On the way into town, the car in front of us struck and killed a l­ ittle boy who had dashed out in front of it. The frantic wailing of the w ­ oman driver of the car was hard to forget. At the ­hotel I almost had to fight my way to the elevator through a bevy of w ­ omen in the lobby offering me their ser­v ices. When I fi­nally arrived in Monrovia the next morning, the scene at the airport was one of pandemonium. Hundreds of ­people rushed the Air Ivoire plane when it touched down. As we passengers descended the plane’s stairs onto the field, we w ­ ere swarmed by a mob begging, cajoling, enticing, imploring. Th ­ ere was no obvious arrivals hall nor passport control—­just a confusing mass of p ­ eople. Fortunately, among that mass was one of my Amnesty colleagues and Samuel Kofi Woods, founder of the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, who had agreed to act as our host in Liberia. Someone asked for my passport, which I hesitantly yielded and then retrieved in relief, and eventually we w ­ ere on the way to the Mamba Point. Shell ­after shell of bombed-­out buildings lined our route; garbage piled four and five feet high stood everywhere like disheveled sentinels, ­children often scavenging them for the dregs; militiamen, well equipped with arms but with “uniforms” often no more than torn trousers and T-­shirts, lounged or swaggered to the incessant beat of ­music. In some parts of the city the sweet smell of feces, smoke, and rotting animals was overpowering. Monrovia appeared to be just what it was: a city that had recently been u ­ nder siege. Suddenly the Mamba Point ­Hotel appeared at the curve of a road overlooking Cape Mesurado, the spot where African American settlers had first established the city. The ­hotel was not fancy, but it promised a touch of order amid tumult. How it had survived the war intact was hard to fathom, except that ­every time one of the factions had threatened to attack or burn it, its



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Lebanese owner had rushed out into the street waving salvific dollar bills in the f­ aces of the would-be looters. On my way to Liberia I had read Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps, his tale of a four-­week walk across the interior of Liberia in 1935.12 What I found on the large front porch of the Mamba Point, where every­body gathered and where we would conduct much of our business and take most of our meals (seafood mixed grill with “well-­boiled potatoes”), was straight out of Graham Greene. In one corner ­were two mercenaries, beers in hand, r­ ifles propped against the railing; in another two backpackers, the smoke from their “cigarettes” drifting lazily into the humidity; in a third a heavyset man peering furtively through a magnifying glass at some minerals; and in the fourth the star of the show—­a brightly colored parrot repeating over and over again, “Welcome to Liberia! Fuck you! Welcome to Liberia! Fuck you!”13 Some of ­those with whom we met over the next few days would prob­ably have been happy to do just that. Whenever Amnesty conducted a mission, it tried to talk with a good cross-­section of the players involved in the h ­ uman rights dramas taking place. In this case that meant government officials, faction leaders, representatives of h ­ uman rights NGOs, clergy, journalists, l­ awyers, ambassadors, traditional tribal chiefs, prisoners, UN officials, and officers with ECOMOG, the regional peacekeeping force, 80 ­percent of them Nigerian, which had itself committed numerous ­human rights abuses, including child trafficking and drug smuggling.14 Early on the first full day in country, we called on government officials—­ the foreign minister (though he was in Ghana or Côte d’Ivoire or Gabon or wherever Liberian foreign ministers went to get out of Monrovia), the minister of justice, and the minister of information. The office of the foreign minister was air-­conditioned to Arctic temperatures, the coldest place, I ­imagined, in the entire nation—so cold that it almost made one long for the suffocating heat outside, the only options in a Liberian spring being intensely humid or unbearable. The minister of justice’s office was comfortably cool, and the minister of information’s, stifling. It was obvious that the status of a government minister—or of the warlord to whom he paid obeisance, for all ­these ministers ­were likely to be henchmen of one warlord or another—­could be judged by the temperature of his office and that in turn was a function of ­whether the office had a roof or closable win­dows. The government buildings

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­ ere a shambles; the Legislative Assembly was in ruins; the President’s w House was uninhabitable. It was no surprise that the Ministry of Information was stifling b ­ ecause its offices had no windowpanes. In the absence of the foreign minister, we saw his deputy, an old man (or at least he looked old), very sad, very nice, very cautious. It was hard to picture this old man cavorting with thugs and murderers, and yet would he be ­here if he had not at least acquiesced quietly? “­Things are not so bad now,” the old man said. “­Things are good.” ­Because it was obvious he had no power, it was not worth contradicting him, so my mind wandered and my eyes followed. We ­were in the office of the foreign minister, decorated with a few nondescript pictures, a wall hanging, and a wooden carving. On the desk sat a ­little wooden carving of the three monkeys who neither saw, heard, nor spoke any evil. This foreign minister, I thought, has a remarkable sense of humor. For ­t here was still plenty of evil at large in the land. We saw that firsthand in a prison we toured: sixty-­eight raggedly clothed prisoners, most accused of petty theft, occupying about a half-­dozen small cells. Dried vomit and feces caked the floor, the walls, and the single mattress provided in each cell. One prisoner stands out in my memory. He was about sixteen, and his body was covered with pinprick-­sized dots. He readily admitted to having stolen a radio, but, when he was arrested by the Nigerian peacekeepers of ECOMOG, the soldiers had de­cided to have some fun with him and had forced him to lie down for more than an hour in a pit of red ants. A week ­later the bites w ­ ere still unbearable.15 Such torture was child’s play, however, compared to the crimes for which the warlord Roo­se­velt Johnson of the Krahn ­peoples had been responsible. By the time the Amnesty del­e­ga­tion met with him in the living room of his home where we w ­ ere surrounded by a dozen gun-­toting comrades, his star had diminished considerably from the time during the war when he had headed a faction that included the notorious “General” Buck Naked. The general’s soldiers fought in the nude or dressed in w ­ omen’s clothing, thinking it protected them from bullets, and claimed to murder ­children and eat their hearts before ­battle. By their own account, they had killed at least twenty thousand Liberians. Since then, Johnson’s faction had been routed by Charles Taylor, who was of Gola ethnicity. Perhaps Johnson thought that meeting with Amnesty would help him reclaim some respectability or protect him from retribution by Taylor. Of



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course, he assured us, he would see to it that ­human rights ­were protected in the f­ uture and past perpetrators brought to justice. “Including yourself?” I wondered. “No one is perfect,” he said sardonically. The next year, ­a fter Charles Taylor had been elected president with 75 ­percent of the vote, Johnson was forced to take refuge in the American embassy ­under a hail of bullets. Most of his soldiers w ­ ere killed, and the compound where we had met with him destroyed. A ­ fter a brief standoff between Taylor and the embassy guards, Johnson was flown to asylum in Nigeria where he died a few years ­later.16 Being posted at that embassy, which was just around the corner from the Mamba Point, was the first choice of assignment for few diplomats, as evidenced by the fact that ­t here had been no ambassador in place since 1992. Quite apart from the danger, Monrovia was hardly overflowing with amenities. ­There was only one other “full ser­v ice” restaurant besides the Mamba Point’s—an Italian joint, though no one cared to speculate on the origin of the meat served ­t here. William Milam, a c­ areer diplomat, chargé d’affaires, and highest-­ranking American official assigned to the embassy at the time, was more than happy to join us for dinner, particularly when we suggested we eat on the porch of the Mamba Point and not at the Italian ­temple of mysterious cuisine. Among the occupants of that eclectically populated porch was a fascinating man named Ken Noble, who had just left the employ of the New York Times, for which he had served as Los Angeles bureau chief during the O. J. Simpson trial and as West Africa bureau chief from 1990 to 1994. He was in Monrovia to research a book on the war. Ken was a tough, no-­nonsense journalist with a penetrating gaze and incessant skepticism. A gradu­ate of Yale and of Berkeley Law School, he had no journalism experience when he was selected by the Times for its minority internship program in 1980, but he had risen rapidly at the paper.17 I invited him to join Milam and the Amnesty crew for the meal. It turned out to be a fascinating conversation. Noble provided a detailed account of the war, and Milam candidly assessed the m ­ istakes the United States had made in Liberia over the years. One of ­t hose ­mistakes was validating Doe’s reelection in 1995 despite it having been obviously rigged. “That was a bad call and a turning point in Liberia’s fall into chaos,” the diplomat said. When our eve­ning fi­nally wrapped up near midnight, Milam started to walk back to the embassy by himself. It was only two or three blocks away,

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but t­ here w ­ ere no streetlights and roving bands of armed men everywhere in the city. “­Don’t you want to call for a car?” I asked. “Oh, I ­don’t think I need one,” he said casually. Noble looked at him as if to say, “Who’s this damn fool who thinks he’s safe b ­ ecause he’s white?” but kept his mouth shut. Then Milam reconsidered. “I guess the president [Clinton] ­wouldn’t be too happy if I got jumped,” he said and called the marines at the embassy to come get him. ­Those armed men so ubiquitous in Monrovia during our mission did not, however, represent all the residents of the city. In fact, Liberia is an excellent counterexample to t­ hose who say that ­human rights is inevitably a toothless cause. That may sometimes be the case at the global or multilateral level, but local activists who can access ­human rights language and protections can sometimes overcome even the fiercest warlord. The most impressive ­people we met in Liberia came from two groups rarely associated with brute power: the religious community and w ­ omen leaders. The Catholic archbishop of Monrovia, Michael Francis, considered the conscience of the nation, had been defying Doe, Taylor, and their lot for more than twenty years, denouncing corruption, child soldiers, and all manner of h ­ uman rights crimes. It was u ­ nder his auspices that our host, Kofi Woods, had formed the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission that provided ­legal repre­sen­ta­tion to enemies of the government, rights education to the populace, and a radio program reminding the community e­ very day that it held its ­f uture in its own hands. If the archbishop could claim a mea­sure of protection due to his office, Kofi was more vulnerable, subject to constant threats, occasional imprisonment, frequent exile, and the need to sleep in a dif­fer­ent place almost e­ very night. And yet, despite the perpetual peril, Kofi, like t­ hose prisoners of conscience I described in Chapter 2, would not yield. In an interview with Robert F. Kennedy H ­ uman Rights, he put it this way: My life has always been, at ­every moment of the day, ­every moment, a surprise. I walk to dif­fer­ent places and p ­ eople hold my hands and ­can’t believe that I am still living. B ­ ecause all that was heard about me was that I would be killed in a moment. Society needs ­people who can help . . . ​by their conviction. ­Because when you confront evil you provide a moral alternative for society. When a nation is so consumed in evil, it’s difficult to see alternatives u ­ nless p ­ eople of conviction stand



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up! Sometimes you can even convince other ­people to join the strug­ gle. You can even convert t­ hose of evil heart to good. I have seen that happen.18 By repeatedly “standing up,” the archbishop, Kofi, and ­others in the religious community offered Liberians an alternative to the hell they ­were experiencing. Six years ­a fter our visit, ­a fter Taylor had been elected, ­a fter the country had been convulsed in a second civil war, it was the ­women of Liberia led by, among o ­ thers, Crystal Roh Gawding and Comfort Freeman, two Lutheran leaders tired of seeing their ­children slaughtered, who forced Taylor to enter into a peace agreement.19 A few months l­ater, u ­ nder indictment by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which had been established in the aftermath of the Sierra Leone bloodbath, Taylor fled Liberia to be succeeded in 2005 by the first female president of an African country, the respected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. She would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. Our few days in Liberia and the Amnesty report that followed contributed very ­little to ­t hese subsequent developments. At the most we reminded the warlords and the supporters of h ­ uman rights that the international community was watching and that what was happening in Liberia was regarded as an abomination by far more than just the victims of the atrocities. But it was Liberians, with support from international ­legal mechanisms and the George W. Bush administration, who rescued their country. For my part I just felt lucky to get out of Monrovia alive and not just ­because one morning at the Mamba Point I was awakened by a fierce knocking on the door only to find a guy in some kind of uniform pointing a ­rifle at me. Samuel Johnson observed that “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,”20 but I can attest that condition applies well before a fortnight, when a man awakes to find a militiaman pointing a r­ ifle at him. “Anyone h ­ ere?” the soldier asked. “Just me,” I replied. “Let me see,” he said. “Be my guest,” I said, and without another word the gun-­toter poked his ­rifle ­under the bed, into the closet, and ­behind the shower curtain. Finding nothing except cockroaches, he turned and left, leaving me to reconcentrate my mind. And then ­there was the assassination threat. At the beginning of our visit, we had held a press conference to explain our presence in the country. A reporter from an anti-­Taylor paper asked me if Amnesty believed that war

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criminals should be allowed to run for president. I carefully explained that Amnesty took no position on who could be a candidate for president but that in general we believed that anyone who had committed a war crime should be brought to justice. The next day the front-­page headline read, “War Criminals May Not Run for President,” an obvious swipe at Taylor, and the article attributed the sentiment to me. Knowing that if we appeared to be taking sides in the election it could damage our credibility and hence our mission, I immediately went to the newspaper office, laid out our position again, and asked for a correction. The editor assured me he understood. The next morning the headline in even bigger font read, “YOU ­WILL BE BOOKED!” referring of course to Taylor and putting t­ hose words in my mouth. The next day I flew out of Monrovia as scheduled, the only hitch being that a copi­lot of the Air Ivoire plane spent the entire flight locked in the bathroom with a flight attendant, but my two colleagues remained for another day or two and at one point met with a close aide to candidate Taylor. “Tell Dr. Schulz,” the aide instructed them, “that Mr. Taylor is very concerned for his health. Tell him that Mr. Taylor is concerned that he ­will be booked by a bullet if he should ever return to Liberia. And tell him to keep an eye on his back in New York.”21 Since I ­didn’t expect to return to Liberia anytime soon and felt pretty safe in New York, I d ­ idn’t take the threat seriously, but I understood the fear of all t­ hose Liberians who had to live with such intimidation e­ very day. I certainly had no regrets when in 2012 Charles Taylor was fi­nally convicted of murder, rape, and ten other crimes and sentenced to fifty years in prison—­a sentence he is currently serving in the United Kingdom.

* * * The next mission I led took me to the United Kingdom and specifically Northern Ireland in May 1999 in the com­pany of several staff members from the International Secretariat. The Good Friday Agreement had been signed a year before, ostensibly ending more than thirty years of conflict between “republicans,” who sought the unification of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland and ­were mostly Catholic, and “­unionists” or “loyalists,” who ­were mostly Protestant and favored the status quo, that is, maintenance of Northern Ireland as a province or region of the United Kingdom. Despite the sec-



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tarian divisions, “the Trou­bles,” as they w ­ ere invariably referred to, w ­ ere less about religion than about po­liti­cal and national identity. But what­ever they ­were about, they managed to kill almost three thousand ­people, the majority between the ages of fifteen and forty.22 Though the agreement had put an end to the shooting war, all parties to the conflict acknowledged that much remained unresolved and that the lack of resolution, especially around h ­ uman rights issues, threatened the prospects of long-­term peace. From the republican point of view, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), a Protestant-­dominated police force lodged inside battlement-­style stations, was a par­tic­u­lar focus of outrage, suspected of having collaborated with Protestant hooligans in murderous forays against the Catholic community. For the ­u nionists, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, or IRA, the principal republican militia, was nothing more than a bomb-­planting group of terrorists that deserved no quarter. In addition, republicans and u ­ nionists alike had carried out executions of t­ hose they regarded as traitors in their own ranks. Caught in the ­middle was a populace that, in the big cities at least, lived ­behind so-­called “peace walls,” im­mense physical barriers that separated Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods and ­were inevitably plastered with po­liti­cal graffiti. No ­matter which side of the wall they lived b ­ ehind, parents w ­ ere united in worry about the fate of their ­children. The purpose of our mission was two-­fold: first, to encourage reforms of the RUC designed to make them more even-­handed enforcers of law, and second, to investigate three po­liti­cal killings in which the RUC appeared to be implicated but for which no one had been held to account. As in Liberia, I was included in the Amnesty del­e­ga­tion ­because the United States, with its large Irish population and abundance of Irish American po­liti­cal leaders, had an inordinate influence on ­matters related to Northern Ireland: US Special Envoy George Mitchell had played a key role in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement. Unlike in Liberia, however, Northern Ireland (the United Kingdom) had a functioning demo­cratic government and a justice system that was at least theoretically committed to the rule of law. Though the IRA and the loyalist militias, such as the Ulster Defense Association (UDA), had often been impervious to the pleadings of h ­ uman rights organ­izations, we hoped the Northern Ireland and British governments might be more responsive now that a new day was on the horizon.

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That our principal attention was on the RUC and its ­unionist allies did not mean, however, that we w ­ ere indifferent to abuses committed by the republicans. Both sides had plenty of blood on their hands, often as a result of bombings that ended with the deaths of t­ hose who played no direct role in the conflict. We met with every­one from representatives of the Orange Order, the Protestant fraternal order that sponsored provocative marches through Catholic neighborhoods, to Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the po­liti­cal party historically associated with the IRA. Among the IRA’s victims was Andrew Kearney, a thirty-­t hree-­year-­old ­father of four who came from a republican ­family but had gotten into a pub fight with an IRA commander less than a year before we interviewed his el­ derly ­mother, Maureen. That altercation had sealed his fate. The IRA had strict rules when they meted out punishment to their own: Advise the target to call an ambulance. Wait ­until you hear the ambulance coming before you start shooting. Shoot only the legs or ankles. Keep the victim conscious so he can treat his own wounds by, for example, putting his fin­ger in the bullet hole to avoid bleeding to death. For what­ever reason, t­ hose rules w ­ ere broken in Kearney’s case. He was shot in each knee and one ankle, all right, but the phone in his flat had been ripped out so his wife could not call for help, and his hands had been tied ­behind his back so he ­couldn’t tend to his wounds. He died on the way to the hospital, and his ­mother was determined to bring his murderers to book, although she passed away before that could happen. As I listened to stories over the years from the families of victims of ­human rights crimes, I never quite got used to the anguish. When t­ hose crimes w ­ ere abetted by authorities sworn to uphold the law, as in the three RUC-­related cases we investigated, it is particularly revolting. Patrick Finucane was shot fourteen times in front of his wife and three ­children as he sat at the Sunday dinner ­table in his own home. Two masked men had plunged through the front door with a sledgehammer on February 12, 1989, shot Pat twice, and, a­ fter he slumped to the floor, put twelve more bullets in his face. Finucane was no pub brawler, no sectarian “soldier,” no partisan politician. He was an eminent criminal defense l­ awyer who dared to take as clients republicans accused of being terrorists. His most famous client had been Bobby Sands, whose death by hunger strike in 1981 had brought international attention to the strug­gle in Northern Ireland.



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As we sat in the Finucanes’ h ­ ouse talking with his w ­ idow, Geraldine, I c­ ouldn’t keep my eyes from wandering to the door of that kitchen where ten years before the assassination had taken place. What must it be like to still live in that home on Fitzwilliam Drive in North Belfast and multiple times a day pass by the spot in the ­house where your husband had been murdered, your ­children had cowered in horror ­u nder the t­able, and you had been wounded? The Finucanes’ oldest son, Michael, l­ater recalled that day: “The ­thing I remember most vividly is the noise,” he said, “the reports of each bullet reverberating in the kitchen, how my grip on my younger ­brother and ­sister tightened with e­ very shot.”23 And yet t­ here with us sat Geraldine, fervent but composed, her hands in her lap, tea on the t­ able, insisting that even ­after a de­cade she would see justice. And justice was needed, not just for Patrick or for her and her ­family but for Northern Ireland to flourish b ­ ecause the murder of Pat Finucane still ate at the body politic, still tainted the trust ap ­ eople need to have in its government if a democracy is to function. The UDA had acknowledged responsibility for the killing, was even proud of it for having eliminated a barrister they claimed, falsely, had been a member of the IRA. What the Finucane f­ amily and Amnesty, citing reams of circumstantial evidence, alleged was that the RUC and perhaps other British security ser­v ices ­were involved in the murder.24 It would be 2004, five years ­after our meeting, before Ken Barrett, a hitman for the UDA, would be convicted of the crime that had been committed based on information supplied by a British army agent, and eight more years ­after that (2012) before a review conducted by a former war crimes prosecutor confirmed that RUC officers had proposed the killing, facilitated its execution, and then obstructed the investigation. British prime minister David Cameron subsequently apologized to the Finucane ­family, an apology they understandably regarded as being too ­little, too late.25 Tragically, Patrick Finucane was not to be the only defense attorney assassinated in Northern Ireland. Almost exactly ten years a­ fter his death and three months before our mission, Rosemary Nelson was executed. Though 40 ­percent of her clients w ­ ere Protestants, Nelson had earned the ire of loyalists for defending a man accused of killing a prominent loyalist fighter. She had provoked the enmity of the RUC by criticizing their h ­ andling of t­ hose controversial Orange Order marches; by representing Robert Hamill’s ­family, whose case is described below; and by filing complaints against the police

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when its officers had threatened her and roughed her up. A year before her death, she had testified before a US congressional committee: “I have begun to experience difficulties with the RUC. Th ­ ese have involved RUC officers . . . ​ making allegations that I am a member of a [republican] paramilitary group and . . . ​making threats against my personal safety. . . . ​[M]y clients have reported an increasing number of . . . ​[RUC] death threats against myself and members of my f­ amily.”26 It was therefore not surprising that her f­amily suspected RUC involvement when on March 15, 1999, Rosemary’s car was blown up just yards from her h ­ ouse. The sophisticated bomb had to have been attached only hours before at a time when the neighborhood surrounding the Nelson h ­ ouse was saturated with RUC and British Army patrols, including by he­li­cop­ter.27 Once again, a u ­ nionist militia, this time one calling itself the Red Hand Defenders, claimed responsibility, but could they have manufactured a device of this complexity on their own? Rosemary’s husband, Paul, was skeptical when we interviewed him at his home. Paul observed insightfully, “If the government ­won’t protect p ­ eople who pursue [republicans’] rights through ­legal, nonviolent means, it encourages ­t hose who work through extralegal.” Again, it would be years—­twelve of them to be exact—­before an in­de­pen­ dent inquiry would conclude that though direct government involvement in her murder could not be established, Rosemary was being surveilled by MI5 (the British domestic intelligence ser­v ice) and that the RUC had indeed threatened her, assaulted her, besmirched her reputation so as to make her a target, leaked intelligence about her, and failed to protect her, although they knew her life was in danger.28 They may not, in other words, have set off the explosion, but they had printed and mailed an invitation by special delivery to o ­ thers to do the deed. Police, ­after all, have a variety of ways to affect their ends beyond direct use of force. One of t­ hose is to feign ignorance. That was the case when it came to Robert Hamill, a twenty-­five-­year-­old Catholic ­father of three who was walking home from a dance with another man and two ­women on the night of April 27, 1997. As they approached the main crossroads of Portadown, a Protestant majority town frequently the locus of Orange Order marches, they saw a group of loyalists loitering about at the junction. They also, however, noticed an RUC Land Rover parked near the crossroads and, assuming it provided a mea­sure of protection, carried on their way. That was a ­mistake that



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would cost Robert his life for, as he and his companions entered the intersection, more than thirty loyalist men and ­women attacked the four Catholics, beating them savagely. Robert was knocked unconscious almost immediately, and, though one of his ­women companions threw herself over his body to try to protect him, the crowd continued kicking him while shouting “Die, you Fenian bastard!”29 And die is exactly what Robert Hamill did in the hospital eleven days l­ ater. But what about the RUC patrol? What did they do? They did nothing. They w ­ ere twenty yards away from the melee. Thirty ­people w ­ ere shouting and stomping on four o ­ thers. It would have been hard—it would have been impossible—­not to notice. Or did the officers simply not want to notice, not want to intervene, ­either for sectarian reasons or ­because they ­were afraid? Fi­nally, a­ fter Robert Hamill lay sprawled on the ground, bleeding from his head, one of the RUC officers approached him and advised his companions to turn him on his side. Other than calling for an ambulance, that was the extent of the assistance they offered.30 As Robert’s ­sister, Diane, remarked when we spoke with her, “They d ­ idn’t even have to have gotten out of their car. If they had just fired a shot or two into the air, it likely would have dispersed the mob and Robert would be alive ­today.” Initially the RUC alleged that the clash had involved rival loyalist and republican factions battling each other—­not a mob of thirty attacking a group of four—­and that the police themselves had come ­under attack. They soon recanted that account. Then it emerged that the police had been alerted to the possibility of trou­ble a few minutes before the attack on Hamill and his companions by another attendee at the dance who told them that loyalists ­were harassing Catholics and suggested they keep their eyes open. They had studiously ignored that warning. Rosemary Nelson was representing the Hamill ­family in trying to get to the bottom of the case, to find out what the RUC did and d ­ idn’t do and why. It may have been a f­ actor in her death. Years l­ater it was alleged in court that one of the four RUC officers had called the home of a ringleader of the loyalist mob and urged him to get rid of incriminating evidence.31 What­ever the case, the police had not interfered in the assault, and, when we asked the chief superintendent for Portadown why not, he gave one of the most stunning answers I ever heard in my years at Amnesty: “Police lives are as valuable as any other lives,” he began. (So far, so good. I d ­ idn’t disagree with that.) “Therefore, ­t here is no need to put police lives on the line in the

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midst of a melee. The only advice I give my officers is to use common sense.” ­There we had it. The police d ­ idn’t try to save Robert Hamill’s life b ­ ecause their commanders had told them it ­wasn’t their job to save Robert Hamill’s life. But if the police, to whom we give authority, weapons, and often the benefit of the doubt, ­aren’t required to try to protect ­people, even, yes, sometimes at the risk of their own lives, who is? No one was ever convicted of killing Robert Hamill and no RUC officers ever held to account for what­ever role, active or passive, they played in his demise. It was pretty clear that policing in Northern Ireland needed a complete overhaul, and much of the rest of our time in the country was spent advising about that pro­cess. Fortunately, it had been de­cided, as part of the Good Friday Agreement, that a new department would be formed. In 2001 the Police Ser­v ice of Northern Ireland was launched as successor to the RUC. The Police Ser­v ice has hardly operated without flaws, but Catholics now make up 30 ­percent of its officers (in contrast to the RUC’s 8 ­percent), and in 2007 even Sinn Fein accepted its authority.32 We spent a full five or six days taking testimony, offering counsel, and tending hope of change, but before we left Northern Ireland we had one more person to see: the first [prime] minister of Northern Ireland, David Trimble, head of the Ulster Unionist Party, the more moderate of the Protestant parties in comparison to Ian Paisley’s Demo­cratic Unionist Party. The year before, Trimble and John Hume, leader of the Social Demo­cratic and L ­ abour Party, the moderate Catholic alternative to Sinn Fein, had been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as a result of their parts in bringing about the Good Friday Agreement. But David Trimble, a former law professor, was hardly a peaceful person. He came across as austere, humorless, and angry. (In contrast, the firebrand Gerry Adams had appeared calm, reasonable, and charming.) Indeed, Trimble spent most of the meeting excoriating Amnesty. He was practically sputtering with rage, and at one point even slammed a book on a t­able while he paced his elaborate office at the Stormont, the seat of the Northern Ireland Parliament. He accused Amnesty and other ­human rights advocates of complaining about victims of the British military’s actions but failing to object when the IRA attacked the soldiers themselves and, in Trimble’s view, v­ iolated the soldiers’ h ­ uman rights. The argument was peculiar for a law professor to make (though not more peculiar than his insistence at another point that the princi­ple of innocent



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­ ntil proven guilty was a mere “theoretical construct”). In the first place u ­Amnesty had repeatedly criticized the IRA for its ­human rights violations and indiscriminate use of vio­lence. But Trimble had to know that when soldiers are in uniform, with all the power and authority that conveys, their deaths in combat, while they may well be tragic, are not considered ­human rights crimes but casualties of b ­ attle u ­ nless the killings violate the laws of war. The question turned on w ­ hether the Irish Republican Army was r­ eally an “army,” a military force. It certainly considered itself one, though Trimble would naturally dispute that; he considered it no more than a band of thugs and terrorists. If it was an army, then the British ­were engaged in combat in Northern Ireland, and the IRA was obligated to re­spect the laws of war (and, incidentally, entitled IRA prisoners to be considered prisoners of war). That was a l­ egal question more suited to an international courtroom or a law review article than a po­liti­cal conversation.33 For Trimble the charge against Amnesty was obviously a con­ve­nient rhetorical point meant to divert from the subject we w ­ ere t­ here to discuss, namely, the need to reform the police, so I did not pursue the ­matter. I just let him fume. Fi­nally, when he came up for air, I raised the Hamill case with him. I knew from Diane Hamill that Trimble had written her a note—­she showed it to us—in which he had asked, “Is my understanding correct that the RUC attempted to help [Robert and his party] and w ­ ere beaten back?” His understanding was not correct, but his letter offered an opening to discuss the case—­and besides, the Hamills ­were his constituents. At first, he insisted that Robert himself had been guilty of some unspecified infractions. “­You’re not saying, are you,” I asked, “that Hamill brought his death upon himself by simply walking down the street?” This elicited another tirade, so I de­cided to change tacks. When he had calmed down, I put my hand g­ ently on his forearm and said in my quiet­est and most pastoral voice, “Mr. Minister, I ­don’t know the ­whole facts of the Hamill case. Perhaps none of us ever ­will. But I do know that t­ here are a m ­ other, f­ ather, and s­ ister in that h ­ ouse who are in deep mourning for a beloved child. And I do know that, as First Minister, you are now not just leader of the Ulster Unionist Party. You are the leader of this entire country. If Northern Ireland is ever to heal, it w ­ ill be b ­ ecause ­people in your position reach out across the barriers of the mind to the regions of the heart. Can you find it in your heart to reach out to a suffering

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f­ amily, even though they be of a dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal or religious faith, as simply one frail h ­ uman being to another?” At that point something remarkable happened. The room became very still, and for an instant David Trimble’s eyes filled with tears. The tears ­didn’t brim over, and he quickly reverted to other issues but less passionately now as we talked for about thirty minutes more. I was so stunned at what had happened, even uncertain that I had seen what I thought I had seen, that when we stood to leave, I put the proposition about visiting the Hamills to him once again in similar words. Once again his eyes became misty, and he averted his gaze. “Yes, I ­will consider it,” he said, and the meeting was over.34 I suspect David Trimble never visited the Hamills, and I am well aware that tears are no substitute for e­ ither justice or mercy. I recall the tale of the sparrows who w ­ ere standing in line to greet a king. As each sparrow approached the king, the royal wrung its neck. Soon tears spilled down the king’s cheeks, and one sparrow, still waiting in line, said to another, “Look, the king weeps; we are saved.” But the other sparrow was not convinced. “No,” he said, “­don’t look at his eyes; look at his hands.” We cannot rely on the tears of the sovereigns to keep us safe and our rights preserved. And yet David Trimble’s tears reflected something telling about ­human beings. His bombast was not so much a sign of insensitivity to all the pain he saw around him as a protection against it, and his emotion not an indication of weakness but of humanity. From what I saw of David Trimble, I d ­ idn’t like him as a person, but I wondered ­whether that glimmer of sympathy he had shown me was one reason Northern Ireland had fi­nally been able to achieve a mea­sure of peace that had eluded so many other places in the world. Upon our departure from Belfast, I was asked by a reporter what had impressed me most about the situation in Northern Ireland. I replied, “That all the tears that have been shed over the last thirty years, Protestant and Catholic, have had the taste of salt and all the blood that has been spilled has been the color red.”

* * * No goat was strapped into the seat beside me on the flight from Khartoum to Nyala, Sudan, but then t­ here w ­ ere no seatbelts on the flight e­ ither. And no flight attendant cavorted in the bathroom with a pi­lot, but that’s b ­ ecause ­there



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was no flight attendant. Th ­ ere was a pilot—­two in fact—on this Sudan Airways flight but, I was told l­ ater, they w ­ ere former Aeroflot pi­lots who had been washed out of ser­v ice to the Rus­sian airline for incompetence, impairment, or some other debilitation ­because ­t hose ­were the only kind of pi­lots Sudan Airways could attract or afford. And the plane itself was not a passenger plane but an aged cargo prop converted to a “passenger” plane that customers entered through a retractable rear door to find themselves in a cabin with no win­dows, no baggage compartments, and seats missing a few bolts to the floor. Irene Khan, the secretary general of Amnesty in London, seemed not to notice any of t­ hese deficits as we and a half dozen other colleagues set out on a flight for Darfur in May 2004. It being about 5:00 a.m. when we took off, she promptly went to sleep. Khan was a forty-­eight-­year-­old Bangladeshi ­lawyer, educated in Britain and at Harvard Law School, who had spent twenty years in the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees before taking over the top job at Amnesty in 2001. I liked and respected her very much. She was a powerhouse—­smart and tough. Unlike Liberia and Northern Ireland, where cease-­fi res ­were in place when we visited, Darfur was in the m ­ iddle of a genocide. We w ­ ere actually quite surprised that the Sudanese government had granted Amnesty permission to investigate—we had been turned down several times before—­and the organ­ization jumped at the chance. B ­ ecause the United States would play such a key role in any international response to the crisis, Irene had asked me to co-lead the del­e­ga­tion with her. She and her team would go to Geneina on the border with Chad in far western Sudan, while I and mine journeyed to Nyala, a city of about four hundred thousand in the southwest of the country. We would then rendezvous back in Khartoum to share our findings with government officials. The conflict in Darfur appeared to be ­simple but was in fact remarkably complicated. On the surface it looked as if one indigenous ethnic group was massacring another. The real­ity was far more complex. This part of western Sudan had traditionally been the home of the Fur ­people, African farmers (or pastoralists) who had occupied the land since the early 17th ­century. They ­were primarily a sedentary ­people. Over time Arab populations advanced into the region driving their herds of sheep and goats, a primarily nomadic occupation. U ­ ntil the late twentieth c­ entury the two tribal populations had generally managed to live harmoniously, but in the

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1980s a confluence of ­factors jeopardized that harmony. First, increasingly extreme droughts meant that the farmers had less arable land to cultivate and the nomads had fewer places for their herds to feed. ­These shortages inevitably led to tension. Then in 1983 war broke out between the Islamic government in Khartoum and the largely Christian south. In an attempt to consolidate its power and avoid a two-­front war in the west, Khartoum began tilting t­ oward the Arab tribes in Darfur, signaling that they would be favored over their African neighbors when it came to po­liti­cal power and distribution of already scarce resources. In turn some members of African tribes formed rebel militias called the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement to protect tribal interests, though the rebels w ­ ere hardly a defensive force alone and accounted for their fair share of atrocities.35 Now Khartoum r­ eally had a prob­lem on its hands. Already occupied with war in the south, it needed a proxy army to represent its interests and head off the rebels in Darfur. That is why around 2002 it began encouraging and then logistically supporting Arab militias called Janjaweed, or “warriors on ­horse­back,” whose principal tactic was to swoop into African villages, slaughter the male inhabitants to deprive the rebels of ready recruits, and terrify the w ­ omen through rape, pillage, and the burning of villages. Th ­ ese raids ­were frequently conducted u ­ nder air cover from Sudanese government fighter planes that would strafe the villages shortly before the Janjaweed entered them.36 For about a year before our mission, Amnesty had been documenting this destruction of villages through the use of satellite imagery. It estimated that thirty thousand p ­ eople had been killed and over one million displaced into refugee camps in Chad or in Darfur itself.37 Why had the Sudanese government agreed to the Amnesty mission? Since early August 2004, the US Congress had begun using the word genocide to describe what was g­ oing on in Darfur. On September 9, Secretary of State Colin Powell, wary of countenancing another Rwanda on his watch, confirmed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “genocide” was an accurate description of the conflict. So theoretically the United States was taking on an obligation to intervene in some way to put an end to the fighting in Darfur. In 1993, in a case involving the war in the Balkans, the International Court of Justice had ruled that a party to the Genocide Convention, such as the United States, that was “aware . . . ​of the serious danger that acts of



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genocide would be committed [must] employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent genocide.”38 In fact, the United States had no intention of invading Sudan to stop genocide in Darfur. Just the year before it had invaded Iraq, another Muslim country, and had its hands more than full t­ here. Moreover, Powell was the one who in February 2003 had presented spurious claims to the United Nations about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, which had still not been confirmed eigh­teen months ­later. He was the last person whose word would persuade the international community to take action in Darfur.39 But the Sudanese government could not count on all this; it genuinely feared that if it ­were not seen as acting responsibly to stop the carnage, it might suffer some as yet unspecified ill consequences. Allowing Amnesty to investigate was one way to bolster the appearance of respectability. We received our visas only days before the mission was scheduled to begin on September 14 and ­were the first ­human rights NGO to gain access to the region and meet with the government since the war had begun. What we found was e­ very bit as chilling as we had expected—­v illages burned to the ground; a child’s single sandal remaining in a hut now full of wasps’ nests; ­women reporting destruction so complete that they had not so much as a shovel with which to bury their menfolk. UN officials in whose quarters we stayed—­t here ­were no functioning h ­ otels in Nyala—­estimated that at least eighty villages had been abandoned and testified to the presence of aerial bombardments by government planes and he­li­cop­ters. The African Union had “peacekeeping” forces in the region, but they w ­ ere handicapped by two t­ hings: first, they had only one he­li­cop­ter to cover the entire province of 49,000 square miles, bigger than the state of Pennsylvania, and second, even if they did come upon a massacre in pro­gress, they w ­ ere not allowed by their terms of engagement to try to stop it b ­ ecause they w ­ ere only “observers.” They could only report ­after the fact on all the ­dying ­going on around them.40 Among the most moving parts of our journey was an excursion to the enormous Kalma camp for displaced persons outside Nyala—­seventy-­five thousand p ­ eople, mostly ­women and c­ hildren burned out of their villages, assaulted, raped, their menfolk slaughtered. The survivors now crowded into a few square acres, into torn tents or stick hovels, with makeshift latrines ­running through the m ­ iddle of them.

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­There is a smell to refugee camps that once you have inhaled it, you never forget—­a smell of goat dung and ­human waste; of sweat and tears and unstaunched menstrual blood; and of desperation that gives way to sagging shoulders and the decay of the ­human soul. I was struck by a thousand ­things in the Kalma camp: the c­ hildren who called out to us repeatedly the only En­ glish word they knew: “OK, OK” (with the thumbs-up sign), when nothing was OK—­absolutely nothing was OK. The police sent by the Sudanese government to guard the camp, many of whom ­were suspected of being killers themselves, who preyed on ­t hose they ­were supposed to be protecting. But what ­really took my breath away was this: a young ­woman who amid the squalor and degradation, her clothes, such as they ­were, tattered and falling off her, wore around her neck a lovely piece of jewelry—­just glass no doubt but a turquoise-­colored glass that sparkled constantly in the relentless sun. At first I thought it was a religious symbol, and I asked our Arabic-­ speaking translator to ask her what the necklace represented. “She says, ‘It is me,’ ” he told me. I ­didn’t understand the answer. Perhaps she had said simply “It is mine” and he had mistranslated. “What did she say?” I asked. “Did she say it is hers?” “No,” he said definitively. “She said, ‘It is me.’ ” And suddenly I understood. When the ­women workers who led the strike against the textile mills in Lawrence, Mas­sa­chu­setts, in 1912 w ­ ere being hosed down and beaten by the police, they shouted, “Give us bread and roses.” That chant, “bread and roses”—we demand bread to eat, yes, but we demand our dignity too—­has been a watchword of the l­ abor movement ever since. And h ­ ere in this dreadful camp was the very same demand. “This piece of jewelry, this small, sparkling piece of glass around my neck—­t his is me! This is how I know that, though I am being treated as mere brute flesh right now, bone, ­water, swollen tongue, I am not just that. I retain a tiny hint of my humanity. I require bread to live, of course. So do the cows, goats, sheep, pigs—­bless them all. But none of them decorate themselves with turquoise glass; only ­humans do that. Only h ­ umans look on a sparkling piece of glass and call it beautiful. And I am a ­human being! Still! And I demand roses too.” The ­simple demand for bread and roses ran up against not only the brick wall of brute force but the perversity of the oppressors’ thought. Over and over, I was left dumbfounded by the ingenuity with which the bureaucratic



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­ earers of torment justified the harm they inflicted. We found ­t hese justifib cations pervasive in Khartoum but well represented in Nyala as well. In the Nyala National Security Prison, for example, we interviewed a ­lawyer incarcerated ­t here for having represented a ­woman from a burned-­ out village who was seeking l­ egal redress for loss of her possessions and death of her husband. When the l­ awyer went to visit his client at the Kalma camp, he was accused of seeking to take up residence in the camp without qualifying for its protection. It beggared belief of course that anyone would seek refuge in such a place if he ­didn’t need to. But then another imprisoned ­lawyer told us of a client who was taken hostage by the rebels, beaten severely, and then, a­ fter fi­nally being released and returning home, was arrested by the police in Nyala and charged with . . . ​having contact with the rebels! Kafka had nothing on the Sudanese authorities. One of t­ hose authorities offered us a breathtaking description of what we ­were seeing in Darfur. The Wali, or governor, of the Nyala region was a tall, elegant man who sported a trim mustache and carried an intricately carved cane. He spoke perfect En­glish, was trained as an engineer before undertaking a highly successful c­ areer in business, and had been appointed to his post just ten weeks before. He assured us he was ­eager to help reconcile the two sets of tribes and gave an evenhanded account of the war u ­ ntil suddenly he plunged into a fantasy world. The truth was, he said, that equal numbers of Africans and Arabs had been killed or displaced, but the reason it appeared as if the African tribal members had been more victimized was ­because, as sedentary ­people used to fixed locations, they ­were comfortable staying in the camps, whereas the nomadic Arab tribes w ­ ere still on the move and hence inaccessible to NGOs or the media and unable to tell their side of the story. “If that’s true,” I asked, “why have far more graves of African tribal members been found than of Arab? Are you suggesting that the Arabs are carry­ ing around thousands of their dead comrades’ bodies with them as they travel?” This question flummoxed him. “The rebels have killed the Arabs’ camels and contaminated their wells,” he said. This was prob­ably true but hardly responsive to my question. “What do the Arab tribes do with the dead camels?” I asked. “They bury them,” he replied. “So ­there are mass Arab camel graves but no mass Arab ­human graves?” I inquired. “That’s right,” he said. “That is the most imaginative theory I have heard in years,” I told him, and I thought to myself that surely Hannah Arendt had been wrong to conclude

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that the most dangerous perpetrators of evil ­were the banal bureaucrats and not the clever ones. Part of the tragedy of Darfur was that what­ever their differences, African and Arab tribes had a ­great deal in common. They ­were all Muslims, for one ­t hing; they shared many similar cultural practices; they ­were all impoverished; all ­were at the mercy of climate change; and they ­were impossible to tell apart physically, unlike the Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda. This lack of distinctive physical characteristics was brought home to me when I sat beside the police chief of Nyala at a cultural festival to which our del­e­ga­tion had been invited. This was, on the one hand, a kind of pathetic attempt to reconcile the warring p ­ eoples through food and entertainment, but it was also a reminder of mutual interests. A ­ fter we had watched about a dozen tribal dances, their participants all to the untrained eye dressed in similarly colorful costumes and performing similar steps and gestures, I asked the chief of police, a huge man whose belly was bursting excitedly through the buttons of his uniform, which of the dance troupes ­were from Arab tribes and which from African. “I have no idea,” he said. “Let’s ask the Wali.” But the Wali could enlighten me no more than the chief. Just as in Rwanda and Bosnia, resentments had indeed accumulated for years between ethnic groups, but their cinders d ­ idn’t spark into flame ­until some third party, in this case the government of Sudan, worked its bellows upon them. A ­ fter four days in Darfur, it was now time to confront the authorities in Khartoum. But first we had to get back ­t here. I was determined I would not do so via Sudan Airways, but ­t here ­were no trains and you ­couldn’t drive across the desert both for geo­graph­i­cal and safety reasons. Somehow I learned that Sudan Airways had a competitor—­a private com­pany owned by a Finn that flew the occasional jet out of Nyala. To our good fortune, a flight was g­ oing to Khartoum the day we needed it. As it turned out, for all appearances’ sake, you c­ ouldn’t have distinguished that jet from one operated by Qantas. I was relieved, but t­ here was one more “logistical” hurdle I had not counted on. It is often said that the most dangerous part of flying is the trip to the airport, which in our case was quite literally true. As we approached the Nyala airport in one of the cars owned by the UN observers who had hosted us, we ­were pulled up short by a roadblock. In and of itself this was hardly surprising. What was surprising and unnerving ­were the soldiers “manning” the roadblock: four ­children, no more than ten or twelve, each holding an AK-47



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that they immediately poked into all four of the car win­dows. This was only the second time I had had a weapon pointed at me, the first being in Liberia, and I ­didn’t like it any more this time than before. Less in fact, ­because ­these kids w ­ ere twitchy and obviously hyped up on something. They wanted money, and they wanted it now. It w ­ ill not surprise you to learn that they got it. I knew very l­ ittle about Khartoum before learning I would be ­going ­there. I knew it was located at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles. I knew it was where British general Gordon had been killed, his troops routed by the Mahdi. And I knew it was dusty. The latter proved true, but knowing that fact was not very useful, and since we w ­ ere not t­ here on a tourist trip, the former two facts ­were even less helpful. Fortunately, I knew enough about the Sudanese government to be unsurprised by its perfidy. The president, Omar al-­Bashir, had come to power in 1989 in a military coup and had immediately established himself as one of northern Africa’s greatest despots. We would not be seeing him, but we would see a significant cross-­section of his cabinet—­t he ministers of interior, justice, humanitarian affairs, federal affairs, and foreign affairs, as well as the chair of the Advisory Council on H ­ uman Rights and the Commission on the Elimination of Abduction of ­Women.41 In each case we described what we had found in Darfur and made recommendations, including that the government agree to an increase in the number of African Union peacekeepers and an expansion of their mandate to allow for true protection. What quickly became apparent was that the government was perplexed and divided. Some officials took a relatively balanced approach, agreeing that both the rebels and the Janjaweed had committed atrocities and that the government would welcome international assistance. It was obvious they w ­ ere worried about Sudan becoming even more of an international pariah state than it already was and about economic sanctions, if not military intervention. For ­t hese officials the few tools available to enforce ­human rights appeared to be making a difference. But other ministers ­were utterly obdurate, denying that large numbers of p ­ eople had been killed or that the government had played any role in the killing. For ­t hese officials our presence was at the very least a nuisance and more likely a provocation. “Who are you Americans to tell us what to do?” one of them asked me. “You Americans committed terrible crimes at Abu Ghraib. You ignore international law at Guantánamo Bay. Who are you to chastise us?”

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On one point, however, almost every­one seemed to agree. The reports of rape, which had been widespread and which we and o ­ thers had well documented, w ­ ere highly exaggerated. Muslim men simply do not commit rape. ­Women confuse the Arabic word for “rape” with its other meaning, “forced,” and w ­ ill say they have been raped when they have only been forcibly robbed of their possessions. ­Women in refugee camps who say they have been sexually assaulted when they leave the camp to search for firewood are clearly lying since rape is a private crime and no man would attack a w ­ oman in broad daylight. And anyway, “As we all know, ­women in this country have no brains.” Among t­ hose assuring us t­ here w ­ ere few, if any, rapes in Darfur was the chair of the Commission on the Elimination of Abduction of ­Women—­a man. But then . . . ​a ll the members of the commission w ­ ere men! Fi­nally, ­after three days of living in what was feeling more and more like Alice’s Wonderland, we arrived at our last meeting, this one with the most power­f ul of all the government ministers, Major General Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein, the minister of the interior. Hussein’s office was the picture of kitsch: a ceramic peacock lit inside by a green lightbulb, a green plaid Naugahyde couch, a plastic-­coated t­ able (green), and a bevy of silk flowers and trees. What­ever Hussein lacked in decorating taste, he more than made up for in hostility: “You are a po­liti­cal organ­ization,” he shouted at us. “You make a judgment before you even come to the country.” “Mr. Minister,” I replied, “we would have been delighted to come e­ arlier, but you have been denying us visas.” For about twenty minutes he railed at us. David Trimble had nothing on this guy. Fi­nally, Irene walked out but signaled to me to stay. I was glad to stay. I wanted to see how this ended, though no screenwriter could have scripted it better. A ­ fter a few more minutes of ranting, the minister’s cell phone rang. This fi­nally brought an end to the tirade, but I recognized the tune on the ringtone. “What was it?’ I asked myself as we w ­ ere ushered out of the office, and then it came to me: “Mary Had a L ­ ittle Lamb.” The most ferocious man in the government had unwittingly chosen “Mary Had a ­Little Lamb” for his ringtone. I c­ ouldn’t help but chuckle at the irony, though it ­wasn’t Mary who was leading the lambs to slaughter. It was about the first time I had laughed in seven days. The Darfur crisis continues at this writing. At least a hundred thousand ­people have been killed and perhaps many more. In 2008 the United Nations replaced the African Union troops with a UN-­mandated peacekeeping force;



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in 2009 an arrest warrant for Omar al-­Bashir was posted by the International Criminal Court; and ten years ­later he was overthrown, convicted, and imprisoned in Sudan for corruption. ­There ­were even rumors that he would be turned over to the court.42 In 2020 the United States removed Sudan from the list of states sponsoring terror.43 But the collapse of the power-­sharing arrangement between civilian and military leaders in Khartoum in the fall of 2021 and the removal of the UN peacekeeping forces that December sparked a revival of the vio­lence.44 While neither Colin Powell’s declaration of genocide45 nor Amnesty’s mission nor all the speeches and testimony I gave about the situation on returning home made a dent in the Sudanese government’s willingness to underwrite mass atrocities, t­hese actions did have one salutary effect: they helped launch a grassroots movement to stop genocide in Darfur and elsewhere around the world.46 Thanks to the Save Darfur Co­a li­tion and the subsequent involvement of Hollywood stars such as George Clooney and Don Cheadle, to say nothing of Samantha Power’s acclaimed book “A Prob­lem from Hell”: Amer­i­ca and the Age of Genocide (2002), hundreds of thousands of ­people learned about the crime of genocide and committed themselves to trying to stop it. In 2005 the United Nations ­adopted the resolution on the “Responsibility to Protect,” and although, to be sure, mass killing has not been eliminated—as Syrians, Ukrainians, and the Rohingya in Myanmar would be the first to attest—­t he response of the world community has often been more forthright than it was in Rwanda, for example. We in the h ­ uman rights movement take our small victories where we can find them, knowing that if we are not vigilant (and sometimes even when we are), they may be reversed at any time.

CHAPTER 5

My Country ’Tis of Thee US Domestic ­Human Rights Violations

Many American po­liti­cal leaders ­were delighted when Amnesty criticized US adversaries for committing h ­ uman rights abuses. We have seen how both George H. W. Bush and his son used Amnesty’s reports on Iraq to reinforce the righ­teousness of their military actions and that Senator Jesse Helms was only too happy to have me testify before his Senate Foreign Relations Committee about China’s sins. ­Every time Amnesty issued a list of prisoners of conscience held in Cuba, we could be sure that the Cuban American community and its allies would be the first to applaud. But when Amnesty took the United States to task for its own h ­ uman rights violations, ­t hese erstwhile sympathizers became all weak in the knees or worse. Such reservations hardly deterred AI from taking on American transgressions, and, fortunately, with the rescinding of the restrictions on Amnesty members addressing h ­ uman rights violations in their own countries, AIUSA was ­free to be active and out­spoken on m ­ atters at home. Th ­ ose included every­t hing from the treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers, including ­children, who w ­ ere often h ­ oused in jails alongside the regular prison population, to sexual assault on Native American ­women and ­women in the military, a transgression that at the time was rarely talked about and far more widespread than the ser­v ices would acknowledge.1 We became involved in the issue regarding Native American w ­ omen when the noted playwright Eve Ensler, now known as “V,” who was the genius ­behind The Vagina Monologues, came to my office one day to alert me to the catch-22 in which survivors of sexual assault on Native American res-



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ervations found themselves. Tribal courts w ­ ere not legally permitted to try non-­Indian suspects, even when their alleged crimes took place on reservation land, and ­were allowed to sentence Native Americans convicted of crimes, including rape and murder, to no greater than one year in prison. On the other hand, state and federal courts often failed to pursue cases against Indian suspects or against suspects who committed their crimes on Indian land for fear of jurisdictional disputes, if not for indifference. Thanks to Ensler’s initiative, AIUSA issued a comprehensive report on this prob­lem,2 and in 2013 the law was changed to expand the power and reach of tribal courts to deal with sexual assault on Indian reservations.3 In addition to concerns about the criminal justice system, by far the largest number of US domestic abuses that Amnesty addressed, however, fell into three related categories: police practices, prison conditions, and the use of the death penalty.

* * * As a professor of criminal law at the University of Pittsburgh, my f­ ather was generally well disposed t­ oward the police, and, as a middle-­class white child, I ­adopted a similar attitude. Sergeant Stan Gorski of the Pittsburgh Police had been a student of my ­father’s and became a ­family friend. He would occasionally drop by our ­house, sometimes in his patrol car, which I thought decidedly cool. My opinion of the police changed markedly with the civil rights movement and then took a deep plunge during the anti–­Vietnam War years. That fear and disdain came to a head with the Chicago “police riot” at the 1968 Demo­cratic National Convention and was reinforced on my first day at theological school in Chicago. Within an hour of my arrival in the city, a Chicago police cruiser rammed into the side of my Camaro that I had parked on the street in front of the school. When two burly white cops walked through the doors of the school and asked, “Is that your Camaro outside?” my voice no doubt jumped by at least an octave. “Yes, sir,” I squeaked. “It’s mine. Is ­t here a prob­lem?” “Well,” said the cop, “­whether ­t here’s a prob­lem ­will be up to you ­because we just ran our cruiser into your car. Now you have two choices: you can ­either fill out a form and report the accident to downtown, or you can forget all the fuck about it. We strongly advise you take the

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latter course.” The Chicago police w ­ ere the last p ­ eople I wanted to have any dealings with, and as a white kid I could forget all the fuck about it, so I promptly did. My sweeping distrust of cops did not modulate much over the intervening twenty years between theological school and my ascension at Amnesty. The Amnesty years would both deepen my suspicions and refine my criticisms. The first major report on police misconduct that Amnesty issued a­ fter I became executive director was its 1996 account of brutality in the New York City Police Department (NYPD). As the largest and perhaps most prestigious police force in the country, the be­hav­ior of the NYPD set standards for other departments. The report described ninety cases of ill treatment or excessive use of force, the vast majority, not surprisingly, involving persons of color.4 The day before we released the report, I met with Howard Safir, the police commissioner, at his office at 1 Police Plaza in Manhattan, to see if I could get a commitment from him to review our report and respond to it. Safir, who had been appointed by Rudy Giuliani, was a belligerent, swaggering volcano of denial. Nothing we had found was accurate or worth a moment’s notice. “It’s short on facts and long on hype,” he said. Giuliani himself called it “scattershot” and “not a real analy­sis.”5 Fourteen months ­later a Haitian man named Abner Louima was brutalized by NYPD cops while in custody at a station h ­ ouse, a broomstick shoved up his rectum. The case became a national cause célèbre and would cost the city $8.75 million in damages. Safir told ABC News that in light of the Louima incident he would “take a second look” at our report. What­ever scrutiny he did or did not give it was insufficient to prevent another tragedy. In February  1999 an African immigrant named Amadou ­Diallo, mistaken for a rape crime suspect, was shot nineteen times by the NYPD elite Street Crimes Unit as he stood unarmed in the doorway of his home. Diallo’s murder cost the city $3 million to ­settle a wrongful death lawsuit, and, in part b ­ ecause of that murder and ongoing pressure from Amnesty and ­others, Safir’s successor, Raymond Kelly, disbanded the Street Crimes Unit in 2002.6 Unfortunately, ­there are no reliable national statistics on police use of excessive force—­ironically, on a per capita basis, New York City prob­ably has fewer such incidents than many other departments—­but a sophisticated study



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published in the Lancet in 2021 documented that Blacks and Hispanics are at far greater risk of being killed by police than whites.7 And even when physical vio­lence is not involved, the steady drip-­drip of discrimination is enervating. The triviality of the alleged offense in one case of which AI became aware reinforced the limitlessness of implicit bias: a young Black man named Theo­ philus Bell was s­ topped by police in Des Moines, Iowa, for riding his bicycle without a light. Contesting his arrest in court, Bell proved that ­every single person ­stopped for that offense in Des Moines was African American, even though 98 ­percent of the bikes in that majority-­white city had no headlights.8 The most commonplace solution to such racist outcomes was always more police training—­and certainly training is valuable—­but even more impor­ tant, I came to believe, was the posture that police leadership struck ­toward misconduct. A police chief who would not tolerate brutality did not guarantee it never took place, but a chief who ignored or excused it (“a few bad apples”) inevitably presided over a department where it was rampant. In the August 16, 1998, issue of the New York Times Magazine, Safir unwittingly revealed the prob­lem. Referring to the Louima case, he said, “Police brutality by definition is, I go to arrest you, and you resist, I can use reasonable force. But ­after y­ ou’re down, I hit you on the head five times. That’s brutality. But taking someone 30 minutes ­after an event, taking them into a room and brutalizing them the way it allegedly happened, that’s criminal.” 9 As I pointed out in a letter to the magazine’s editor that appeared September 6, to try to differentiate “brutality” from “criminality” or to think that the criminality of a brutal act turned on the time frame in which it took place sent exactly the wrong signal to the public and certainly to the police!10 To be sure, race was not the only demographic f­ actor that prompted abuse at the hands of police. In 2005 AI issued a 214-­page report on police mistreatment of LGBTQ+ persons based on a survey of twenty-­nine major city departments (twenty-­t hree ­others failed to respond).11 When race and gender identity intersected, the mistreatment was likely to be even more severe. This was illustrated in a 2006 case AI documented of a young transgender Latinx ­woman, Mariah Lopez, who was arrested for soliciting by NYPD police and taken to Precinct 6, where she was beaten so severely her tooth and nose ­were broken.12

* * *

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Though all t­ hese cases (and many o ­ thers of which I became aware) disgusted me, I also knew that t­ here w ­ ere cops who resisted the “blue wall of silence,” the code among officers that discouraged holding to account colleagues who ­violated good police procedure. So interested did I become in what motivated some cops to reject mistreatment and even report or testify against ­those who stained the badge’s honor that for a time I thought I might write a book on the subject. I began by interviewing half a dozen officers who had crossed the blue wall, beginning with a member of the AIUSA board, Ron Hampton of the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. Ron was a tall, handsome African American man who eventually served twenty-­t hree years on the force as a community relations officer. When he would come into Amnesty’s Washington office in his full police regalia, it never failed to set off ner­vous titters among the younger staff who knew that AI often had an adversarial relationship with the police and ­didn’t know that Ron was on our board or that he was frequently at odds with the police establishment to say nothing of some of his colleagues. “Bill,” one of ­t hese staff members once informed me with fear and trembling, “­t here’s a policeman at the front desk asking for you. Should I get Gerald to join you? He’s a l­ awyer.” I assured her it w ­ asn’t necessary. Ron had been raised in Washington in a f­ amily of six c­ hildren. His m ­ other was a strong, in­de­pen­dent w ­ oman with a keen sense of integrity who taught her son that “you run the job; d ­ on’t let the job run you.” Growing up, he had a good relationship with police officers who walked the beat in the community and seemed genuinely to care about the ­people who lived ­there. That was why, when he returned home ­after four-­and-­a-­half years in the Air Force, including twelve months in Vietnam, he enrolled in the police training acad­ emy. Almost from the start, however, he was troubled by the approach he was being taught ­there, which involved learning to intimidate and frighten. “Why are we ­doing all this hollering when our job is to help ­people?” he asked one of his instructors. “If you ­don’t like it, you can leave,” was the response. “I ­don’t like it,” Ron said, “but I’m not leaving.” Over the next twenty-­t hree years Ron worked hard to gain the trust of the community he patrolled. He was convinced that demeaning or brutalizing o ­ thers was not the way to make better ­human beings of them. When he was told by commanders to “go get some PD76”—­stop and frisk calls—he insisted that he’d only stop p ­ eople if he had good reason to do so but not just



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to meet a quota, unlike officers who would meet their numbers any way they could in the first hour of a shift so they could do nothing for the next seven. His superiors and fellow officers often ridiculed him or threw roadblocks in his way, and Ron regularly flunked the ­little tests of loyalty they threw at him. When, for instance, a seasoned cop swiped a ­bottle of liquor from a store shelf, rookie Ron was expected not to report the theft. “I busted his ass,” Ron said. For thirteen years he walked the beat by himself ­because other cops would not work with him. Even other African American officers encouraged him to tone down his criticisms, temper his righ­teousness. “It w ­ ill hurt us all,” they told him. “But I believed that speaking out about injustice ­wouldn’t hurt us any more than we w ­ ere already hurt,” Ron told me. “I w ­ asn’t trying to reform the department. I was just trying to be an ethical man.”13 Eventually Ron helped found the National Black Police Officers Association dedicated to” promoting justice, fairness and effectiveness in law enforcement”14 and became a h ­ uman rights activist, even asking a jury in 1993 to spare the life of a cop-­k iller in Austin, Texas, a move that infuriated many of his fellow officers.15 Through Ron I met other African American officers who held similarly skeptical views of traditional policing. One of the most in­ter­ est­ing was a ­woman named Leslie Seymore, who spent twenty-­six years with the Philadelphia police and was initially told, a­ fter she had easily passed the police exam, that she c­ ouldn’t serve b ­ ecause she was an unwed m ­ other. “What does that have to do with being a police officer?” she asked before suing and winning instatement on the force. That was just the first of many challenging questions Leslie posed to her supervisors over the years. When Rodney King was bloodily assaulted by Los Angeles police in 1991, the National Black Police Officers Association asked its members, of which Leslie was one, to wear black ribbons in solidarity with King. When she did, she was ordered to take it off ­because King was a civilian. Her case went all the way to the police commissioner. “But t­ here is pre­ce­dence for commemorating a civilian,” Leslie told the commissioner. “When Frank Rizzo [the notorious former mayor of Philadelphia and white supremacist] died, he was a civilian and we all had to wear signs of mourning for him!” Of her outspokenness, Leslie told me, “The best weapon a police officer has is what’s between her ears, but in a quasi-­military organ­ization like the police y­ ou’re taught not to use [your brain] but to just follow o ­ rders.” Much

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police be­hav­ior, she had found, was motivated by fear. “Officers think guns make them invulnerable,” she said, “but most [officers] are just plain scared out on the streets so they react to Black f­ aces in ste­reo­t ypical ways.” Knowing that she had often received threats from her fellow officers, I asked if she had ever been afraid of them. “­Here’s the big secret,” she said. “­Those officers [who threatened me] are basically cowards, afraid to confront you directly ­because, remember, I’ve got a gun too.”16 Leslie had done what she could from inside the force to bring greater justice to policing, but, when we talked in 2000, she had added another tune to her repertoire. While serving in the Philadelphia Police Department, Leslie was also the president of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union—­t he only active-­duty officer to take on such a role. ­After conversations with Ron, Leslie, and o ­ thers, my view of cops began to shift a bit: it was obvious that t­ here w ­ ere “a few good apples” among them, many of t­ hose good apples having been inspired by ideals they had been taught by their ­mothers. Ron was not the only one whose ­mother’s injunctions still resonated. Moreover, it was not just Black cops who acted nobly and white cops who acted brutally. Black and Brown cops w ­ ere also responsible for unjustifiable use of force, and I met several white cops, including the legendary Frank Serpico, whose disdain for police misconduct was ­every bit as fervent as my own.17 Clearly the prob­lem was systemic. Police departments w ­ ere permeated with racism b ­ ecause American society was permeated with racism. That society gave cops weapons and authority and then asked them to do fear-­ inducing jobs they ­were ill equipped to do. It established minimal educational standards; paid modest salaries; put l­ ittle premium on emotional intelligence and self-­awareness; rarely addressed the phenomenon of implicit bias; entangled police in complex systems of oppression; told them they w ­ ere top dogs, in charge, the last line of defense; identified “threatening” populations; provided inadequate supervision; and was then surprised when ­t hose cops used their power ruthlessly. It was not Amnesty’s job to fix policing in Amer­i­ca, but we had to keep calling departments to account when they v­ iolated p ­ eople’s rights. My more mea­sured view of police was a luxury that I, a middle-­class white guy, could easily afford to take since I was unlikely to be a victim of the kind of capricious harassment or life-­threatening encounters that ­people of color ­were. As



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it turned out, I never wrote that book on cops who crossed the blue wall of silence. The events of 9/11 intervened, and I wrote a book on that subject instead (see Chapter 6), but I did come to the conclusion that the prob­lem of policing was a lot more complicated than ­either my wide-­eyed childhood view of the cops or the cynicism of my young adulthood had made it out to be. One piece of the puzzle had to do with the nature of the weapons we put at law enforcement’s disposal. In short order I became something of an expert on devices just then being developed for use in criminal justice—­devices that ­were broadly referred to as “stun technology.”

* * * I got on and off passenger planes so frequently during my years at Amnesty that I gradually overcame most of my fear of flying and settled into the airport routine so thoroughly—­security check, read or snooze at the gate, load by row number, and so on—­t hat before 9/11 at least I rarely noticed what was ­going on around me. But that after­noon in 1999 I was startled to recognize among my fellow passengers just waiting to board someone who was arguably the most famous person in the world: Muhammad Ali. No entourage. No security. No fuss. No nothing. Just Ali and his wife, Lonnie, sitting in the gate area along with all the rest of us. Before I could work up the courage to approach “the Greatest,” we all boarded, the Alis in first class, naturally, and I practically in the rear cabin toilet. ­After we had leveled off, I asked the flight attendant to take a note to Mr. Ali. On the back of one of my business cards I wrote, “Would you be willing to work with Amnesty International on h ­ uman rights issues?” Pretty soon another business card came back in a spidery hand: Ali was already suffering from Parkinson’s at that point. “Yes!” it read and provided a name and number for me to contact. It was signed “Muhammad Ali.” That was how we ended up producing one of the best advertisements in AIUSA’s history. The electric chair had been in­ven­ted in 1880 by a dentist in Buffalo, New York, and first employed to execute a convicted criminal a de­cade l­ ater. Electric c­ attle prods had occasionally been used on civil rights protesters. But it was not ­until the 1990s that electronic devices specifically designed to debilitate p ­ eople, though not kill them, became the rage. The most popu­lar of ­t hese devices ­were stun guns or Tasers, but they also included stun shields,

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stun batons, and even a stun lock for your car’s steering wheel, which, when its motion detector was activated, emitted intimidating blue sparks and, according to US News and World Report, “may also qualify you for an insurance discount.”18 Perhaps the most dramatic of the stun technology instruments, however, was a thick ­belt that could be strapped to a prisoner’s waist and on activation delivered a 50,000-­volt, 3-­to 4-­milliampere, 8-­second shock to the kidneys, causing the recipient to crumble to the floor in agony. Its major manufacturer was a Cleveland-­based com­pany called Stun Tech that claimed that, in addition to exerting control over its wearer, the ­belt could inflict humiliation. “­After all,” bragged a Stun Tech training manual, “if you w ­ ere wearing a contraption . . . ​t hat by the mere push of a button in someone e­ lse’s hand could make you defecate or urinate yourself, what would that do to you from the psychological standpoint?”19 According to Stun Tech, its device was used by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, at least six state correctional agencies, and many county sheriffs’ departments, often for transportation of prisoners, including to court hearings where defendants remained attired in the b ­ elt. In June 1999 Amnesty issued a report criticizing the use of stun ­belts on a variety of grounds.20 The very fact that wearers knew that at any moment they might be subjected without warning to excruciating pain constituted in AI’s judgment cruel and inhumane treatment. Stun Tech was right: from a “psychological standpoint” such unremitting anxiety was unbearable and therefore ­v iolated fundamental princi­ples of dignity. Moreover, the UN’s Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners prohibited corporal punishment or the use of restraints for punishment.21 AI documented multiple cases in which stun b ­ elts had been activated e­ ither by m ­ istake or as intentional punishment. The case of Ronnie Hawkins, convicted of stealing two hundred dollars’ worth of aspirin, was instructive. At his sentencing hearing, Hawkins, acting as his own l­ awyer, raised repeated objections to the proceedings, at which point the municipal judge ordered the stun ­belt he was wearing to be activated, a penalty that was ultimately ruled illegal.22 ­Here was the perfect opportunity, we thought, to employ Muhammad Ali in one of our campaigns. He had made his name, ­after all, by inflicting pain. How power­f ul would it be if he now became a spokesperson for stopping it? Ali was interested. The result was a striking poster in black, white, and red featuring a picture of the Champ standing over one of his prone boxing op-



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ponents with the words, “25 Times in His ­Career Muhammad Ali Fought for a ­Belt. Now He’s Fighting Against One.” That poster, which is now in the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, was the visual focal point of a press conference at which we released the stun b ­ elt report and of a subsequent advertising campaign that brought stun b ­ elts to the attention of the American public.23 At the press conference Ali’s ­daughter, Laila, just then embarking on a successful boxing ­career of her own, represented her ­father and joined Frank Serpico and Charles Austin, chief of the Columbia, South Carolina, Police Department, in calling for a ban on stun ­belts. Serpico summed up the case this way: “Stun ­belts . . . ​enable corruption and brutality to flourish. They allow the police officer or prison guard to inflict pain at a distance, with the push of a button. . . . ​It is bad enough when t­ here is evidence of abuse . . . ​[but] the stun ­belt leaves no such evidence, it leaves no marks, no fingerprints, it ­doesn’t break bones—­making it a weapon ripe for abuse.”24 For once Amnesty, which often lagged ­behind H ­ uman Rights Watch and other h ­ uman rights organ­izations in breaking news, was ahead of the curve. ­Every major news outlet covered our campaign. We had been speaking out about abuse associated with stun technology for several years—­I placed an article about it in the New York Review of Books in 199725—­but suddenly we had become the go-to agency for critical comments about anything related to stun weaponry. Over the next few years, we would be quoted and referenced in thousands of news accounts, often related to deaths or injuries subsequent to infliction of electroshock. Stun ­belts ­were used by a ­limited number of law enforcement agencies, but stun guns, which emitted shocks when applied directly to a subject, and Tasers, which fired two electrified darts at a range of up to thirty-­five feet, ­were becoming more and more popu­lar and not just among American police departments. We had identified eighty-­six US companies that manufactured stun technology, some of which was being exported to countries like Saudi Arabia, notorious for using electroshock for torture. In fact, though the US Department of Commerce had instituted an export license category in 1994 called “specially designed instruments of torture,” ostensibly to deter manufacturers of such ­things as thumb screws, it regularly approved export of stun weapons u ­ nder the category of “crime control equipment.”26 And if foreign markets ­weren’t sufficient profit-­makers, stun equipment companies had expanded

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their domestic consumer targets to include private individuals. The M18 and X26c Tasers w ­ ere designed for civilian use and could be purchased on the internet with no background check required. You could even make your own stun gun with a do-­it-­yourself kit. Predictably, as the use of such weapons increased, so did the deaths and injuries associated with them. By 2004 the Arizona Republic had managed to identify ninety cases in which death followed shortly ­after the use of a Taser by police.27 That number did not take into account deaths related to private use, even though headlines such as “Deaf Peddlers W ­ ere Tortured with Stun Guns, Enforcer Says” ­were becoming more and more common.28 Police had used stun weaponry on six-­year-­old kids and seventy-­one-­year-­old grand­ mothers, and it appeared that par­tic­u­lar populations, such as p ­ eople high on drugs, ­were especially susceptible to deadly consequences. It was in this context that I agreed to debate Rick Smith, cofounder of Taser International, the leading manufacturer of Tasers in the United States, at a public forum at Claremont College in California in March 2005. When I arrived, one of the hosts of the forum buttonholed me with an anxious look on his face. “Apparently Taser has recruited police from all over California to be in the audience to­night,” he said. “The place is crawling with cops. It ­won’t be a friendly crowd. Are you still game to do it?” “Well,” I said, “do you remember the old story of the Texas town that had erupted into a riot? The town officials called for the Texas Rangers but w ­ ere disconcerted to find that only one Ranger showed up. ‘Where are the other Rangers?’ they asked. ‘You got one riot,’ replied the Ranger, ‘you need one Ranger.’ Well, you got one auditorium full of cops, you need one h ­ uman rights activist.” The bravado was as much for my own reassurance as my host’s. I w ­ asn’t quite sure what to expect. Amnesty’s position on stun guns and Tasers was actually more nuanced than our position on stun b ­ elts. We w ­ eren’t calling for an outright ban except on sales to civilians or foreign countries identified as employers of torture. In fact, Amnesty preferred the use of nonlethal weapons, which is what Taser International identified their product as being, to lethal ones, but in light of the accumulating evidence that Tasers might in some cases contribute to deaths, we ­were asking two t­ hings: first, that sales be suspended u ­ ntil a thorough, in­de­pen­dent study had been conducted on the potential health risks of receiving one or more 50,000-­volt shocks, and, second, that if police



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­ ere ­going to purchase and employ ­these weapons, they not assume they w ­were nonlethal; place them high up on their “use-­of-­force continuum”; and use them only as a last resort when they had encounters with ­people who appeared to be u ­ nder the influence of drugs or other­wise impaired. As it turned out, the debate was quite cordial. Rick Smith was that relatively rare corporate type who believed that engaging (and potentially coopting) critics was a smarter strategy than stonewalling them. He had even offered to collaborate with Amnesty on ­those in­de­pen­dent tests, though AI refused, pointing out that then they ­wouldn’t truly be in­de­pen­dent and that in any case we lacked the medical expertise to conduct such a study. He framed his mission as similar to Amnesty’s in that he wanted to save lives by giving law enforcement options other than using their guns. He had shifted subtly from calling Tasers “nonlethal” to “less lethal,” but he ­wouldn’t commit to stop selling his product to civilians, even if asked to do so by the Association of Chiefs of Police (which I suspected would ­favor such a restriction). He also refused to agree not to sell to countries the State Department identified as purveyors of electroshock torture. For my part, aware of my audience, I emphasized the reasonableness of Amnesty’s requests and framed the issue in terms of what was good for both suspects and police. The police, for example, surely d ­ idn’t want a bunch of civilians firing Taser darts into them! Interestingly enough, when it came to the Q&A, no one that I could identify as a police officer asked a single question. In fact, on balance the questions w ­ ere more hostile to Rick’s position than to mine.29 I was pretty sure I ­hadn’t won many points with the cops, but one h ­ uman rights activist appeared in this instance to have been enough to keep an auditorium full of them at bay. When I retired from Amnesty in 2006, I was surprised to receive a cordial note from Rick Smith thanking me for my willingness to “discuss the issues in a constructive dialogue.” I was reminded of social ethicist Reinhold Niebhur’s famous book Moral Man and Immoral Society, in which he had argued that the morality of individuals ought to be distinguished from that of the collective. Eventually that com­pany reduced its profile as a supplier of Tasers, changed its name to Axon, and became a leading supplier of police body cameras, a valuable product from a ­human rights point of view. In the short run, our campaign on stun technology inspired more and more municipalities to

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suspend or defer ­orders of such weapons. In the long run, the courts mandated the kind of use restrictions we w ­ ere seeking. The definitive 2016 decision by the Fourth Cir­cuit (Armstrong v. Pinehurst) held that what are now called “conductive energy devices” should only be used in situations where an officer or third party’s life is at stake and should be considered closer to a lethal than a non-­lethal weapon on a police departments’ use-­of-­force continua.30 It took two de­cades to get to that ruling but, without Amnesty making a nuisance of itself, it is less likely we would ever have gotten it at all.

* * * Assuming a suspect survived the pro­cess of being arrested, the odds ­were that he or she or they would end up spending some time in a jail or prison. A second broad area of AI’s concern in the United States was the conditions ­under which incarcerated p ­ eople w ­ ere held. Exemplary of abysmal conditions was the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix, Arizona, and the poster child for bad actors was its sheriff, a pot-­bellied, rough-­spoken fellow named Joe Arpaio who called himself “Amer­i­ca’s toughest sheriff.” Arpaio had become infamous for issuing prisoners pink underwear, feeding them rotten bologna, housing them in tents ­under the scorching desert sun, and forcing them to participate in chain gangs, a practice long abandoned in other parts of the country, including the South, where it had become notorious during the days of Jim Crow. In August 1997, AI issued a report criticizing ­t hese practices but also highlighting even more serious violations, including the death of one prisoner and maiming of another, the latter already a paraplegic, through the extended use of restraint chairs—­metal devices that keep their occupants bound at the hands, feet, and neck. Maricopa County deputies w ­ ere also excessively fond of using electroshock stun guns as weapons not of control but punishment.31 All of this met with Arpaio’s enthusiastic support; indeed, he often bragged about it.32 Shortly a­ fter our report came out, Arpaio and I appeared on a national morning talk show. The sheriff baldly denied our allegations and dismissed our concerns. I responded not by citing our report but by pulling out of my jacket pocket a copy of the consent decree that Arpaio had signed recently with the US Justice Department that detailed his abuse of prisoners and made him promise to mend his ways. Amer­i­ca’s toughest sheriff ­wasn’t pleased.



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But this was only an undercard before the main bout, which took place May 1, 2000, on Bill Maher’s nationally syndicated talk show Po­liti­cally In­ correct, taped in the Maricopa County Tent Fa­cil­i­t y with the prisoners making up the audience. Thanks to a producer who was a Unitarian Universalist and knew me from my pre-­Amnesty days, I had appeared twice before on this provocative program, which, in addition to Maher, the host, featured four ­people with wildly dif­fer­ent views and backgrounds. The literary critic Walter Kirn said of the guests on the show that “minor celebrities played po­liti­ cal journalists and minor po­liti­cal journalists played celebrities,” a description that could easily be stretched to include me.33 Perhaps to elevate the show’s gravitas or just b ­ ecause he thought it was funny, Maher always referred to me as “Doc.” That night, in addition to Arpaio, the guests included a current prisoner named Stephen Russo and the comedian D. L. Hughley. Joe Arpaio, then sixty-­eight, was a connoisseur of publicity. In fact, it would soon become clear that what­ever his philosophy of penology, his top priority was attention. Maher introduced him as “an old softy at heart” for having been married to the same ­woman for forty-­four years “and in that entire time he only sent her to the hole six times,” an indication of the level of humor the host indulged in. He then asked Arpaio why sheriffs w ­ ere elected rather than appointed. “If I w ­ asn’t [elected],” Arpaio replied, “I w ­ ouldn’t be on this show. . . . ​If I was appointed, I ­would’ve been fired seven years ago. . . . ​ ­There’d be no striped uniforms, no tents, no nothing.” “[Your critics] say you do t­ hese as stunts to get elected,” Maher replied. “Is it a stunt saving the taxpayers $70 million?” Arpaio asked. This was the perfect opening for me. “Let’s talk about that!” I pounced. “Let’s talk about what the sheriff has done with the taxpayer’s dollars. Ten million dollars Maricopa County has paid to s­ ettle liability claims.” From t­ here we w ­ ere off to the races, the prisoner interjecting descriptions of conditions in the jail; the comedian Hughley more than holding his own, saying pointedly, “The way you [Arpaio] treat ­people—­I’ve seen men like you my ­whole life. Men who do ­t hings to [­others] to make themselves feel better . . . ​t han somebody e­ lse.” I got in a few swipes, noting that for all Arpaio’s talk about lowering recidivism rates with his unconventional tactics, a criminologist that he had hired concluded that a higher percentage of prisoners ­were returning to jail since “Amer­i­ca’s toughest sheriff” had taken charge than before. I also noted that the state auditor general had concluded that Arpaio

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had misappropriated $122,000 of state funds, including $12,000 he had spent on videotapes of his own tele­v i­sion appearances. He admitted it was true. Fi­nally, Bill Maher asked me ­whether the other work Amnesty did ­wasn’t more impor­tant than conditions in the Maricopa County Jail. “Why should I have sympathy for [prisoners] in this place?” he queried. “If t­ hey’ve been convicted justifiably, they should be punished.” I replied, “But a prison is not for stripping of dignity, it is not for brutalizing . . . ​­because ­these guys . . . ​are ­going to be back on the streets. So [we have to care about their treatment] if for no other reason than that we d ­ on’t want to send p ­ eople who have been brutalized further than they may have been already in their childhoods . . . ​ back onto the streets without the kind of skills, without the kind of support they need.”34 My strategy throughout the thirty minutes was not to rehash all the well-­ known complaints about Arpaio’s treatment of prisoners, which prob­ably struck a sympathetic chord only with t­ hose already convinced of his ungodliness, but rather to try to expand the indictment against him in ways that might make even his passive supporters think twice. ­W hether I was successful or not, the prisoner audience was enjoying itself im­mensely, booing every­ thing Arpaio said and cheering wildly whenever one of the rest of us would score a point. Fi­nally, a­ fter the show ended and the lights went down, a chant arose from the bleachers: “Doc for Sheriff! Doc for Sheriff!” Obviously, I had a ready-­made constituency if I ever wanted to run for office in Arizona. By this time it was pitch-­dark on the jail grounds and one of the Po­liti­ cally Incorrect crew led me back to the trailer where the production staff was ­housed. I was standing outside chatting amiably with three young ­women on Maher’s staff when I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of the sheriff heading my way through the darkness. He was surrounded by four of the biggest, most intimidating-­looking deputies you could imagine. This ­didn’t augur well for my health. “Ladies,” I said only half-­jokingly, “why d ­ on’t you form a nice half-­circle in front of me?” Fi­nally, the sheriff and his posse made it up to where my female Praetorian guard and I w ­ ere standing. Arpaio stuck out his hand. “You know,” he said, “you and I are putting on a g­ reat show. Any chance you can get us on Larry King Live?” ­A fter I had promised to do what I could to promote the “Bill and Joe Show,” the production staff invited me to join them along with Maher and Hughley (though not the prisoner) at a local bar. By the second drink, I had



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concluded that I cared for Maher even less than I did the sheriff. On neither of my first two appearances on Po­liti­cally Incorrect did I have any time to observe him off-­camera b ­ ecause he had dashed off the set without even a “thank you” when the show was over. But now I saw that both he and Arpaio ­were angry and self-­absorbed: Maher was just more polished at his persona, which was that of an iconoclastic know-­it-­a ll who hid b ­ ehind cynical humor to, in Hughley’s words, “make himself feel better than somebody ­else.” Eventually both Maher and Arpaio got a mea­sure of comeuppance, with Po­liti­ cally Incorrect being canceled allegedly for remarks Maher made ­after 9/11 (though Maher bounced back with Real Time with Bill Maher) and Arpaio losing reelection in 2016 and being convicted of contempt of court (though he was l­ater pardoned by Donald Trump). As far as I was concerned, I was just glad to get out of Dodge.

* * * A focal point of AI’s campaign on US violations was the treatment of w ­ omen, especially ­women in prison. When Amnesty was founded in 1961, most prisoners of conscience w ­ ere men ­because most po­liti­cal or religious leaders, journalists, u ­ nion officials—in short, most of the population that might produce POCs—­were men. Domestic vio­lence was still considered a private m ­ atter, no concern of the state; even rape as a weapon of war was not prosecutable as a war crime, as we have seen. With the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1970s, the profile of rights leaders began to change, and with the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against W ­ omen by the United Nations in 1979, the recognition began to dawn that absent a gendered consciousness, ­human rights would remain a pathetically self-­limited concept. Nonetheless, that it was considered pathbreaking when First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton declared at the World Conference on ­Women in 1995 that “­women’s rights are ­human rights” gives a sense of the leisurely pace of change. Four years e­ arlier AI had issued a major report on discrimination and vio­lence against w ­ omen, and over the course of the next ten years the organ­ ization significantly ramped up its work on gender-­based issues.35 Representative of newly emerging ­human rights heroines whom Amnesty defended was the Bangladeshi novelist Taslima Nasrin, who was forced into exile for

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writing a novel about a Hindu ­family being persecuted by Muslim fanatics, a novel that prompted real-­life fanatics to threaten to release ten thousand snakes on the streets of Dhaka if she was not hanged.36 Among t­ hose whose life Amnesty helped save was Zoleykhah Kadkhoda, a twenty-­year-­old ­woman sentenced to death by stoning in Iran for having sexual relations outside marriage but who, though buried up to her waist and pelted by rocks, managed to survive and ­a fter international pressure was subsequently released.37 And among the issues that began to be labeled a ­human rights violation was female genital mutilation (FGM). In many African, some M ­ iddle Eastern, and a few Asian countries, it is considered appropriate, even requisite, to remove some or all of a girl child’s external genitalia, ostensibly to control her sexuality and prepare her for marriage. The World Health Organ­ization estimates that some two hundred million w ­ omen have under­gone this procedure, which usually takes place between infancy and age fifteen.38 For de­cades FGM was considered a private ­matter, abhorrent perhaps but a cultural practice that had to be respected. In the 1990s that assumption began to change, and ­human rights organ­izations, including Amnesty, came to regard it as an act of vio­lence against w ­ omen. To mobilize against FGM, AI Ghana or­ga­nized a conference in 1996 of representatives from fifty NGOs in seven West African nations. A keynote speaker at the conference, which was one of the first coordinated efforts on the continent designed to build support, including among men, for an end to the practice, was Samuel Zan Akologo, general secretary of AI Ghana. Samuel was a favorite colleague of mine for his calm, graceful presence, and his opposition to FGM was very personal. In the first place, his m ­ other had been subjected to cutting, which had made Samuel’s birth exceedingly painful for her. In fact, the tribal name he was given meant “You Have All Seen,” referring to his ­mother’s agony. And second, when Samuel was five years old, his grand­father had overseen the scarification of Samuel’s cheeks, the carving of deep lines in his face designed to mark his tribal membership. It had been painful and terrifying to the child, and it was not difficult for Samuel to extrapolate from t­ hese experiences what girl c­ hildren must experience undergoing FGM. Fortuitously, the novelist Alice Walker, who had written a book about genital carving, attended the conference and wrote a moving and widely circulated article in Ms. magazine, entitled “You Have All Seen,” about Samuel



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and many of the ­women she met in Ghana who ­were themselves survivors of the practice. She quoted Samuel as saying, “If the w ­ omen of the world w ­ ere 39 comfortable, it would be a comfortable world.” Just a few months ­earlier, with strong support from Amnesty and several w ­ omen’s rights organ­izations, notably Equality Now, the US Board of Immigration Appeals had granted asylum to a Togolese teenager named Fauziya Kasinga, who was seeking protection from returning to her home country where she would be subjected to FGM. This decision was a singular achievement b ­ ecause it was the first time gender-­based persecution had been recognized by the United States as grounds for asylum.40 While the occurrence of FGM in the United States was thought to be relatively rare, l­imited to a few immigrant communities, it was astonishingly not outlawed in ­every state.41 That was also the case with two experiences all too common to ­women in American prisons: being shackled while giving birth and, even more seriously, being subjected to sexual assault by prison guards. Both ­were the subjects of a 1999 Amnesty report on violations of the rights of w ­ omen in custody.42 As a result of mandatory minimum sentences and the “war on drugs,” the number of incarcerated ­women had tripled between 1985 and 1997, which meant that more pregnant ­women ­were being held in American jails and prisons and giving birth while in custody. It was commonplace to shackle ­women while transporting them to the hospital to give birth, and in at least eigh­teen states and the District of Columbia it was permissible to keep ­women in restraints during ­labor and even delivery. Amnesty documented a case from Cook County, Illinois, in which a w ­ oman’s legs w ­ ere still shackled together while the baby was emerging from the birth canal, hard as it is to imagine that the ­mother was much of an escape threat at that moment. Changing ­t hese regulations was a tough haul: by 2006 five states and the District had laws prohibiting restraints during ­labor, but that left forty-­five that e­ ither allowed it or had no formal policies on the ­matter.43 It is a safe bet that more than one of ­t hose pregnant ­women had ended up in that condition thanks to the actions of a prison guard. Contrary to international standards that require female prisoners to be supervised only by female officers, an average of 41 ­percent of the correctional officers guarding ­women w ­ ere men. Reports of t­ hose guards using sexually offensive language, touching inmates’ breasts and genitalia during searches, watching w ­ omen

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prisoners undress and shower, and sexually abusing them, including through rape, w ­ ere widespread and well documented. And yet thirteen states had no laws prohibiting sexual relations between jail or prison staff and inmates. Even worse, in California an inmate could be prosecuted if she reported having oral sex, even if it was forced, and in Delaware and Nevada she could be punished if she made a claim of rape and failed to prove her case. Finding ­women who had been sexually assaulted in prison who ­were willing to talk about the m ­ atter publicly was understandably very difficult. When we released our report, we thought a w ­ oman who had been beaten, raped, and sodomized for reporting previous abuse to authorities in the Federal Bureau of Prisons had agreed to join us at the press conference, but she never showed up. Fortunately, ­others w ­ ere willing to describe mistreatment of w ­ omen prisoners, one of whom was Susan McDougal, who had been imprisoned on charges related to the Whitewater Affair and for refusing to cooperate with In­de­pen­dent Counsel Ken Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton. I had lunch with McDougal at Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, a favorite watering hole for politicos, just around the corner from the White House and Trea­sury Department, on February 1, 2001, a few days ­after Clinton had pardoned her.44 She was, not surprisingly, very grateful to the president, but she was contemptuous of Hillary Clinton, regarding her as wily if not duplicitous. Held in solitary confinement for many months, McDougal made no claims of having herself been sexually abused in prison, but she knew plenty of w ­ omen who had been and was more than willing to share her knowledge of prison conditions. At a press conference for us two months ­later she talked about every­t hing from voyeurism to assault and noted, ironically, that male guards w ­ ere often more sympathetic and forgiving t­ oward female prisoners than w ­ ere female officers, which might or might not be indicative of ulterior motives on the part of the male guards. In contrast to our efforts to stop the shackling of w ­ omen in l­abor, our campaign for remediation of laws related to the sexual violation of w ­ omen in prison was one of the most successful of my years at AIUSA. By the time the campaign was over, all but one of ­t hose thirteen states that had failed to criminalize sexual activity between prison staff and inmates had improved their laws, which is not to say that the abuse had dis­appeared.

* * *



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In seventeenth-­century colonial Amer­i­ca, executions of convicted criminals, generally by hanging, w ­ ere popu­lar public events, designed to reinforce the moral scruples of the community. The pro­cession of the prisoner through the streets ended at a gallows erected as close to the scene of the crime as pos­si­ ble, where a preacher would then deliver an execution sermon, generally identifying the miscreant as a monster of depravity and calling the wrath of God down on all sinners who might be tempted to duplicate the crime being punished.45 During my twelve years at AIUSA, I got accustomed to countering this tradition by preaching what might be called antiexecution sermons. No ­human rights violation occupied more of Amnesty’s energy than its opposition to the death penalty. Actually, my own views on the subject had first been formulated in eighth grade when all students ­were assigned to write term papers in preparation for having to do so in high school and I chose capital punishment as my topic. I had therefore been immersed in all the arguments—­t hat capital offenders often receive inadequate counsel, that capital punishment is applied in a racially discriminatory way, that ­t here is no consistent evidence that it is a deterrent—­for a very long time. Familiar with the subject as I became at Amnesty, however, I soon realized that flesh-­and-­blood considerations made the question far more emotionally complicated than statistics or rote argument would have it appear. I have never wavered from my abolitionist position, but I certainly understood why o ­ thers saw the m ­ atter differently and regretted that the two sides seemed unable to dent one another’s protective armor. When in the 1988 presidential debates, Demo­cratic candidate Michael Dukakis was asked by Bernard Shaw if he would support the death penalty if Dukakis’s wife, Kitty, ­were raped and murdered, Dukakis was roundly criticized for his dispassionate response: “I think you know,” he said, “that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all my life. I ­don’t see evidence that it’s a deterrent, and I think ­t here are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.” 46 For anyone who knew Dukakis, that clinical reply was not at all out of character. Years ­later I spent thirty minutes with him privately while we and two o ­ thers waited to speak at a memorial ser­vice for a deceased mutual friend—­t hirty minutes during which Dukakis never s­ topped reminiscing about public policy and his years in public life while saying hardly a word about our dead friend.

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When defending abolition of the death penalty during my Amnesty years, I was often asked questions similar to the one Shaw asked Dukakis. Generally I responded like this: “If someone ­were to harm my wife, Beth, who is the dearest person to me in the entire world, I would want in e­ very fiber of my being to tear him limb from limb, to torture him and cause him unbearable pain, to destroy him, to see him not just die but die a horrible, painful death. But indulging my worst impulses, my basest emotions, would pay no tribute to a gentle soul like Beth, and the job of government is not to advance our most primitive compulsions; the job of government is to make it as easy as pos­si­ble for h ­ uman beings to be good. Asking the state to institutionalize my most vicious urges, to bless them with its imprimatur, not only dishonors t­ hose we have loved and lost but coarsens the spirit of the society in which all of us must live.” That response may or may not have been convincing, but it was a genuine confession of how I felt and honored both the suffering of ­t hose who lost loved ones and the fact that what governments do establishes the norms by which we live. I, for one, did not want to live u ­ nder a social compact in which harm was always met with more harm. This did not mean, however, that I failed to recognize how brutal many of the crimes committed by death-­row prisoners could be. My years at Amnesty coincided not only with 9/11 (see Chapter 6) but with two of the most horrific domestic mass killings in American history—­t he 1995 bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, which killed 168 ­people, and the 2002 Washington sniper attacks by John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, which killed 17. It sometimes seemed as if death penalty opponents needed to see ­every capital prisoner as potentially innocent of their crimes, but t­ here was no way any of t­ hese four could be considered innocent and yet we still condemned their executions.47 In fact, in the case of McVeigh being put to death in 2001, I was one of the few spokespeople whom the news media could find willing to publicly oppose the deed, unpop­u­lar as that position made Amnesty and me. It was not hard to understand of course why many death penalty abolitionists emphasized potential innocence. A major development during my years at Amnesty was the rapidly increasing rates of exoneration for ­t hose convicted of capital crimes. Between 1994 and 2006, eighty-­two death-­row prisoners ­were released for such t­ hings as corrupted evidence, police or prosecutorial misconduct, or outright proof of innocence, the latter having been



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established in about 30 ­percent of the cases through DNA analy­sis, which came into use in 1986.48 One of t­ hese exonerees, a man named Nick Yarris who had spent twenty-­t hree years on death row for the abduction, rape, and murder of a ­woman he had never met, gave a stunning answer when he was asked how he could seem so sane ­after enduring such an injustice: “What ­were my choices? he replied. “I could (A) be r­ eally devastated and angry and let them continue to own me or (B) I could have fun. B sounds better. . . . ​The lowest insult would be if I came out destroyed, a broken man, b ­ itter and angry. . . . ​My 49 survival technique was to become a good man.”  Some proponents of the death penalty argued that the large number of ­people released from death row for wrongful convictions was evidence of the system working, weeding out the innocent before the fatal day. But that con­ve­nient conclusion ignores the fact that the vast majority of t­ hose exonerated had their cases reviewed not ­because the state took the initiative to correct its errors but b ­ ecause they ­were lucky enough to get a l­awyer, law student, journalist, or h ­ uman rights activist to champion their cause. Two of the most successful of ­t hese initiatives are Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld’s Innocence Proj­ect and Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative. The former was founded in 1992 and the latter in 1995. What happened before then? And since ­t here are about 2,500 ­people on death row and only a handful of ­those cases can be examined at any one time, what happens to the rest of them? The Death Penalty Information Center has documented eigh­teen executions since 1989 in which t­ here is strong evidence that the state killed an innocent person.50 Moreover, the extent to which the death penalty is applied in a racially discriminatory fashion has been established beyond a reasonable doubt.51 It is not just that 34 ­percent of t­ hose executed have been African Americans, even though African Americans make up only about 13 ­percent of the population.52 The ­really telling statistic centers on the race of the victims. Even though Blacks are more frequently the victims of capital crimes than whites, vastly more of t­ hose sentenced to death have been convicted of killing white ­people than Black.53 The value of a Black life in the American criminal justice system is demonstrably less than that of a white person. Theoretically, we could correct t­hese flaws. Theoretically, we could assign ­every capital case to the most conscientious ­lawyers and researchers and mitigation specialists (­t hose who account for a defendants’ ­mental or

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­ evelopmental disabilities and hence their ineligibility for the death pend alty). Theoretically, we could eliminate “testilying” by law enforcement officers, misconduct by prosecutors, and errors in crime labs. We could employ DNA analy­sis in e­ very applicable instance; we could exempt anyone from execution where t­ here was even the slightest doubt of guilt. We could thereby, theoretically, reduce to virtually zero the possibility of executing an innocent person. And, theoretically, we could also eliminate racial bias from our capital sentences. We could, in other words, do what Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun declared in 1994 that he would no longer do, namely, “tinker with the machinery of death.”54 He knew that, try as we might to do all this, we fallible h ­ uman beings would fail. Still, even if we succeeded and even acknowledging how ghastly it was, for example, of David Meirhofer to kidnap seven-­year-­old Susie Jaeger from her tent on a f­ amily camping trip, molest her, choke her to death, and then dismember her, ­t here would remain good reasons not to kill criminals in the state’s name. The Jaeger case is a good example of the type of crime my friend Robert Blecker thinks must be punished by the perpetrator’s death. Robert is a professor at New York Law School, and we got to know each other through debating capital punishment in a variety of settings. I liked him very much—he is smart and self-­effacing and wears a perpetual worried grimace on his face—­ and, though I found his views repugnant, he cut to the nub of the issue in ways that other death penalty proponents did not. Robert is the country’s most prominent “retributivist.” He acknowledges many of the flaws in the administration of capital punishment I’ve already described and believes that they should be eliminated to the fullest extent pos­si­ble. He is a supporter of the Innocence Proj­ect. He believes that far too many ­people have been sentenced to death, and that only a handful—­what he calls “the worst of the worst”—­should actually receive that punishment. Importantly, he ­doesn’t rely on a utilitarian argument, as so many defenders of executions do. He d ­ oesn’t claim that killing criminals serves as a deterrent to f­ uture crime, which is a good t­ hing since t­ here is no definitive evidence that that is the case, t­ here is considerable reason to think that states without the death penalty generally have lower rates of capital crime than death penalty states do,55 and it is incontestable that many countries experience a reduction in hom­i­cide rates ­after they have abolished capital punishment.56



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Instead, Robert argues that some ­people’s crimes are so horrendous that they deserve to die and that a society that refuses to take retribution against them is dishonoring its dead and reducing the value it attaches to h ­ uman life. As he puts it, “The past counts,” and once we have de­cided someone is the worst of the worst, that person should suffer the most painful living conditions and most certain death the Constitution allows. It irks him that prisoners on death row are sometimes granted more privileges—­their own tele­v i­sions, for instance—­t han your run-­of-­t he-­mill prisoner.57 While they are alive, Robert thinks the condemned should be h ­ oused in what he calls “permanent punitive segregation”: “They would eat only nutraloaf, a tasteless patty, nutritionally complete but offering no sensory plea­sure. All visits should be non-­contact and kept to a constitutional minimum. . . . ​[They] should never touch another ­human being again. ­These most heinous criminals would never watch TV. They would get one brief, lukewarm shower a week. Let photos of their victims adorn their cells—in their face but out of reach.”58 And then, when they are killed, it would preferably be by firing squad, a form of execution that is quick but makes a dramatic statement, with a member of the victim’s f­ amily offered the opportunity to fire the first shot before a sharpshooter finishes the job. “Ideally punishment should appear painful to the public while actually experienced as painless to the punished,” Robert says.59 Execution by lethal injection confuses p ­ eople by seeming to conflate a medical procedure with punishment. Why I found Robert’s argument so “refreshing” was b ­ ecause it confirmed, in a sophisticated form, what I had long thought was the real reason ­people favored the death penalty. Proponents could dress their view up with a lot of statistics about deterrence, and they could try to invoke the moral high ground by citing the lex talionis, the biblical law of retaliation, popularly referred to as “an eye for an eye” from Exodus 21:24—an injunction, by the way, that was originally intended to limit punishments to what was equitable more than to prescribe them. But what was at the heart of most ­people’s support for the death penalty was a desire for retribution, the same feeling I had described in my reworking of Michael Dukakis’s answer in his presidential debate. The difference between Robert and me was that he thought that impulse should be indulged and even celebrated, and I thought that d ­ oing so would only make ­t hings worse.

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It was not just that determining who constituted “the worst of the worst” was always g­ oing to have an ele­ment of subjectivity to it. It was that even Robert ­didn’t seem to have the stomach to follow his argument to its logical conclusion, which spoke very well for him. Some years ago a judge in the Punjab Province of Pakistan took the Islamic equivalent of the lex talionis seriously and sentenced a man to be blinded by acid ­after the man had done the same t­ hing to his fiancée.60 Most of us, including Robert, I suspect, would find that punishment grotesque. The shah of Iran’s secret police, known as Savak, raped the d ­ aughter of a religious leader in front of him, and, when the old man closed his eyes b ­ ecause he ­couldn’t bear to watch, the Savak agents burned off his eyelids so he would have to see his d ­ aughter’s suffering.61 ­Were we to have taken t­ hose agents into custody, is t­ here anyone who would find raping their own ­daughters in return and then burning their eyelids off an appropriate punishment? Of course not. Just as the international community has ­adopted a ­whole set of Geneva Conventions to govern the conduct of hostilities, the understanding of what constitute appropriate forms of punishment for criminal acts has evolved over the generations to the point where retribution in kind, retaliation in like heinous mea­sure, is no longer regarded as congruent with a civilized society. The former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, an unrepentant conservative tough guy on whose show The O’Reilly ­Factor I often appeared, told me once at a reception, “You know, Bill, I agree with your opposition to executions. I think that kind of quick kill is far too good for t­ hese monsters. Instead, I’d do as the Eskimos did [O’Reilly would never have called Alaskan Native ­people “Inuit”]: strap them to a canoe and let it drift off into the icy depths.” If Robert Blecker ­really believed that the “worst of the worst” deserved to experience as much pain as pos­si­ble in retribution for their having inflicted enormous pain on ­others, he ­wouldn’t feed them nutraloaf: he’d let them starve. He w ­ ouldn’t allow them noncontact visits: he’d keep them in isolation twenty-­four hours a day. He w ­ ouldn’t let them shower once a week: he’d cheer on the body lice that would eventually infest an uncleansed body. He ­wouldn’t let the Constitution limit their mistreatment: he’d try to amend it to eliminate the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. And he ­wouldn’t kill them by firing squad or advocate a death that only appeared to be painful: he’d try to find the most excruciating way imaginable to kill them. ­Those creative Savak agents used to torture prisoners by strapping them to



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chairs on wheels that moved t­ oward a wall made of white-­hot iron at a rate of about an inch a minute. If the chair ever reached the wall, the prisoner would suffer a slow, agonizing death. How about that? Most of Savak’s prisoners admitted every­t hing to their torturers, even when ­t here was nothing to admit, long before they got near the heat, but this method would do well for capital criminals if w ­ e’re looking to maximize torment.62 Of course, for some prisoners on death row, execution is far preferable to life in prison. They welcome execution. P ­ eople like this are called “volunteers,” though one won­ders how “voluntary” their choice is. Robert Smith was serving life for having beaten his girlfriend’s two-­year-­old ­daughter to death for wetting the bed, but, a­ fter he killed another inmate, also a convicted child killer, Smith agreed to plead guilty on condition the state would kill him. He had been in solitary confinement for years, suffered from depression, and ­didn’t want to grow old in prison.63 In that case a retributivist would need to argue to keep Smith alive . . . ​and maybe that Smith had done a good t­ hing by bringing an end to that other baby batterer’s life. The speaker of the Utah House of Representatives once told me that he thought executions a humane form of punishment b ­ ecause “we Mormons d ­ on’t believe death is the worst ­t hing that can happen to a person. We believe that having to live with your guilt the rest of your life is the worst ­t hing.” “If that’s true, Mr. Speaker,” I replied, “then it seems to me that by supporting the death penalty, you could be accused of being soft on crime.” 64 The minute you acknowledge that ­t here ­really are limits to what kind of retribution can be exacted, even from the “worst of the worst,” then the conversation has shifted. If we ­can’t do just any old sadistic ­t hing that our ids might crave to do to t­ hose who have committed horrible crimes, then we must weigh the implications of the punishments we do inflict for ourselves and the society at large. The “past may count,” but does that mean we c­ an’t learn from it? Is the only way to honor our ancestors, even ­t hose who have been taken from us violently, to keep duplicating the carnage? How did that work out for the Hatfields and McCoys? And what if our murdered ancestors ­wouldn’t want us to exact retribution on their behalf? As Karen Schneider, who was deputy executive director for communications while I was at AIUSA and whose ­father was shot to death in 1971, put it, “When my f­ ather was murdered, I thought that if I could lay my hands on the man who did it, I would kill him. But then

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I thought of my f­ather. He was such a sweet and gentle man and that’s not what he would have wanted. . . . ​My f­ ather was against the death penalty, and I de­cided that the way to honor his memory was to oppose the death penalty myself.” 65 If retribution is designed to honor our loved ones, then surely they o ­ ught to have a voice in what form that honoring takes.66 But even if murder victims would want us to take their killers’ lives, is retribution a wise way to structure the social contract? It certainly ­isn’t the way wise ­people conduct their lives. If your ­children come to you in tears ­because “friends” have been circulating nasty rumors about them, should you tell them to make up even worse fabrications about their friends and spread them as widely as pos­si­ble, or should you bolster your kids’ ego, try to help them sort out motivations, and figure out who their true friends are? In 1926 Mussolini advocated the restoration of the death penalty in Italy “to habituate [Italians] to the sight of blood and to the idea of death.” 67 I ­don’t usually think of Mussolini as a deep thinker, but in this case he uttered something indisputably profound: how a government acts influences its p ­ eople’s values. It’s not that t­ hose who commit crimes s­ houldn’t be punished or that ­t hose who commit particularly gruesome crimes s­ houldn’t be punished severely. Amnesty is, ­after all, a victims’ rights organ­ization, always fighting on behalf of the victims of h ­ uman rights abuses. Th ­ ere’s nothing wrong with retributive justice. But the form of that justice and the way a government exacts it ­will establish norms for the ways that society ­will conduct itself in other arenas just as surely as a toy called “Death Row Marv,” an action figure posed in an electric chair that was released by McFarlane Toys in 1999, desensitized kids to the horror of executions. It is no doubt healthy to acknowledge one’s most vengeful impulses, but it is even healthier not to act on them for, as someone once observed, if it ­were not for the petty rules of bourgeois society, we would all destroy one another in an instant. The good society, bourgeois or not, requires repression as well as authenticity. And it requires a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between ge­ne­tics, environment, and agency as motivations for ­human action. A strict retributivist believes that ­human beings have absolute ­will, exert total control over their faculties, and simply choose to be so evil and monstrous that they deserve annihilation for their choices. No mitigating ­factors—­genetic predisposition to aggression; early childhood abuse; immersion in a racist society; lifelong strug­gles with addiction, including prenatal—­are sufficient to



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warrant keeping the worst of the worst locked up for life rather than killing them. But in ­every other aspect of our lives, we take mitigation into account when responding to o ­ thers’ be­hav­ior. If p ­ eople with emotional disabilities act inappropriately in a social setting, we may well need to set limits to their be­ hav­ior, but we ­don’t any longer attribute it to the Devil. Even the criminal justice system takes “intention” into account in assessing every­t hing from libel to manslaughter. To consider mitigating f­ actors in capital crimes is not to excuse horrific be­hav­ior, release its perpetrators from responsibility, or vanquish evil from our philosophical quiver. Lots of p ­ eople do lots of evil t­ hings. No one knows that better than a ­human rights activist. But to take into account why ­people do evil in deciding their fates is not only to learn how to obviate similar actions in the f­ uture but also to admit that our knowledge of the h ­ uman psyche is incomplete and, in the face of that uncertainty, to find wisdom in the more cautious course. A retributivist might say it ­doesn’t ­matter w ­ hether the worst of the worst could control their destructive urges; we are better off without them. This argument brings us back to a utilitarian one about w ­ hether we want to live in a Mussolinian society in which p ­ eople are “habituated to the sight of blood and idea of death” or in a more mea­sured world in which evildoers are punished by being removed from our midst, often permanently, but not treated in ways that make a moral totem of brutality. I knew which type of society was more appealing to me, but convincing ­others of that was not always easy. Even many Amnesty members expressed ambivalence about the organ­ization’s position on capital punishment. Fortunately, we had some helpful, unanticipated allies and witnessed several impor­tant, even landmark, victories.

* * * In May 2001 the illusionist David Copperfield asked to meet with me to talk about the death penalty. He invited me to his astonishing spaceship-­like, four-­ story pent­house residence on 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan and gave me a tour of part of his collection of historical magic memorabilia, including antique arcade games like Jumbo the Fortune Teller and a ­water gun that shot backwards into the trigger-­puller’s face.68 (Luckily, it was not loaded.)

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He then began a long interrogation about the reasons to oppose executions, challenging me to defend the position in detail. He was obviously bright and curious, but a­ fter an hour I still was not certain why I was t­ here. Fi­nally, he laid his cards on the t­ able, face up. Copperfield wanted to make a “statement” about the death penalty in his magic show. Specifically, he was considering a new illusion in which he would appear to be decapitated by a guillotine. He would provide context for the illusion that would make clear his opposition to state killing, and he wanted to make sure he understood all the arguments both for and against the practice. He was open to some kind of alliance with Amnesty, though that was not his primary motivation in wanting to talk with me. I was quite enthusiastic about his idea: Amnesty saw itself as the principal ­human rights organ­ization tasked with reaching a broader public about ­human rights issues, and what better way to do that, to influence literally millions of p ­ eople, than through the most popu­lar and successful magician in the world? ­There was just one prob­lem: Copperfield wanted to use a real guillotine. “But ­t here ­won’t be any chance you’d actually lose your head, would ­t here?” I asked. “It would be an illusion, a safe illusion, ­wouldn’t it? Not an ­actual, functioning guillotine.” “Well,” David said, “by the time I perfected it, the odds of anything g­ oing wrong would be very low. But, yes, it would be an ­actual guillotine. That would be the point: ­t hese are real instruments of death.” “So you mean something could go wrong?” I replied, trying to suppress a gasp and watching my fantasies of finding vast new supporters of abolition dis­appear like a rabbit in a puff of smoke. “­There’s always a chance,” the magician said, ushering me out with a wry smile. To the best of my knowledge David Copperfield never introduced that illusion into his repertoire. At least I never heard from him again. I’m still not certain if the conjuring he was contemplating would actually have put him in pos­si­ble peril or if he was just maintaining the uncertainty for my benefit. A few years e­ arlier, however, he reportedly lost the tip of a fin­ger in a trick gone wrong, and a few years ­later one of his assistants was severely injured onstage when he was sucked into the vortex of a twelve-­foot-­high industrial fan.69 In any case, much as I liked the idea from a public relations point of view, I was just as relieved not to see it . . . ​come to a head. If we never managed to include David Copperfield among our active abolitionists, we did find lots of other compatriots. The Roman Catholic



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Church, and particularly Catholic s­ isters, led the choir, but we also had unexpected supporters join in.70 The conservative columnist George W ­ ill, for example, editorialized against the practice, citing the “inescapable inference” from the growing number of exonerations that “some of the 620 persons executed [between 1976 and 2000] w ­ ere innocent” and noting that “capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program so skepticism [among conservatives] is in order.”71 When Karla Faye Tucker became the first w ­ oman to be executed in Texas in 135 years, Bianca Jagger went to that state on our behalf to plead for Tucker’s life and was joined in that entreaty by the right-­wing evangelist Pat Robertson.72 While some suspected Robertson’s support for Tucker was influenced by the fact that the thirty-­eight-­year-­old pickaxe slayer was attractive, white, and had become a born-­again Christian in prison, he also appealed to then Texas governor George W. Bush, unsuccessfully, to stay the execution of a young Black man named Gary Graham three months l­ ater.73 Undoubtedly, though, the most dramatic statement against the death penalty by a po­liti­cally conservative figure was the decision in 2003 by Illinois’ Republican governor George H. Ryan to commute the sentences of all 167 prisoners on that state’s death row, again ­because of growing concerns about innocence. Thirteen prisoners sentenced to death had been released during his term.74 (Unfortunately, Ryan found himself in the hoosegow in 2006 for bribery and racketeering, one of four Illinois governors out of seven between 1961 and 2013 who met that fate.) Helpful as all t­ hese unlikely death penalty critics w ­ ere, t­ here was one group of ­people whose voices carried especially power­ful resonance: the ­family members of victims of capital crimes, many of them part of an organ­ ization called Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation founded in 1976. Three of t­ hose with whom we worked frequently, Bud Welch, Jeanne Bishop, and Marietta Jaeger, put the case against the death penalty in particularly compelling ways. Welch’s ­daughter, Julie Marie, had died in the Oklahoma City bombing. At first, he said, he was so outraged that he wanted her killers to “fry,” but gradually he came to realize that “the day they w ­ ere executed would be an act of rage and revenge, and that’s why Julie and 167 o ­ thers are dead.” Most remarkably, he reached out to one of the bomber’s families, meeting with Timothy McVeigh’s ­father, Bill, and ­sister, Jennifer, at their home in Buffalo.

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Bill McVeigh asked Bud if he was able to cry. “I d ­ on’t usually have a prob­lem crying,” Bud told him. “I c­ an’t cry, even though I’ve got a lot to cry about,” McVeigh said, and then a tear rolled down his cheek. “When I got ready to leave,” Bud recounted, “I shook Bill’s hand, then extended it to Jennifer, but she just grabbed me and threw her arms around me. . . . ​I ­don’t know which one of us started crying first. Then I held her face in my hands and said, ‘Look, honey, the three of us are in this for the rest of our lives. I d ­ on’t want your ­brother to die, and I’ll do every­t hing I can to prevent it.’ As I walked away from the ­house . . . ​a tremendous weight had lifted from my shoulders.”75 Jeanne Bishop spoke several times at Amnesty events, and her story never failed to choke me up. A New Yorker article in 1997 by Alex Kozinski, a federal judge who years ­later resigned from the bench ­after numerous charges of sexual harassment, had made the case for retribution by contending that “we tarnish the memory of the dead and heap ­needless misery on their surviving families” if we let killers live. In a subsequent letter to the editor, Jeanne recounted the story of her s­ ister’s murder, a story with which I had become achingly familiar: When my beloved s­ ister, Nancy Bishop Langert, was three months pregnant . . . ​, her killer shot her to death and left her to bleed to death in her basement. . . . ​Too weak to call for help, she drew in her own blood a heart and the letter “u” . . . ​t hen died. . . . ​My s­ ister’s last word on her life was “love.” Another killing would not vindicate her; it would contradict every­t hing she stood for. For that reason, I am not miserable b ­ ecause her killer was sentenced to life without parole instead of to death, as Kozinski contends that I should be. Now I have nothing in common with the murderer—­I am not a deliberate taker of h ­ uman life.76 And then t­ here was Marietta Jaeger, the m ­ other of that seven-­year-­old girl snatched in the m ­ iddle of the night from her campground tent. At 2:00 a.m. on June 25, 1974, one year to the minute of Susie’s abduction, Marietta received a call from her killer. “You wanted to talk to me?” the killer asked. “Well, ­here I am! Now what are you ­going to do about it?” Marietta endured ­t hese taunts, and then, astonishingly, she asked the man what she could do to help him.



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They talked for over an hour—­enough time for the FBI to identify the man as a mentally unstable loner named David Meirhofer—­and at the end of the call, Meirhofer broke down in tears. “I wish this burden could be lifted from me,” he said. ­After he was taken into custody, Marietta visited him in prison, assuring him she had forgiven him, and fi­nally he inadvertently acknowledged having killed Susie and several other ­people. Before the state could decide his punishment, however, Meirhofer hung himself in his cell. His death was not the end but the beginning of Marietta’s journey—­a four-­ decade sojourn to explain to o ­ thers how her religious faith had mandated her objection to the execution of her d ­ aughter’s killer: “Anger, hatred, bitterness, resentment, revenge—­they are death-­dealing spirits,” she said, “and they w ­ ill ‘take our lives’ on some level as surely as Susie’s life was taken.”77 Whenever I heard Bud, Jeanne, Marietta, or other members of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation speak against the death penalty, I thought to myself, “Could I display such a generous spirit?” And then I thought, “Most ­people w ­ ill not think themselves capable of it or even want to be; maybe striking back at ­t hose who harm us is built into our ge­ne­tic code.” But fi­nally I thought, “On whose side do I want to cast my lot? Th ­ ose who perpetuate vio­ lence or ­t hose who try to interrupt it? Th ­ ose who countenance bloodlust or ­t hose who evoke the better angels of our nature?” If the death penalty could be shown to deter crime, its proponents would at least have a rational basis for their support of it, but ­because the evidence of its deterrent effect is at best ambiguous, we are reduced to struggling with the nature of evil, the pull of vengeance, and our competing visions of the good society. No other ­human rights issue demanded deeper reflection on fundamental prob­lems of h ­ uman existence than the death penalty. In the meantime, ­because most death penalty debates hardly allowed for such philosophizing and only an unlucky few could speak from the soul-­ stealing experience of having a loved one taken from them by force, the rest of us abolitionists ­were reduced to arguing the case based on such ­t hings as possibility of innocence, inadequate ­legal counsel, racial and economic disparities, the lack of evidence of deterrence, failure to notify consular officials in some capital cases against foreigners, and the cruelty of the execution pro­ cess itself. The case for the latter was bolstered in 1997 when a six-­inch flame burst from the right side of Pedro Medina’s hooded head as he was put to death in the Florida electric chair, the smell of his burning flesh pervading

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the witness room.78 Two years ­later another botched Florida electrocution resulted in blood pouring down Allen Lee Davis’s face as he strug­gled for breath for ten minutes a­ fter the plug had been pulled.79 Incidents like that led many states to adopt lethal injection rather than electrocution as the method of choice for executions and that in turn prompted a New York physician named Arthur Zitrin to seek me out for a conversation. Zitrin was a leading bioethicist at NYU Medical Center and head of psychiatry at the famous Bellevue Hospital. He had thought long and hard about the death penalty and determined upon a novel strategy for ending it or at least making it rarer: rescind the medical license of any physician who participated in an execution, especially by administering lethal doses of medi­ cation. If a state c­ an’t find a doctor willing to do their bidding, he reasoned, it w ­ ill not be able to carry out the deed. But Zitrin had not been able to find a physician in a death penalty state willing to bring a complaint before a state medical board against a death penalty–­attending colleague. “I’d bring the complaint myself,” he told me, “but how effective would it be for an eighty-­ year-­old Jewish psychiatrist from Manhattan to file a complaint against a Louisiana physician? Can you find somebody?” “Absolutely!” I replied confidently, thinking this would be one of the easiest tasks on my week’s to-do list. It turned out to be anything but. The truth was that Amnesty had very few contacts in death penalty states with doctors who opposed capital punishment, and, when we did find prospective candidates, it was almost impossible to learn the identities of the physicians participating in executions—­names that ­were intentionally kept confidential for fear of retaliation (I almost wrote “retribution.”) This was just one more irony in the American practice of state-­sponsored death. Unlike our seventeenth-­ century ancestors who paraded the convict through the streets to a very public hanging, modern Americans had become skittish and secretive about implementing what supporters of capital punishment claimed was a morally upright practice. Executions ­were never televised; the number of witnesses was strictly l­ imited; the deceased’s body was never displayed; and now even the name of the injecting physician was withheld. If killing “monsters” was designed to deter, w ­ ouldn’t you want their fates advertised as widely as pos­ si­ble and their executioners hailed as heroes? We publicly walk “perps” into police custody, we televise t­ rials, we allow filmmakers into prisons. Could it be that Americans ­couldn’t abide coming face to face with something about



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which on some level they knew did not reflect their best selves, about which in some deep recess of consciousness they felt guilty? In any case I c­ ouldn’t find Dr. Zitrin a collaborator. Fi­nally, he filed a complaint himself against a doctor in Georgia, and, when it was dismissed by the Georgia Composite State Board of Medical Examiners in 2005 and a subsequent lawsuit he brought against the board was thrown out by Georgia courts on the grounds that Zitrin was not an “aggrieved plaintiff,” he dropped his effort. But it had not been in vain. In 2018 the American Medical Association filed a brief with the Supreme Court that said, “Physician participation in executions falsely suggests to society that capital punishment can be carried out humanely, with the endorsement of the medical profession. Physicians should not further such a charade.” 80 I’m guessing that statement made the by then hundred-­year-­old Dr. Zitrin very happy. (He died the following year.)

* * * Despite the failure to disqualify physicians from executions, the years I was at Amnesty saw several critically impor­tant developments in the strug­g le against the death penalty. Though no state did away with capital punishment between 1994 and 2006, Amnesty activists and o ­ thers laid the groundwork for a wave of abolitions in the years afterward, beginning with New York in 2007. By 2021 nine more states had joined New York (Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Mary­land, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Washington) for a total of twenty-­t wo states plus the District of Columbia in which the death penalty is not allowed. In the United States both public support for capital punishment and the number of p ­ eople executed have steadily declined. When I took up my post in 1994, approval for the punishment was at its peak at 80 ­percent. That figure has dropped by twenty points, and, when asked to choose, almost two-­ thirds of Americans say life in prison is preferable to the death penalty.81 During the twelve years I was at Amnesty, 809 ­people w ­ ere executed in the United States; 514 have been executed in the fifteen years since I left.82 If ­t hese are still grim figures, two categories of ­people are no longer included in them at all thanks to two critical Supreme Court victories for which Amnesty and other grassroots anti–­death penalty organ­izations can take a

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modicum of credit. The first was Atkins v. ­Virginia in 2002, which outlawed the execution of what the court, sadly, called the “mentally retarded.” What was especially impor­tant about this case, beyond the fact that it would save many lives, is that the court’s decision was based in significant mea­sure on an emerging consensus—­“evolving standards of decency,” as the court put it—at the state level. In 1986 Georgia had become the first state to exempt persons with intellectual or cognitive disabilities from the death penalty. Since that year eigh­teen more states had ­adopted such an exemption, which, combined with the twelve abolitionist states, meant that thirty-­one out of fifty states did not carry out such executions. “It is not so much the number of ­t hese States that is significant,” Justice John Paul Stevens and the majority said, “but the consistency of the direction of change.” 83 This meant all that energy we and o ­ thers had expended at the state level to roll back death penalty laws had played a major role in convincing the court to take the position it did. It was a gratifying affirmation of Amnesty’s raison d’être: the mobilization of average citizens in the pursuit of ­human rights change.84 Three years l­ater the Supreme Court expanded its prohibitions in Roper v. Simmons to exclude juveniles—­t hat is, t­ hose who had committed their crimes when younger than eighteen—­from eligibility to be killed by the state. Perhaps b ­ ecause kids frequently challenge authority or b ­ ecause tensions between generations are commonplace or ­because ­children have often been seen as just “­little adults,” US law and practice could be especially punitive when it came to crimes committed by young ­people. Two cases ­were particularly prominent during my years at Amnesty. LaCresha Murray was an eleven-­year-­old child in Austin, Texas, in 1996 when a two-­and-­a-­half-­year-­old baby named Jayla Belton was left one day in the care of LaCresha and her grand­father. The child was clearly ill—­sweating and vomiting. Fi­nally, when she went into convulsions, LaCresha and her grand­father took her to a hospital, where she died. Travis County prosecutors ­were convinced that LaCresha had killed the baby by stomping on her and rupturing her liver. They interrogated the eleven-­year-­old at a c­ hildren’s shelter for hours without an adult or an attorney pre­sent, claiming l­ ater that ­because she was “not u ­ nder arrest or in custody at the time of her statement . . . ​, her statement was freely, knowingly and voluntarily given.” 85 LaCresha denied her guilt repeatedly, but she had an IQ of 77 and was worn down by the relentless questioning. She fi­nally agreed to the interrogators’ accusations,



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making up a scenario that could in no way account for Jayla’s injuries. Before she signed a confession, she was asked, “Can you read pretty good?” “No,” LaCresha replied, “but I try hard.” At another point she asked the officers, “What’s that word? Home-­a-­seed?” “Hom­i­cide,” one of them replied. “What’s that?” LaCresha wondered, but no one answered her.86 Oh, and did I mention that LaCresha was Black? ­A fter two ­t rials, the first guilty verdict having been thrown out by the judge, she was convicted of murder, the youn­gest person in Texas history to face the death penalty. Eventually she was sentenced to twenty-­five years in prison instead. At Amnesty’s urging, New York Times op-ed writer Bob Herbert devoted five columns to the case, and it was featured on 60 Minutes.87 Two years a­ fter her conviction, all of our collective concerns about the case ­were confirmed. The Texas Third Court of Appeals threw out her confession as having been obtained unlawfully, an in­de­pen­dent medical examiner testified that Jayla’s injuries had occurred before she had been placed in LaCresha’s care, the child was released from prison, and the district attorney declined to further prosecute the case.88 Twenty-­five years is a long sentence for an eleven-­year-­old, but a few years ­after the Murray case, another child, Lionel Tate, who was alleged to have killed a six-­year-­old girl in what he claimed w ­ ere imitation wrestling moves, was sentenced in Broward County, Florida, to life imprisonment without parole, the longest such sentence for a child so young. That conviction too was eventually overturned.89 (Tate, too, was African American.) In one re­spect, though, both Murray and Tate had been fortunate: neither had been sentenced to die. But u ­ ntil 2005 the United States, joined only by Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, permitted the execution of juvenile offenders, and in that year close to seventy such individuals remained on death row. Roper v. Simmons put an end to what was a flagrant violation of international ­human rights law, and it did so on three impor­tant grounds.90 First, citing Atkins, it noted that the trend among states was also in the direction of giving up juvenile executions in law or practice, another example of evolving community standards of decency influencing the court’s thinking. Second, again paralleling Atkins, it recognized that adolescents bear less responsibility for their crimes than adults do. A major reason for this is physiological. Five months a­ fter Atkins had been handed down in June  2002,

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seventeen-­year-­old Lee Malvo had joined adult John Muhammad in committing the Beltway sniper murders in the Washington, DC, area. A ­ fter the two ­were apprehended, federal officials shopped around for the most death penalty–­friendly venue in which to try them. Amnesty argued against Malvo being subject to capital prosecution and held a press conference at which Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg, clinical professor of neurology at New York University, who had recently written a book called The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind, was our guest.91 Goldberg explained that it was not a coincidence that age eigh­teen was typically the age of social maturity in Western socie­ties b ­ ecause that was the approximate age at which maturation of the brain’s frontal lobes was complete. One of the ways to mea­sure that maturity was by the presence of myelin, a fatty tissue that covers the pathways connecting the frontal lobes with other parts of the brain, a pro­cess that is often not completed u ­ ntil late adolescence or early adulthood. ­Until that point, executive functioning, such as impulse control, modulation of emotional reactions, correct reading of ­others’ emotions, and assessing the consequences of be­hav­ior, may be l­ imited. This and other findings about adolescent brain functioning argued strongly against holding juveniles to the same level of culpability as older p ­ eople.92 Malvo had been so subservient to Muhammad’s direction that when someone offered him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, he declined b ­ ecause Muhammad ­hadn’t given him permission.93 Fi­nally, the court cited international law and practice—­t he fact that the United States stood virtually alone in killing adolescent offenders—­not as a controlling f­ actor but as providing “respected and significant confirmation for the Court’s determination.” “It does not lessen fidelity to the Constitution or pride in its origins,” the court said, “to acknowledge that the express affirmation of certain fundamental rights by other nations and p ­ eoples underscores the centrality of t­ hose same rights within our own heritage of freedom.” 94 This was a significant benchmark in the effort to have the United States take international ­human rights law and standards into account in shaping interpretation of its own Constitution and statutes. No doubt the fact that Justice Anthony Kennedy, who spent his summers teaching international law at the University of Salzburg, wrote the controlling opinion had much to do with the reference, though the citation of foreign law was not an uncontroversial practice as both Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day



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O’Connor attested to having received death threats for ­doing so in other contexts.95

* * * The growing focus of AIUSA on US h ­ uman rights violations brought us into alliance with many domestic rights groups, particularly around issues of racial justice since what we now call white privilege and white supremacy thinking account for so many of ­t hose abuses. At the same time, our domestic activism alienated some of our traditional members. When, for example, in 1998 AI in London issued a report critical of the use of solitary confinement and restraint devices at the state of Maine’s Youth Center, a juvenile detention fa­cil­i­t y, Governor Angus King, now a US senator from Maine, dismissed our concerns and his wife, Mary Herman, wrote me a scathing letter resigning her membership.96 Thanks to follow-up pressure in the media, the governor was forced to appoint an outside investigator who confirmed many of our findings. I then sent Ms. Herman a polite letter inviting her to rejoin Amnesty.97 In general, it was easier for AIUSA to make change domestically than at the international level. For all the United States’ faults, the fact that the country had a ­free press, in­de­pen­dent judiciary, accountable politicians, and a vibrant civil society meant that our concerns ­were almost always heard and sometimes acted on. By the end of my tenure, I think it had been well established that, as the slogan of AI’s campaign on the United States put it, “­Human rights are not a foreign affair.” The country’s commitment to that proposition would be sorely tested, however, by 9/11 and the events following it, and Amnesty and I would be smack in the ­middle of the torrent.

CHAPTER 6

9/11 and the Mainstreaming of Torture

Ed Koch, who was mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989, was once urged by a ­woman to “make the city what it once was.” Koch, who was known for his candor, replied, “Lady, it was never that good.”1 I was to have my own encounter with Koch that focused on another controversial topic—­t he legitimacy of torture—­but, when it came to New York, where AIUSA had its headquarters, I found the city a pretty appealing place. That was despite the fact that I never did master the subway system and had to have a staff member write down the train numbers and station names ­every time I ventured under­ground. It was despite the fact that on the three occasions over twelve years that I had to drive to work from our home in Huntington, Long Island, rather than take my customary form of transportation, the Long Island Railroad, the trip lasted two-­a nd-­a-­half hours each way—­even longer than the train on a bad day! And it was despite the fact that on the sweltering after­noon of August 14, 2003, the city experienced one of its infamous electrical blackouts, and, as the staff scattered to their homes in the city, the chief development officer and I, who both lived on Long Island, started hiking uptown, hoping we could find a train, bus, or taxi to deliver us from Manhattan. Finding none, we ended up overnight in the vacant studio apartment of the grandparents of my assistant’s ex-­boyfriend. And did I mention that the chief development officer was eight-­a nd-­a-­half-­months pregnant, the apartment was on the twelfth floor, and I spent the night terrified that I would be called into ser­v ice as a midwife? Nonetheless, I was entranced by New York City. I had grown up in a city (Pittsburgh), gone to gradu­ate school in another (Chicago); and lived for fifteen years in Boston before arriving in New York, but I never got over my



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awe of the Big Apple. Beth and I tried to take advantage of its food, its theater, its ­music. We reveled in the tumble of languages you heard on the street, the gardenful of races and cultures you encountered everywhere you went, the “characters” you noticed out of the corners of your eyes. We particularly loved cabaret at the Algonquin or Café Carlyle and jazz at any number of venues. Listening to the still-­dazzling sixty-­seven-­year-­old Eartha Kitt purr “Hey, Jacques,” a song I had loved since childhood, or Shirley Horn almost whisper a poignant “­Here’s to Life” just nine months before she died gave me goose bumps. Where ­else could I so easily find a specialist in Hokusai prints who could tell me at a glance that the two samples Beth’s grand­ mother had bought years before in Tokyo ­were indeed genuine Hokusais; that if they had been produced early in the print run they would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; but that, b ­ ecause they ­were late in the run, they ­were worth—­d rumroll—­“absolutely nothing”? Beth called New York “our ­little city,” and it scared, frustrated, intrigued, and enthralled us all at the same time. So when I arrived at the Doubletree H ­ otel in Dayton, Ohio, the morning of September 11, 2001, to give a speech, having just flown out of LaGuardia a ­couple hours e­ arlier, and saw on tele­v i­sion that one of the World Trade Center towers had fallen and then, twenty-­nine minutes ­later, the second met a similar fate, my reaction was quite personal: “our l­ittle city” was sustaining an unpre­ce­dented wound. Suddenly, this swaggering behemoth of a place was exposed and vulnerable. Of course, my first thought, beyond the enormity of the loss of life that was taking place before our eyes, was for Beth’s safety. She was forty miles away on Long Island, but who knew how far the attack extended or where. And then the staff! Th ­ ere w ­ ere about eighty p ­ eople at our offices approximately fifty blocks north of the attack site. ­Were they alright? Might they have f­ amily members at the World Trade Center? (As it turned out, some of them did.) I had to get back to New York as quickly as I could, but how? With all flights grounded, the only option was to drive, but no private cars w ­ ere being allowed into Manhattan. The best I could do was drive from Dayton to Philadelphia and take a train from ­there. What I had not calculated in ­those awful first few minutes ­after the attack or even during the nine-­hour drive to Philly was how profoundly 9/11 and, more specifically, the US government’s response to it would come to dominate the remainder of my time at Amnesty.

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* * * I ­didn’t like George W. Bush. I h ­ adn’t met him—­t he closest I came was that National Prayer Breakfast when he delivered an admittedly impressive keynote—­but I ­didn’t like what I saw of him in the public eye. It was not just his policies that put me off: that would have been true of almost any Republican president. It was his demeanor; his proud anti-­intellectualism (“I d ­ on’t do nuance”); his habit of giving every­one around him a nickname, ­whether they wanted one or not; his Texas tough-­guy routine. He reminded me of e­ very smart-­ass jock at Shady Side I had detested. Moreover, he seemed singularly ill prepared for the presidency and appeared to know it. More than once he displayed that deer-­in-­the-­headlights look that hardly inspires confidence in a leader. That was no doubt why he had surrounded himself with veteran right-­ wingers like his vice president, Dick Cheney, and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. They, not the president, w ­ ere rumored to run the government. And yet, for all my agita about Bush, he performed well in the first few days ­after 9/11 once he ­stopped flying around the country in Air Force One trying to decide when to return to Washington. He came to New York City to express solidarity; he rallied the country; and he made it explic­itly clear that what­ever the faith of the terrorists, neither Islam nor Muslims in general ­were to be blamed for the attacks. He spoke all the right words, and then just as quickly his government began targeting Muslims for detention. Over the course of the year following 9/11, the Department of Justice detained at least 762 undocumented immigrants, almost all of them from the ­Middle East or South Asia. It held them for an average of eighty days, sometimes in harsh conditions, including in cells that ­were illuminated twenty-­ four hours a day, while the FBI reviewed their cases. The Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Ser­v ice refused t­ hese prisoners bond, often engaged in physical and verbal abuse, and sometimes even denied to interested parties that they ­were holding par­tic­u­lar prisoners. Ulti­ mately not even one of ­these immigrants was charged with a crime related to terrorism. Amnesty issued a report in early 2002 descrying ­t hese detentions, which in turn sparked an investigation by the inspector general of the Department of Justice.2 That investigation confirmed virtually every­t hing that Amnesty had reported and cited “significant prob­lems” in the government’s approach.3



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Had t­ hese confinements been the extent of the Bush administration’s violations of ­human rights a­ fter 9/11, they might have been chalked up to fear and uncertainty generated by the worst terrorist attack on American soil in history. It is easy to forget how rattled virtually all Americans ­were by what happened that day. But the administration and its allies ­were far from through targeting Muslims. The New York City police set up massive surveillance of area mosques, student groups, and community organ­izations, ­later having to s­ ettle a lawsuit that committed the NYPD to stop engaging in “suspicionless surveillance on the basis of religion or ethnicity.” 4 The Homeland Security Department fingerprinted, photographed, and registered 85,000 Muslim and Arab noncitizens beginning in November 2002, u ­ ntil the program was suspended a year ­later, having identified only eleven ­people with any conceivable ties to terrorism.5 And the Justice Department repeatedly tried to deny suspected terrorists access to American courts, only to be rebuked by the US Supreme Court in cases such as Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.6 Such responses to 9/11 not only ­didn’t appear to make Americans safer; they alienated the Muslim community from the government and contributed to a spike in hate crimes against Muslim Americans that by 2014 had still not returned to pre-9/11 levels—­a phenomenon duplicated in 2020–2021  in crimes against Asian Americans following President Donald Trump’s designation of the coronavirus pandemic as being caused by the “China virus” or the “kung flu.”7 The two issues that most occupied Amnesty’s attention in the years following 9/11, however, ­were the detention without trial of hundreds of individuals at the US base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (GITMO), and the use of torture by the United States at Bagram Air Base in Af­g han­i­stan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq, as well as by allies in dark site prisons to which terrorist suspects had been sent as part of the so-­called “extraordinary rendition” pro­ cess. Th ­ ese two topics warrant a more detailed examination b ­ ecause, among other reasons, they have had unanticipated consequences that remain with us ­today. Growing up a child of the Cold War in the 1950s, I was taught not only to fear the Soviet Union—­Pittsburgh’s steel mills would inevitably be early targets of a Soviet nuclear attack so it was especially wise for us Pittsburgh kids to learn to “duck and cover” with alacrity—­but also to regard the United States as a place of exceptional integrity, consistency, and reliability when it came to its ideals. This was of course a naïve view, one ­shaped not just by

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white privilege but white astigmatism, and soon relegated to the ash heap if not of history, then at least of childhood, by the civil rights, Black Power, and antiwar movements. And yet, for all its failings, some t­ hings about the American po­liti­cal and ­legal systems appeared to have been established as normative, at least a­ fter the passage of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Among t­ hose normative markers ­were that ­people accused of crimes ­were entitled to know the charges brought against them, to have access to l­ awyers, and to have their cases heard before a tribunal in­de­pen­dent as much as pos­ si­ble of po­liti­cal control. American cops might not be your “friends,” sentencing might be subject to racial bias, and prisons might well be hellholes—­a ll ­t hese we have seen in e­ arlier pages—­but you had to know what the government had arrested you for, you had to be assigned an attorney to defend you, and you got to appear before a court to plead your case. ­These fundamental ele­ments of due pro­cess w ­ ere exactly what w ­ ere missing in many of the contexts in which Amnesty had designated individuals as prisoners of conscience. Indeed, US officials often remonstrated with foreign governments about the violation of ­t hese very rights, including in two cases we have already met, that of Ken Saro-­Wiwa in Nigeria and Lori Berenson in Peru, even though, in Berenson’s case at least, the United States could not have sympathized with her po­liti­cal views. Such a commitment to due pro­cess and broader notions of freedom—­fair elections, for example, and an unfettered press—­were key reasons why the United States could command a significant mea­sure of re­spect around the world. In 1999–2000, the favorable opinion of the United States, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Proj­ect, was 83 ­percent in G ­ reat Britain, 78 ­percent in Germany, 75 ­percent in Indonesia, and 52  ­percent in Turkey. By 2006 ­those numbers had fallen to 56 ­percent in ­Great Britain, 37 ­percent in Germany, 30 ­percent in Indonesia, and 12 ­percent in Turkey, the latter two majority Muslim countries. What had happened in ­those six years? A good part of the answer could be summed up in the names “Guantánamo Bay” and “Abu Ghraib.” 8 At the heart of the Guantánamo Bay misadventure was the unwillingness of the US government to decide ­whether to treat ­t hose taken into custody for terrorist acts as criminals or e­ nemy soldiers. If they w ­ ere criminals, they needed to be charged with crimes, assured counsel, and brought to trial in an American civilian courtroom. If they ­were e­ nemy soldiers, they w ­ ere subject to the Geneva Conventions, which provided that if they ­were inter-



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rogated, they only be required to provide name, rank, birth date, and serial number. ­Under the Conventions, they had to be provided living quarters comparable to the American soldiers at the same fa­cil­i­t y; they could not be prosecuted solely for participating in combat against the United States; and they had to be released at the “cessation of hostilities.” 9 The prob­lem was that the Bush administration d ­ idn’t like e­ ither of ­t hese options. By August  2002, the United States had deposited 742 prisoners at GITMO.10 Many of them had been picked up in Af­ghan­i­stan, often in return for bounties. George W. Bush described the first detainees as “the worst of the worst” and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld piled on by calling them “among the most dangerous, best trained, most vicious killers on the face of the earth.”11 Eventually the prisoners would come from forty-­nine dif­ fer­ent countries, the vast majority Arab. What they would all have in common is that they ­were regarded as members of the Taliban, al-­Qaeda, or some other group that wished the United States ill.12 But how could the United States prove that? And while taking t­ hese p ­ eople out of the terrorist action was certainly valuable, even more valuable might be learning what they knew about plans for f­ uture 9/11s. If they w ­ ere regarded as criminals, the United States might well not be able to make a case against them sufficient to satisfy the standards of an American court, and they would then have to be released. If they ­were regarded as prisoners of war, they c­ ouldn’t be interrogated extensively, and they would be eligible for the protections of the Geneva Conventions. Since neither of t­ hose choices was acceptable, the administration had to come up with some third category: they chose “unlawful combatant,” a term introduced in the United States in a 1942 Supreme Court case (ex parte Quirin) in which the court had ruled that eight Nazi spies captured out of uniform as they tried to sabotage vari­ous American facilities ­were not prisoners of war and hence could be tried by a military tribunal and sentenced to death.13 “Unlawful combatant” solved a myriad of prob­lems: if the GITMO prisoners ­were combat­ ants, then they ­were not criminals eligible for civilian ­trials. But if they ­were unlawful combatants, they w ­ ere not covered by the Geneva Conventions. The United States could, in other words, do pretty much what it wanted, and what it wanted to do was interrogate them thoroughly in what­ever fashion it chose; ­house them in unappealing conditions; hold them in­def­initely (for, ­after all, who could say when the war on terror would end?); and try them, if it tried

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them at all, before military commissions whose standards w ­ ere far less stringent than civilian courts. All of ­t hese ­v iolated the bedrock princi­ples of due pro­cess that had made the United States a model for other countries around the world—­but so what? ­These w ­ ere terrorists, ­weren’t they? Well, some of them no doubt ­were, but the ­whole point of a court trial was to ensure that someone other than the accuser made that determination, and the point of the Geneva Conventions was to require that combatants held in custody ­were not abused. The Conventions even provided a way to resolve a dispute as to w ­ hether a prisoner is or is not a legitimate prisoner of war. The question was to be submitted on a case-­by-­case basis to a “competent tribunal,” like an international or civilian court. Why the Bush administration never did that is still a mystery. They might very well have prevailed, certainly before an American court, since many of the prisoners did not meet all the criteria for being prisoners of war, such as fighting u ­ nder the flag of a nation that had ratified the Conventions. In any case, the administration held firm. “Unlawful combatants” the GITMO prisoners would be, and military tribunals would decide their fates—­ unless of course ­t hose tribunals acquitted an accused, in which case Pentagon top ­lawyer William J. Haynes II observed that the prisoner “may not necessarily automatically be released.”14 What the administration had not counted on was the deputy camp commander at GITMO admitting in March 2002 that some of the prisoners w ­ ere hardly the “worst of the worst” but “lost souls” who w ­ ere prob­ably innocent.15 It had not counted on the Supreme Court ruling in 2004 that even noncitizens held at Guantánamo had habeas corpus rights nor on the International Red Cross describing the treatment of GITMO prisoners as “abuse.”16 It had not counted on military ­lawyers assigned to defend prisoners in front of military commissions questioning the ­legal bases of the commissions themselves. And it had not anticipated how inflammatory the very existence of GITMO would be at the international level nor how much damage it would do to the United States’ reputation as a champion of ­human rights. Amnesty led much of that criticism. We regularly challenged the “­legal limbo” into which GITMO prisoners had been thrown: they had no access to domestic courts; no contact with relatives; and, ­unless they w ­ ere to be tried by military commissions (which we did not regard as legitimate judicial bodies), no regular access to ­lawyers. We denounced the detainees’ living



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conditions—­incarceration in small cells for up to twenty-­four hours a day—­ and pointed out that as many as 10 ­percent of them had been interrogated in Af­ghan­i­stan, found to have no intelligence value, and yet w ­ ere sent to Guantánamo anyway.17 The revelation in spring of 2003 that three minors who w ­ ere sixteen years old or younger w ­ ere being held at the prison sparked our par­ tic­u­lar outrage.18 All this came to a head in May 2005, when Amnesty secretary general Irene Khan, in releasing the organ­ization’s annual report on h ­ uman rights conditions around the world at a press conference in London, called Guantánamo Bay “the gulag of our times,” a reference to the Soviet forced-­labor camps established by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, mostly in Siberia.19 ­Those five words generated the most intense public controversy of my tenure. You would have thought Irene had kicked George W. Bush in the groin and then spat on him for good mea­sure for all the umbrage her comments bred. Four times in one press conference Bush called the comparison with the Soviet gulags “absurd” and insisted that the United States stood for “freedom.” He said Amnesty was relying on the word of prisoners at GITMO “who hate Amer­i­ca, ­people who have been trained in some instances to disassemble [sic]—­t hat means not tell the truth.”20 Vice President Richard Cheney said he was “offended”;21 Defense Secretary Rumsfeld called Amnesty “reprehensible”22; and the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, said we w ­ ere “absolutely irresponsible.”23 It was obvious we had hit a nerve. It w ­ asn’t just the nerves of government officials, however, that had been triggered. The statement also provoked some of our traditional allies. The Washington Post, a notably liberal paper that often covered Amnesty’s reports, was first out of the block, saying “it’s always sad when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings” and lamenting that Amnesty “has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world’s dictators but for the United States.” The comparison of GITMO with the gulag was inappropriate, the Post said, and gave Bush defenders grounds for saying his critics ­were “hysterical.”24 The left-­wing columnist E. J. Dionne called it “a dramatic, overwrought and, yes, outrageous meta­phor.”25 A commentator on National Public Radio, another major outlet for h ­ uman rights concerns, pointed out that no one could reasonably compare brave Soviet dissidents imprisoned in the gulag to Taliban and al-­Qaeda fighters held at Guantánamo. Perhaps the most authoritative critique came from Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic. A

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historian of the Soviet gulag who had published the definitive history of the camps in 2003, Applebaum, while complimenting Amnesty’s accuracy and po­liti­cal neutrality in the past, wrote that she found Irene’s words “infuriating . . . ​­because in the Soviet Union it would have been impossible . . . ​for Irene Khan to publish an in­de­pen­dent report about anything at all.”26 Many other outlets and opinion-­shapers on both left and right joined in the piling on. Even some of my colleagues in other h ­ uman rights organ­izations w ­ ere peeved at Irene’s use of words. “Houston, we have a prob­lem,” I thought to myself in the face of all this blowback ­because of course with Irene and her staff in London, it fell to AIUSA and me to respond to all the critics and media inquiries, the latter of which numbered in the hundreds. Two ele­ments of this controversy ­were particularly ironic. In the first place, we in Amnesty USA had not been consulted ahead of time about Irene’s use of the meta­phor, and, had we been, we would have discouraged it for many of the reasons the faultfinders ­were citing. Amnesty’s structure—­a strong international hub in London that called the shots for its national subsidiaries with minimal input from the latter—­ was once again coming back to haunt us. And the second irony was that in the press conference we in AIUSA had held at almost the same time as Irene’s to herald the release of the annual report in Washington, I had suggested that George W. Bush and his colleagues in government “may be considered high-­ level torture architects” who might be subjected to international prosecution ­under the princi­ple of universal jurisdiction if they persisted in committing the kinds of ­human rights violations cited in the report.27 Normally, that warning would have warranted significant media coverage in the United States, but it was utterly buried by the gulag “fiasco.” So what to do? I ­couldn’t run away from Irene’s remarks without making the organ­ization appear foolish, but I thought the meta­phor inexact and unfortunate. Luckily, we had an excellent communications team on staff, and we set about figuring out how to blunt the criticisms and take advantage of the attention to Guantánamo. We agreed that I would accept as many invitations as I could from friendly or at least neutral media platforms and that I would try to make the following three points as concisely as pos­si­ble. First, while the comparison with the Soviet gulag was admittedly not literally true in ­every re­spect, ­t here w ­ ere in fact many similarities—­captives w ­ ere being dis­appeared into a remote prison, held incommunicado from their families,



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denied ­legal counsel or ­trials, and, according to the International Red Cross, abused. Second, while Americans might abhor the meta­phor, Amnesty was an international organ­ization that reflected global opinion, and, like it or not, Irene’s words reflected the fact that the United States had become a pariah in the eyes of the world for its practices at Guantánamo. And third, t­ hose who chose to focus on our language ­shouldn’t use an argument over nomenclature as an excuse for failing to talk about what’s ­really happening at GITMO: captives w ­ ere being dis­appeared into a remote prison, held incommunicado from their families, and so on. For the next two weeks solid, I repeated t­ hese points over and over again on national and local outlets.28 ­After a few days, we de­cided that, paradoxically, it was to our advantage to prolong the story rather than try to move on ­because, for what­ever damage it was ­doing to Amnesty’s reputation, it was bringing huge attention to the issue of Guantánamo. For that reason, we agreed that I would accept an invitation to go on Fox News’s major Sunday talk show with Chris Wallace. While Fox was known for its right-­w ing bias—­t his was even before it morphed into Donald Trump’s “state tv”—­I had frequently accepted invitations to go on commentator Bill O’Reilly’s talk show, The O’Reilly F ­ actor. In the first place that show reached a larger audience than any of the other networks’ interview programs—­something like four million viewers—­and, while that audience was overwhelmingly conservative, I figured that if even 10 ­percent of them ­were persuaded to think twice about what­ever topic I was addressing, that was four hundred thousand ­people Amnesty was not likely to reach other­wise. Then, too, O’Reilly, though l­ater subject to sexual harassment charges, actually gave me an opportunity to state my case. He might well argue with me, but he gave me enough time to make my points, unlike his colleague Sean Hannity. On the one or two occasions I appeared on Hannity and Colmes (the precursor to his ­later Sean Hannity Show, Alan Colmes being the hapless liberal), Hannity interrupted me so per­sis­tently that I de­cided it was not worth the effort. Chris Wallace, whose ­father, Mike Wallace, AIUSA had honored in 1997 with a Media Spotlight Award for his exposure on 60 Minutes of CIA involvement in h ­ uman rights violations in Guatemala, was known as a tough but serious journalist. I calculated that although he would no doubt try hard to discredit Amnesty’s perspective, he would also give me room to respond, which turned out largely to be the case.

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On Saturday, June 4, ten days a­ fter the “gulag” bombshell had been detonated in London, a friendly Fox production crew arrived at our home in Huntington and promptly filled ­every inch of our spacious living room with their equipment, positioning me adjacent to our expansive view of Long Island Sound. Chris Wallace was beamed in via monitor and began the interview by pointing out that 1.6 million p ­ eople w ­ ere killed in the Soviet gulag—­nothing like what was happening at the US base in Cuba. I responded, as I had been ­doing for a week and a half, by disavowing the exactness of the meta­phor and then pivoting to the conditions at GITMO. Wallace claimed that the inmates at Guantánamo had been taken “off the battlefield in the ­middle of the war on terror,” unlike Soviet prisoners who w ­ ere brave po­liti­ cal dissidents. This provided a helpful opening for me to point out that b ­ ecause the GITMO captives had been denied ­lawyers or the opportunity to state their cases in court, ­there was no way to know for sure exactly who they ­were. And since by 2005 the Bush administration had released around two hundred prisoners from Guantánamo, it was obvious that many of them ­were hardly the “worst of the worst” as they had at first been represented. From this point on Wallace veered away from the linguistic controversy into more substantive issues, a shift I welcomed. Did I stand by my reference to Donald Rumsfeld and US attorney general Alberto Gonzales as “torture architects”? I replied that the Convention Against Torture, to which the United States was a party, required investigation of t­ hose who “are alleged to be involved with the formulation of a policy of torture or with its carry­ing out” and that Rumsfeld had “provided the exact rules, 27 of them in fact, for interrogation [of Guantánamo prisoners], some of which do constitute torture or cruel, inhumane treatment.” Wallace then unwittingly did me the ­favor of listing some of what Rumsfeld had approved: “putting prisoners in stress positions for prolonged periods of time, stripping them naked and even using dogs to frighten them.” Did we have “any evidence whatsoever that he ever approved beating of prisoners, ever approved starving of prisoners, the kind of t­ hings we normally think of as torture?” “It would be fascinating to find out . . .” I began. Wallace jumped: “You mean you ­don’t . . .” “But I do know,” I went on, “that what ­you’ve just described, the use of dogs, stress positions, that constitutes a violation of the Convention Against Torture.” A moment ­later I pointed out that the reason we d ­ idn’t know for sure how prisoners had been treated was



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­ ecause the US government had systematically prevented h b ­ uman rights groups from conducting investigations at GITMO. “What we do know,” I said, “is that FBI agents themselves raised concerns about p ­ eople being held in stress positions for up to twenty-­four hours. . . . ​A Kentucky National Guardsman testified to prisoners having their heads slammed against the wall. What we do know is that the International Red Cross protested prolonged sleep deprivation t­ here.” Perhaps b ­ ecause he was exasperated by the direction the interview was ­going, Wallace turned to a broader question: if the United States was guilty of “atrocious h ­ uman rights violations,” as we had said, “where do you fit into that equation the liberation of fifty million ­people from oppressive regimes?” I ­didn’t know where he had gotten that number, but his query provided me another opening. “Amnesty tries to hold one plumb-­line universal standard to e­ very government: to Chile, to Cuba, to North K ­ orea, to China—to e­ very government,” I said. “And the United States applauds Amnesty when we criticize Cuba and North ­Korea and China. Indeed, that’s Secretary Rumsfeld who just called us ‘reprehensible.’ That is the same person who quoted Amnesty regularly in the run-up to the Iraq War when we reported for twenty years on Saddam Hussein’s violations—­years during which Rumsfeld himself was courting Hussein for the US government!”29 Wallace let that swipe pass and out of the blue asked me if it was true that I had contributed to the campaigns of John Kerry and Ted Kennedy, trying to make our criticism of the United States appear to be nothing more than partisan politics. ­Here was one instance when I was delighted to be able to point out that Amnesty’s policy was that research was conducted by staffers in London who w ­ ere not Americans; that the comment about the gulag came out of London, not AIUSA; and that my personal po­liti­cal views therefore had no bearing on Amnesty’s positions. This line of inquiry quite con­ve­ niently allowed me to return to one of our key talking points: “­W hether the Americans like it or not,” I said, “[the comment about the gulag] does reflect how more than two million Amnesty members in a hundred countries around the world and, indeed, the vast majority of ­t hose countries feel about United States detention policy.” Overall I was very happy with how the interview turned out. Chris Wallace’s last question had been, “Is it pos­si­ble, sir, that by excessive rhe­toric or by your po­liti­cal links, that you have hurt, not helped your cause?” “Chris,”

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I concluded, “I ­don’t think I’d be on . . . ​t his program ­today . . . ​if Amnesty ­hadn’t said what it said and President Bush and his colleagues h ­ adn’t responded as they did. If I had come to you two weeks ago and said, ‘Chris, I’d like to go on Fox with you just to talk about US detention policies at Guantánamo and elsewhere,’ I suspect you ­wouldn’t have given me an invitation.”30 Irene’s surprising choice of words had turned out to be a vehicle for exposing what was happening at the US base to a much wider audience than we would have other­wise been able to reach. The benefits, if not wisdom, of what Chris Wallace had called “excessive rhe­toric” w ­ ere quickly borne out. Our first break came when the editorial page of the New York Times, departing from its customary common ground with the Washington Post on po­liti­cal m ­ atters, came to our defense on the same day my interview was broadcast on Fox. “Now that the Bush administration has made clear how offended it is at Amnesty International’s word choice . . .” the editorial, entitled “Un-­American by Any Name,” began, “we hope it ­will soon get around to dealing with the substantive prob­lems that the Amnesty report is only the latest to identify.” It then went on to call for the closure of the prison and said, “What makes Amnesty’s gulag meta­phor apt is that Guantánamo is merely one of a chain of shadowy detention camps that also includes Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the military prison at Bagram Air Base in Af­ghan­i­stan and other, secret locations run by the intelligence agencies. Each has produced its own stories of abuse, torture and criminal hom­i­cide. ­These are not isolated incidents, but part of a tightly linked global detention system with no accountability in law.”31 This was a perfect articulation of what we had been saying, but coming from the country’s “paper of rec­ord,” it carried singular weight. Five days l­ater the respected foreign correspondent H.  D.  S. Greenway editorialized in support of our position in the Boston Globe, quoting me extensively and vouching for AI’s integrity: “­There are plenty of ­people in this world who hate Amer­i­ca—­considerably more since Bush took office,” he wrote, “but Amnesty International is not among them. Its research is thorough and its findings considered.” The use of the word “gulag” may have been “over the top,” he concluded, but then, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”32 Politicians began to call for Guantánamo to be closed. On June 6 it was reported that then Senator Joseph Biden, ranking Demo­crat on the Foreign



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Relations Committee, favored an investigation of Guantánamo, saying, “But the end result is, I think we should end up shutting it down, moving ­t hose prisoners.”33 On June 12 Republican senator Mel Martinez of Florida, a former member of George  W. Bush’s cabinet, announced that he believed GITMO should be closed. “It has become an icon for bad stories,” he said, “and at some point you won­der the cost-­benefit ratio.”34 Eventually even Bush himself a­ dopted the man­tra. In the spring of 2006, following three detainee suicides at Guantánamo, the president told reporters, “I’d like to close Guantánamo. . . . ​No question Guantánamo provides an excuse . . . ​to say ‘the United States is not upholding the values that ­t hey’re trying to encourage other countries to adhere to,’ ” though he quickly added that shutting the prison was not feasible in the near ­future.35 And, indeed, as I write in 2022, Guantánamo Bay is still open, although of the approximately 780 ­people incarcerated t­ here since 2002, fewer than 40 remain.36 Does this mean Amnesty’s campaign against GITMO was a failure? In absolute terms, yes. Most of t­ hose remaining prisoners have still not received ­trials and languish in indefinite detention. But, in part thanks to Amnesty, “Guantánamo Bay” became a symbol of all that was wrong with the American approach to the war on terror, a shorthand way of referring to the United States’ shortsightedness. Ironically, no one put this better than Major General Michael Lehnert who oversaw the construction and early operations of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. Reflecting on that experience in 2015, Lehnert said, “Our country made the decisions we did when we ­were angry and frightened. We wanted revenge for what we rightfully viewed as a sneak unprovoked attack on sovereign soil. However, we cannot allow our fear or our anger to serve as excuses for walking away from our national values. Guantánamo was a bad decision.”37 Even the “gulag” appellation itself gradually gained wider currency. New York Times’ columnist Maureen Dowd had Vladimir Putin refer to “your GITMO gulag” in a satirical send-up of George W. Bush.38 Harper’s magazine carried a front-­cover story on the fate of war-­on-­terror prisoners that it dubbed “American Gulag.”39 And seven years a­ fter Irene’s controversial choice of words, the Atlantic was still using “gulag” to encompass all American supermax prisons.40 And what of ­t hose “worst of the worst” who had first populated GITMO? In March 2021, the New York Times surveyed their fates. Of the twenty who

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­ ere first escorted to their cells clad in orange uniforms, only two remained w at the camp. The rest had been transferred to the custody of other nations or released. Of t­ hose, four had returned to the po­liti­cal or military leadership of the Taliban. Four could not be found. The rest w ­ ere e­ ither still in foreign 41 prisons or living quiet, uneventful lives. Is it too much to imagine that t­ hose or better outcomes might well have been achieved had t­ hose twenty prisoners been accorded their fundamental rights at trial? Perhaps the four current Taliban leaders might still, legitimately, be in jail. Of course, w ­ e’ll never know, but what we do know is this: had the United States respected its own customary ­legal procedures or the Geneva Conventions, ­t here would have been no occasion for, in General Lehnert’s words, our “walking away from our national values” and no occasion, I might add, for my having had to spend two of the most intense weeks of my life exegeting the phrase “gulag of our times”!

* * * Six days ­after 9/11, President Bush signed an executive order authorizing the CIA to capture and interrogate al-­Qaeda members and ­others suspected of being involved in the attacks. Many months of l­egal debate within the administration ensued regarding the status of such captives and the permissible techniques that might be employed in such interrogations. Th ­ ese debates and their consequences have been widely documented42 and resulted in such now legendary sound bites as CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black’s testimony to Congress that “­there was ‘before’ 9/11 and ‘­after’ 9/11 and ‘­after 9/11’ the gloves come off” and Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo’s infamous memo of January 9, 2002, asserting that the president need not be bound by customary laws of war b ­ ecause they did not constitute federal law.43 Bush concurred with the conclusions of his most rabid advisers by issuing a memo to his top officials on February 7, 2002, which asserted that common article 3 of the Geneva Convention requiring the humane treatment of prisoners did not apply to ­either al-­Qaeda or Taliban captives. He then went on to insist that, even so, “our values as a nation . . . ​call for us to treat detainees humanely, including t­hose who are not legally entitled to such treat­ ment. Our nation has been and w ­ ill continue to be a strong supporter of Geneva and its princi­ples. As a ­matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces ­shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appro­



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priate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the princi­ples of Geneva” (emphases added).44 ­Under the guise of reaffirming the traditional American commitment to respecting the rights of t­ hose in its custody, this finding created opportunities for brutality so obvious that even the biggest dullard could find a way to take advantage of them. It labeled such prisoners ineligible for humane treatment, which is dangerously close to labeling them “less than h ­ uman,” a common precursor to torture. Its restrictions applied only to the US military, not the CIA, and not of course to other countries to which the United States would transfer t­ hese prisoners (“extraordinary rendition”)—­countries like Syria, Egypt, Romania, and Poland—­t hat had far fewer scruples about applying “enhanced interrogation techniques” than the United States allegedly did.45 Best of all, it rendered all this talk of humane treatment null and void if someone (undesignated) found such treatment inappropriate or inconsistent (undefined) with “military necessity” (undelineated). ­Little won­der then that beginning a few months l­ ater reports began leaking out that it was not only Guantánamo Bay to which terrorist suspects ­were being transferred but to so-­called “black site” prisons in countries that used torture to extract information more quickly than “more benign interrogation methods” could accomplish.46 ­Little won­der that ­Human Rights Watch reported in 2002 US brutalization of prisoners, including hom­i­cides, committed at Bagram Air Base in Af­g han­i­stan.47 And ­little won­der that within slightly more than a year of Bush’s memo, Amnesty and other ­human rights organ­izations w ­ ere getting word of mistreatment, including sleep deprivation and prolonged hooding, at US facilities in Iraq—­information that Amnesty delegates on a mission to Iraq shared with US officials in July 2003 in Baghdad.48 That is one reason few of us at Amnesty w ­ ere surprised when on April 28, 2004, less than a year ­after Amnesty had tried to alert the United States to what was happening in Iraq, 60 Minutes II broadcast graphic photos of Iraqi detainees being humiliated and tortured at the American military prison at Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad. Two days ­later an internal report by US Major General Antonio Taguba, which had been commissioned months e­ arlier, was released. It confirmed that cruelty was routine at Abu Ghraib and included, among other grotesque practices, “punching, slapping, kicking detainees”; using unmuzzled military dogs to frighten them; forcing groups of males to

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pose “in sexually explicit positions,” “to wear w ­ omen’s underwear,” and to “masturbate . . . ​while being photographed”; and in at least one case, placing a dog chain around a male prisoner’s neck while a ­woman guard held the leash. One photo of a prisoner, Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, hooded and standing with outstretched arms on a box, electric wires dangling from him, became an iconic repre­sen­ta­tion of American barbarity.49 As an Iraqi translator put it sardonically, “I always knew the Americans would bring electricity back to Baghdad. I just never thought t­ hey’d be shooting it up my ass.”50 George W. Bush acted surprised when confronted with t­ hese revelations. He had been ­going around for months assuring the world that the United States did not engage in torture.51 He said he was “sorry.”52 He said that what happened at Abu Ghraib did not represent “the Amer­i­ca that I know.” He said ­people would be held accountable.53 But what he did not say was that he and his administration had seeded the conditions that made an Abu Ghraib inevitable. On May 7 the heads of nine major US h ­ uman rights organ­izations wrote the president, reminding him that for the previous year and a half reports of “unnamed US intelligence officials boasting about the use of torture” had appeared in major news outlets and that for over a year we had been begging him to repudiate such statements and assure that detainees w ­ ere treated in accordance with international humanitarian law. We asked him to “establish clear prohibitions on illegal and inappropriate interrogation and detention methods.”54 To my knowledge we never received a reply. Tempting as it was, however, to lay blame for the use of torture at Guantánamo Bay and in Iraq, Af­ghan­i­stan, and the black site prisons solely at the feet of George Bush and his colleagues, it was also true that they had a lot of accomplices. In the months and years following 9/11, the tacit prohibition on endorsing torture directly and publicly began to fall away. Brutality started to go mainstream. Some of the acclaim for it came from the usual suspects like conservative commentators Pat Buchanan and Charles Krauthammer.55 Some of it came from self-­styled progressives like Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, who, while abjuring physical torture, appeared to be willing to entertain other forms and began a November 5, 2001, column by writing, “In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to . . . ​torture. OK, not c­ attle prods or rubber hoses, at least not ­here in the United States, but something to jump-­start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history.”56 And some of it emerged out of popu­lar culture. The hit



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tele­v i­sion program 24 premiered just two months ­after 9/11 and ran for nine seasons, often depicting counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer using barbarous techniques on suspects. The New York Times headlined a description of the show as “Normalizing Torture, One Rollicking Hour at a Time.”57 Fox’s The Chamber ­couldn’t rival 24 for longevity, though it too debuted just a few months a­ fter the 2001 terrorist attacks. In this game show contestants w ­ ere “fastened spread-­eagle in a chair [with] electrodes strapped to certain muscles to induce involuntary contractions” or “rotated over flames as if being roasted on a spit or forced to sit in tank tops in subzero cold, emerging covered in ice or complaining of having their legs burned.” Fox executive Mike Darnell was quoted as saying, “I’m looking for visceral reactions from the contestants. I want to hear if t­ hey’re in pain or are suffering.”58 Perhaps it was no surprise that the entertainment world would try to capitalize on Americans’ passion for revenge ­after the grievous assault represented by 9/11. Then, too, I expected outrageous comments from the likes of Krauthammer and Buchanan, even though I must admit that when I debated Pat Buchanan in the fall of 2003 at Vanderbilt University and we had dinner with the students beforehand, I found him utterly charming, even as I was prepared to find him contemptible. I had to keep reminding myself of the many reasons I ­didn’t like him. It was the “progressives,” however, whom I felt duty-­bound to try to ­counter ­because they ­were the ones who ­were more likely to sway the undecided. They ­were the ones who wanted to preserve their virtue even as they found rationales for “something” and who sought limits to a practice that inherently had no limits. It was inevitable that defenders of torture would cite one version or another of the classic “ticking bomb scenario:” some culprit knows where a bomb is planted that, if it goes off, w ­ ill kill hundreds, if not thousands, of ­people. Surely we are compelled to do something to make the villain talk even if not by using such unseemly devices as “­cattle prods or rubber hoses.” But why not ­cattle prods, rubber hoses, or what­ever e­ lse it took? If the “reputable” reason to torture somebody even a l­ ittle bit was to save large numbers of other p ­ eople, how could we justify not employing any mechanism at our disposal, including torturing that miscreant’s baby, to protect innocent lives? The two ­people with whom I engaged in this argument most pointedly, the first privately and the second publicly, w ­ ere the former mayor of New

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York, Ed Koch, and the esteemed Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz. In February 2002, Koch wrote to me asking my opinion of “the use of torture in the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario” ­because, he said, “I ­will be discussing and writing on the subject in the media.”59 Knowing that he still had a following in the city, though he had been out of office for thirteen years, I responded to him in some detail. I hoped to discourage him from endorsing torture even if I ­couldn’t persuade him to oppose it. I was surprised when he subsequently invited me to lunch, and we met at a corner t­ able in a restaurant called Citarella near Rocke­fel­ler Center. Koch was a big man, friendly, used to being paid attention to, but he was no phi­los­o­pher. We had a good conversation, but I had a feeling his mind was made up before we sat down, and any subtle arguments I might make would be lost on him. I also sensed that his biggest disappointment during our conversation was that no one in the restaurant appeared to recognize him or, if they did, both­ered to seek him out for a handshake. He was obviously miffed that Rudy Giuliani was getting such favorable attention as “Amer­i­ca’s Mayor.” I’ve often thought he would be pleased to see the level of ignominy to which Giuliani has fallen t­ oday! A key reason Koch had glommed onto the necessity for torture was ­because he had been reading Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz regarded himself as a champion of civil liberties and had often applauded Amnesty’s work. In response, however, to Israel’s use of what it called “moderate physical pressure” on suspected terrorists who presumably had information about ­f uture attacks, he had proposed that in t­ hose ­limited “ticking bomb”–­t ype situations, interrogators ­ought to apply to a court for a so-­called “torture warrant” that would authorize and, presumably, restrict in certain ways the “pressure” it was permissible to apply.60 In his books Shouting Fire: Civil Lib­ erties in a Turbulent Age and Why Terrorism Works61 as well as in numerous tele­v i­sion appearances, including on 60 Minutes, the professor had insisted that since torture would inevitably occur in situations of extremis, it was wiser to try to regulate it through official l­ egal channels than allow it to be applied willy-­nilly.62 That would relieve low-­level officials of the l­ egal and moral burden of making an unpleasant decision and, he insisted, would provide a way to modulate brutal impulses by limiting them to “non-­lethal means, such as sterile ­needles being inserted beneath the nails to cause excruciating pain without endangering life.” 63 Dershowitz insisted that he was against torture and d ­ idn’t even necessarily f­ avor the use of torture warrants but saw them as



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a way to prevent or minimize the practice. I saw them as exactly the opposite: a way to purify brutality by clothing it in the raiment of l­egal respectability. For that reason and b ­ ecause I worried that an influential ”liberal” voice like Dershowitz’s might convince far more ­people than just Ed Koch that ­t here was a way to make torture respectable, I de­cided to take him on in a review of Shouting Fire in the Nation and on several subsequent tele­v i­sion appearances. It was easy enough to point out that torture ­v iolated the Convention Against Torture the United States had ratified, that it rarely yielded reliable information, and that it fractured the United States’ reputation for probity at a time when we w ­ ere involved in a global strug­gle in defense of civility and the rule of law. Moreover, the ticking bomb scenario represents a hy­po­t het­i­cal situation that could virtually never be replicated in real life. In October 2001, 45 ­percent of Americans said they approved of the “torture of known terrorists if they know details about f­ uture terrorist attacks”—­ approved, in other words, of using torture in a ticking bomb scenario.64 But ­whether someone “knows details about f­ uture terrorist attacks” is exactly what authorities ­don’t know in the first place. That’s why ­you’re torturing them—to find out what they know! If you c­ an’t be sure ahead of time that they have the information you seek, the ticking bomb rationale falls apart. All ­t hese w ­ ere commonly cited arguments. Dershowitz’s defense of torture warrants, however, required a more granular response. To make his case more relevant to the issue of the day, Dershowitz had speculated that “had law enforcement . . . ​arrested terrorists boarding one of the planes [on September 11] and learned that other planes . . . ​­were headed t­ oward unknown unoccupied buildings,” they would have had an “understandable incentive” to torture them for the information. I thought this example illustrated perfectly what was wrong with the ticking bomb scenario. “This assumes,” I wrote, that law enforcement officials would have had the time in the hour and a half or so between the boarding of the planes and the impact on their targets to (1) take the suspects into custody; (2) ascertain with enough certainty to warrant torture that the suspects w ­ ere (a) terrorists who (b) had the needed information in their possession; (3) apply to a judge for a torture warrant and make the case for one; (4) inflict torture sufficient to retrieve the necessary facts; (5) evaluate the validity

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of ­t hose facts in order to be assured that no innocent plane would be identified and blown out of the sky; and (6) take the steps required to stop or mitigate the terrorist act.65 That seemed highly unlikely. It was the concept of torture warrants themselves, however, that required a more thorough examination: that is, the presumption that the way to combat an abhorrent practice was not to outlaw it but to license it. Search warrants w ­ ere a legitimate tool of law enforcement if obtained legally b ­ ecause ­t here was nothing inherently wrong with the act of searching. But torture was not a morally neutral act, and therefore it ­couldn’t be “cleansed” by issuing a warrant. If it could, I asked, why not issue “brutality warrants” to cops who thought they had to rough up or kill citizens to protect themselves or the general public; or “testilying warrants” to police who believed the only way to convict a defendant was to lie on the stand; or “warrants to tolerate prisoner rape” to correctional officers who claimed that was the only way to control life b ­ ehind bars. I thought t­ hese examples would expose the wrongheadedness of Dershowitz’s line of thought, but to my amazement he replied in a letter to the editor that he would indeed offer a “heuristic ‘yes’ ” to such warrants “if requiring a warrant would subject ­t hese horribly brutal activities to judicial control and po­liti­cal accountability.” Given a chance to reply to his reply, I observed that “the question is, What is the best way to eradicate ­t hese practices? By regulating them or outlawing them and enforcing the law? That an evil seems pervasive or even . . . ​inevitable is no reason to grant it official approval. . . . ​Had we applied Professor Dershowitz’s approach to child l­ abor, American 10-­year-­olds would still be sweating in shops.” 66 I ­don’t know ­whether ­these or any of the other efforts we at Amnesty made to c­ ounter the mainstreaming of torture had an appreciable effect on public opinion. One of our colleague organ­izations, ­Human Rights First, did a splendid job of mobilizing military leaders to speak publicly against the practice, and they obviously carried far more credibility on the subject than I did.67 I do know, however, that of thirty-­two opinion polls taken between 2001 and 2009, only three showed that a majority of Americans favored the use of torture. Even William F. Buckley Jr. chastised Dershowitz, saying, “To attempt to describe legitimate reasons for torture breaks the spiritual back of the law.” 68 And I do know that t­ hose years witnessed a robust debate on what con-



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stituted mistreatment. George Bush claimed repeatedly that he would never authorize torture, but he approved the use of waterboarding (pouring w ­ ater over the face of a subject to stimulate drowning), con­ve­niently forgetting or ignoring that the full title of the Convention Against Torture includes the words “and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.” 69 Even the most generous observer of waterboarding would be hard-­ pressed to describe it as “kind, humane and uplifting!”

* * * I was so caught up in the torture debate I de­cided to edit a book on it, which required that I talk with many ­people about what motivated torture and how it could be ­stopped.70 On ­t hese bases I came to a few conclusions. The first was that u ­ nless you had experienced torture or abuse yourself, it was almost impossible to fully understand it. Even t­ hose who had survived torture had a hard time describing it. Th ­ ose of us who had been fortunate enough not to have under­gone such mistreatment could only extrapolate from our worst pain or trauma, and that was rarely, if ever, g­ oing to get us to what torture was ­really like. It was ­because of such opacity that some could joke about it and o ­ thers could so readily appear to indulge it. Second, I concluded that while an impulse to cruelty might lie curled in many of our breasts, it was too s­ imple to say that anyone could become a torturer. Po­liti­cal torture required sanction from authorities, which meant that the way to stop torture was to hold to account t­ hose in authority—­such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, who had rationalized and encouraged torture—­and not just its direct purveyors at places like Abu Ghraib. Fi­nally, though, I needed to acknowledge that I understood the impulse to pry information from someone if you thought that information might save a loved one’s life. Just as I felt compassion for the families of capital crime victims who sought the death of the one who had caused them such distress, so I could get inside the heads of parents who, faced with a perpetrator who might know about a bomb set to go off at their c­ hildren’s school, would want all means employed to save their ­little ones. I knew all the reasons that hy­ po­t het­i­cal was fantastic; I knew that similar hy­po­t het­i­cals ­were used to justify the rottenest be­hav­ior; I knew that torture was utterly loathsome; and I

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still understood the impulse. The only solution was to make torture an invariable crime, to bring to trial ­t hose who committed it, to provide them a robust defense and ample opportunity to justify their choices, and to let a court or jury decide if t­ hose choices mitigated their violation of the law. In a true ticking bomb situation, maybe they would.71 ­After all, ­human rights are ultimately about saving lives, and no utilitarian could argue credibly that harming one person to actually save the lives of one hundred was not a trade worth making. I had seen enough complexity in the world to be suspicious of moral purists. I was no deontologist who believed that it was best to follow the rules even at the risk of our lives, though I also knew that in real-­life situations that was not an easy calculation to make. It was reflections such as this that prompted me to be critical of the h ­ uman rights movement in one re­spect. Much as I detested the approach the Bush administration had taken to the “war on terror” and was relentlessly critical of its corresponding ­human rights violations, I was also frustrated that Amnesty and its colleague organ­izations rarely expressed equal animus ­toward ­those committing acts of terror. Indeed, I never saw a research report on al-­ Qaeda and its crimes. In an essay in the April 2004 issue of the New York Times Magazine entitled “Security Is a H ­ uman Right, Too,” I said, If we in the h ­ uman rights community abhor the targeting of civilians in any context, as we surely do, then we need to act as if we believe it. We need to report as best we can on the funding sources and recruitment tactics of Al Qaeda’s network; call to account t­ hose governments that allow themselves to become entangled with terrorist cells; name the suppliers of arms to terrorist groups—­suppliers who include established states, not just “rogue” ones; mobilize grass-­roots opposition to terrorism by addressing root c­ auses like economic deprivation or social discrimination; and offer a clear articulation of the ways in which re­spect for h ­ uman rights helps offset the terrorists’ appeal.72 That call was met by radio silence from the ­human rights community, but I was glad I had issued it.

* * *



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When George W. Bush ended his term in office in January 2009, he had an approval rating of 34 ­percent, the lowest for a departing president since Harry Truman.73 I hoped I had contributed at least a tad to that dismal showing, but ­little did I know that eight years ­later a man would enter office who would make Bush look like a model of sagacity. Perhaps the contrast to Donald Trump contributed to a reversal of Bush’s favorability ratings, which in 2018 had leaped to 61 ­percent.74 But it would be a ­mistake to forget all Bush did to tarnish long-­held American values. Trump is a phenomenon all to himself, but, quite apart from their shared bluster, Bush’s war on terror seeded the ground for many of the forty-­fifth president’s ignominious practices. Bush and Trump differed markedly on ­whether the United States had an obligation to help spread democracy around the globe, Trump abjuring such a mission and Bush saying in his second inaugural address that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of demo­cratic movements and institutions in ­every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”75 But Bush’s nose-­t humbing at international norms and his tendency to “go it alone,” champion American exceptionalism, plunder the rights of detainees, foster suspicion about Muslim immigrants, short-­circuit constitutional protections at GITMO, and excuse lapses from law at Abu Ghraib as a consequence not of his own policies but of “a few bad apples” all accustomed Americans in a way no previous president ever had to what would emerge as Trump’s Make Amer­i­ca ­Great Again (MAGA) and “Amer­i­ca First” memes. Through his tolerance for torture if not in name but certainly in fact, Bush undermined the cosmopolitan values—­ the conviction that what ­human beings share in common is more impor­tant than what divides us and that therefore we all need to abide by the same rules—on which an interdependent world depends. Through his disparagement of international institutions like the United Nations, the ­Human Rights Council, and the International Criminal Court, he alienated a portion of the public from ­t hose traditional mechanisms of diplomacy designed to foster a civilized world. All this softened the underbelly of American culture, making a portion of the public more susceptible to a charlatan who had no use for the rule of law. What Bush sowed, Trump reaped. And yet, despite my per­sis­tent clashes with the Bush administration, I had to acknowledge that unlike some of my Amnesty colleagues around the world

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who ­were targeted by their own governments when they spoke out against injustices at home, I had never suffered ill consequences for my candor. I had never been threatened by state officials. My taxes had never been audited. To my knowledge, I had never been tailed. Maybe I had not been enough of a threat to warrant such attention, and inevitably my whiteness had offered me a mea­sure of protection. But still the point was worth noting. I had a chance to make that acknowl­edgment in 2008, two years ­after I had left Amnesty, when as a se­nior fellow for h ­ uman rights at the Center for American Pro­gress, I was asked to speak to the Interparliamentary Union in Geneva, a gathering of parliament members from around the globe, on the topic of ­human rights and security. It was the day before the 2008 presidential election when George Bush was about to be replaced by Barack Obama, and I pulled no punches in my criticisms of the out­going president. ­After my speech several parliamentarians held nothing back in lambasting Bush, the United States, and Americans in general for the United States’ many sins. At first, I contented myself with voicing agreement since most of the critiques w ­ ere ones I shared and had often enumerated. But fi­nally, when the attacks became more personal and came from countries I knew ­were paragons of repression and h ­ adn’t held a f­ ree election in de­cades, if ever, I could contain myself no longer. “Friends,” I said, “you are spreading your animus at the feet of the wrong American. Few ­people have been as publicly critical of the United States as I have been. But I ­will say to you, sir, from Chad and you, ­ma’am, from Cambodia, and you, sir, from Belarus, that if you had been even half as critical of your president as I have been of mine, you would not be with us ­here in Geneva t­ oday, and it is pos­si­ble you would not be with us at all.” No comfort for ­those who had suffered at the hands of American thugs but a reminder that the United States had no mono­poly on such perversity.

Figure 1. Former prisoner of conscience Václav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, addressed the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco at an event cosponsored by AIUSA in 1994. To Havel’s left is Shirley T ­ emple Black, former US ambassador to the Czech Republic, the author, and Ross Daniels, chair of the International Executive Committee of Amnesty International (see Chapter 2). Courtesy of AIUSA.

Figure 2. Joan Baez sings at a fundraiser held in Atherton, California, in 1995 for the Ginetta Sagan Fund, named a­ fter a key figure in the development of AIUSA. Ginetta is seated in the fan-­backed chair (see Chapter 8). Courtesy of AIUSA.

Figure 3. The author speaking with Bianca Jagger at the 1995 Executive Director’s Leadership Council meeting in Washington, DC. Bianca was to be of inestimable assistance to AIUSA in its public activism (see Chapter 7). Courtesy of AIUSA.

Figure 4. Wei Jingsheng, the “­Father of Chinese Democracy,” addresses a press conference in New York City cosponsored by ­Human Rights in China and AIUSA shortly ­after Wei’s release in November 1997, a­ fter eigh­teen years in Chinese prisons (see Chapter 2). Courtesy of AIUSA.

Figure 5. The heads of all the Amnesty national sections meet at the headquarters of AI’s Palestinian Groups in the Gaza Strip in April 1998. Israel had balked at permitting the directors to enter Gaza (see Chapter 3). Courtesy of AIUSA.

Figure 6. The author shares a laugh with President Jimmy Car­ter during an AIUSA board meeting at the Car­ter Center in January 1999. (The remark that prompted the chuckle is described in Chapter 4.) Courtesy of AIUSA.

Figure 7. The Dalai Lama and the author examine a copy of the Universal Declaration of H ­ uman Rights in Atlanta in June 1999 (see Chapter 3). Courtesy of AIUSA.

Figure 8. The author with Martin Sheen following the pre­sen­ta­tion in Los Angeles in 2000 of the Enduring Spirit Award to Mexican l­awyer Digna Ochoa, who was subsequently killed in October 2001 when she returned to Mexico (see Chapter 2). Courtesy of AIUSA.

Figure 9. A print of Flying Pizza by Claes Oldenburg—­a gift from Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen in 2000 in appreciation of my performing the wedding of their d ­ aughter (see Chapter 7). Courtesy of Beth Graham.

Figure 10. An Amnesty USA demonstration in Washington, DC, in 2001, protesting the sale of “blood diamonds,” which w ­ ere funding the brutal war in Sierra Leone (see Chapter 3). Courtesy of AIUSA.

Figure 11. The author with Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover following Belafonte’s pre­sen­ta­tion to Glover of an AIUSA Media Spotlight Award for Danny’s ­human rights activism, New York City, 2002 (see Chapter 7). Courtesy of AIUSA.

Figure  12. An editorial cartoon that appeared in the Washington Post in 2004 during the period when AIUSA was most vociferously criticizing US post-9/11 ­human rights violations (see Chapter 5). Courtesy of Jeff Danziger.

CHAPTER 7

Star Power

Clutching a painting ­under his arm, Senator Ted Kennedy ambled up to the head ­table with a sheepish gait. He reminded me of myself as a ­little boy presenting a misshapen clay ashtray from art class to my parents, except that this painting was lovely and the recipients of it w ­ ere Kennedy’s niece Rory—­ the youn­gest of Bobby and Ethel’s eleven ­children, who had been in utero when her ­father was killed—­and her fiancé, Mark Bailey. The occasion was the rehearsal dinner the night before their wedding, and the setting was the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mas­sa­chu­setts. U ­ ncle Teddy, as he was affectionately called in the ­family, had been painting since 1964 a­ fter he had broken his back in a plane crash and endured weeks of immobility. When he presented the seascape as a gift to the wedding ­couple, the tent erupted in cheers and laughter, and the senator blushed and joined in the revelry before he returned to the ­table where his wife, Vicki, was sitting with Rory’s ­sister Kerry, a leading h ­ uman rights campaigner I had come to know through Amnesty, and her then husband, Andrew Cuomo, along with my wife, Beth, and me. We all lauded Ted’s artistic talent. Beth and I had landed in the midst of this intimate ­family gathering on July 16, 1999, thanks to Kerry who, knowing I was a “man of the cloth,” had asked me to help out her younger ­sister by co-­officiating at the wedding with a rabbi since Mark was Jewish. The rabbi was to arrive the next day when the ceremony would take place. In the meantime, Beth and I had been welcomed into the midst of this elegantly raucous conclave of siblings, cousins, and a few close ­family friends ribbing each other in the affectionate, if competitive manner so typical of the Kennedys.

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The eve­ning was nothing short of sparkling. Ted Kennedy was warm and charming and funny—­“I’ve been dieting all day, as usual,” he said to me sotto voce, “and I’m absolutely stahhving!” Vicki was welcoming; Kerry was her usual full-­hearted self; Andrew was handing out cigars. It was obvious that Rory was held in the highest affection by ­every member of the ­family, that this was her night, and that nothing was ­going to spoil it. At the end of the festivities Mark spoke moving words of love and appreciation for his soon-­to-be bride. When the eve­ning was over, Beth and I headed to a local h ­ otel knowing it had been an occasion we would never forget. And then we awoke the next morning to learn from tele­v i­sion news that the small plane John F. Kennedy Jr. had been pi­loting on his way to the wedding, along with his wife, Carolyn, and her s­ ister, Lauren Bessette, had failed to arrive at its first stop on Martha’s Vineyard where it was to drop Lauren off. It was not yet certain that the plane had crashed, but t­ here appeared no other explanation. Suddenly the joyous event of the night before took on an ominous cast. The wedding had been scheduled for late after­noon, but it seemed likely, though not certain, that was not ­going to happen. At 3:00 p.m. the phone rang in our ­hotel room. It was Ethel Kennedy. “Bill,” she said, “we still ­don’t know what has happened to John, but the wedding has been canceled and t­ here are now several hundred guests from all over the country gathering in the h ­ otel ballroom. I need you to go downstairs, speak to them, and offer them succor.” I was stunned. For a moment I failed to reply. “Bill?” Ethel said. “Yes, Mrs. Kennedy,” I said, quickly pulling myself together. “Yes, of course. I’ll do that.” Nobody said “no” to Ethel Kennedy, but I d ­ idn’t feel pulled together at all. That word “succor” rang in my head. It was an incredibly gracious gesture of Ethel’s to think of her guests’ spiritual needs at such a fraught time, but what should I say? This was just about the hardest t­ hing I had ever been asked to do in my ministry, and I had only about fifteen minutes to assem­ble my remarks. Thankfully, Beth was t­ here, and with her incisive counsel, I put together a few notes and we headed down to the ballroom. We w ­ ere astonished to find Rory and Mark who, though no doubt struggling with their own grief and disappointment, warmly greeted each of their guests with smiles and hugs—an example of emotional and spiritual courage I have rarely seen duplicated.



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­After a few minutes, someone quieted the crowd, and I introduced myself and began to speak. I still have the notes I used to say in part, We are gathered t­ oday at the dusk of a day made poignant by the immensity of its paradox—­a time of overwhelming joy for two p ­ eople we love now mixed with confusion, uncertainty, and grief. If the worst has happened, we ­human beings are thrown up once again against the hard, stark fact of ­human finitude, of ­human tragedy. I have no cosmic explanation for the vagaries of this life. In the face of terrible loss, it is utterly appropriate to join with Dylan Thomas as we “rage, rage against the ­dying of the light.” And yet, perhaps especially in the face of our fragility, it is entirely right to trea­sure breath, to embrace love, and to bless the graceful gifts of the earth: in the words of another writer, “to trea­sure with such e­ ager care the light that plays on e­ very passing moment.” . . . ​­Today is not only not the end of love, but indeed it is love’s very manifestation—­for t­ hose who are missing, for all ­those who love them, and for Rory and Mark who are very much still with us ­here. I ­wasn’t sure my feeble remarks had risen to the occasion, but I relied on the assurance from my ministerial training that in situations such as this, the contents of one’s words are less impor­tant than the resonance of one’s presence.

* * * Though the wedding had been postponed, the circumstances in Hyannis Port had fostered a friendship between the senator and me. At the rehearsal dinner Ted mentioned that he had agreed for the first time in his c­ areer to speak at the Senate Prayer Breakfast, a small private gathering of senators who wished to discuss religious questions, and he was quite anxious about it. He wanted to emphasize his devotion to God, f­amily, and nation. He asked if perhaps I could help him articulate his thoughts. I said I’d be happy to try. Naturally, with John Jr.’s death, this agenda was postponed, but at some point in the fall, with his “preaching” date approaching, Ted got back in touch; we talked through his objectives in detail, and I tried to put a first draft of his thoughts in words. Apparently his remarks w ­ ere very well received. In his

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typically magnanimous way, he forwarded me copies of appreciative notes he had been sent from other senators and even the Senate chaplain. Over the next (and last) ten years of his life, he would call me periodically, sometimes about an upcoming speech, such as his eulogy at the funeral of Coretta Scott King; sometimes to invite me to an event; sometimes to solicit my thinking on a ­human rights issue; and sometimes just to shoot the breeze. I was certainly not an intimate friend—­I prob­ably saw him privately about a dozen times—­but, contrary to some po­liti­cal characterizations of him as ­either an impenetrable liberal lion or, as his enemies would have it, the Devil incarnate, I found him sensitive, thoughtful, loving, and indelibly sweet. In part our connection was forged b ­ ecause I urged him to speak very personally in his prayer breakfast remarks and to deliver them in a slow, modulated way. Ted was renowned for his loud, impassioned speeches, which w ­ ere just fine on the floor of the Senate or at a po­liti­cal rally promoting a cause about which he cared deeply, but would not work in a chapel ser­v ice in front of twenty-­five ­people talking about his faith in God and love for his ­family and nation. He took my advice and in his autobiography, True Compass, says that the remarks ­were unusual for him b ­ ecause “I rarely speak in public on personal ­matters. It’s something my generation was taught not to do” and ­because “I also was speaking in a quiet voice, which in itself is a challenge to me. My Republican Senate colleague John Chafee once told me I was ‘wrong at the top of [my] lungs’ but I wanted to speak in a quiet voice ­because the louder our voices become, the more we grow strangers to each other and ourselves.”1 Almost all of our subsequent interactions took place with Ted speaking in his quiet voice. For my part I was honored to be of support to someone who was fighting hard for issues I cared about while carry­ing huge private burdens I could only imagine. He brought out ­every pastoral instinct in me. Even more than that, Ted Kennedy was hard not to like, as even some of his most ardent adversaries have confessed. He had a ­g reat, often self-­ deprecating sense of humor. He and his excellent staff w ­ ere attentive to other ­people—at his own volition and without advance arrangements he showed up and spoke one night at an event for one of my books held at the Kennedy Library—­and he did his best to be accessible not just to his own ­children but to the sprawling families of his ­sisters and two dead ­brothers, trying to call ­every one of the kids on their birthdays no ­matter how busy he other­wise



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was. When his friend Senator Frank Church was d ­ ying of pancreatic cancer in Bethesda, Mary­land, Ted went to visit him almost e­ very day despite the pressures of his Senate schedule.2 Ted Kennedy strug­gled with his feelings, I’m sure, as most men of his generation did, but on more than one occasion I saw him display the huge heart that his ­family knew well and a vulnerability that he often hid from ­others. Less than a year ­after John Jr.’s death, he called me to say that the reporter Gloria Borger wanted to interview him on 60 Minutes II not about po­liti­cal issues but about all the tragedies his f­ amily had suffered. “I ­don’t want to do it,” he said, “­because I’m afraid I’ll cry.” “I’m sure you w ­ ill cry,” I said, “and, if you do, the vast majority of ­people ­will think even more highly of you for your humanness.” He did the interview, and he did cry. In talking with Borger about John’s death, he said, “You try to live with the . . . ​happy aspects and the joyous aspects of it and try to muffle down the other kinds of concerns and anxiety and the sadness of it. And know that you have no alternative but to continue on.” And then he added, “I suppose I ­don’t do as well as maybe ­others in being able to sort of talk about t­ hose inner feelings and emotions that have been very close to my—­deep in my heart and soul.”3 Afterward, I sent him a six-­word note, “I am so proud of you.” He replied with a copy of a truly despicable column in the Boston Globe by a columnist named Brian McGrory that upbraided him for shedding tears, calling it “demeaning” and accusing him of having encouraged “tabloid publicity,” 4 a huge irony since Ted had not wanted to do the interview at all. Attached as well, however, ­were several letters to the editor excoriating McGrory. One of them said, “This may come as a terrible surprise to McGrory but Kennedy is a man, not just a Senator or an American icon. C ­ an’t he be allowed to show some emotion? . . . ​­Don’t pick on Kennedy for being a ­human being.”5 Several years l­ater Ted called me at my Amnesty office in New York to say he was in the city and to ask if I could meet him at his s­ ister Pat Lawford’s l­ ater that after­noon. I rearranged my schedule and showed up at Lawford’s apartment, where I sat by while the senator visited with his s­ ister who was seriously ill at that point. For about thirty minutes Ted regaled his suffering s­ ister with happy memories from their childhood, cajoling her to take care of herself and encouraging her in their shared faith. When he fi­nally emerged from her sickroom, he looked ashen. I asked how his ­sister was

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­ oing, and he just shook his head. We went down to his waiting car and talked d about some pending issue before Congress—­I ­don’t even remember which—­ but it was obvious that that was a pretext for my presence and that he had just wanted com­pany as he performed another sad familial duty. Not all the occasions when we ­were in contact ­were fraught ones, however. Sometimes when I was in Washington, I would meet him in his “cubbyhole” office b ­ ehind the Senate dais or his office in the Russell Building just to chat. He loved to show visitors an old letter from his childhood framed on his office wall. One of his s­ isters had written to their f­ ather Joe when he was ambassador to G ­ reat Britain something like this: “Tell Teddy to lose weight. He takes up too much room in the ­family photos.” “Same prob­lem t­oday,” he’d chuckle. I’ve already mentioned the 2001 National Prayer Breakfast to which Ted invited me and at which I was importuned by Benazir Bhutto to get Amnesty to declare her husband a prisoner of conscience (see Chapter 2). Ours was a peculiar configuration of tablemates that morning. In addition to Bhutto, Ted, and me, t­ here was the foreign minister from Albania, a stray congressman from Ohio, and the prime minister of Greenland. I was actually quite interested to meet the prime minister, first ­because I ­hadn’t realized that Greenland, a de­pen­dency of Denmark’s, had its own prime minister and, second, ­because I had always wanted to visit the country and hoped for some travel advice; but the prime minister turned out to be a dour and uncommunicative man. Perhaps that’s what spending much of the year in darkness w ­ ill do to you. When I w ­ asn’t trying to pry recommendations for Greenland bud­get motels out of the prime minister, Ted and I kibitzed ­under our breaths. “Does Bush have a nickname for you yet?” I asked. “Prob­ably ‘that damn Kennedy!’ ” he said. Spying his friend and Senate colleague Orrin Hatch, Republican from Utah, he introduced me to him b ­ ecause Hatch had attended Pitt Law School where my ­father taught for thirty-­t hree years. “He was a good man, your ­father,” Hatch said kindly. I d ­ idn’t tell him that Dad despised his politics and always took comfort in the fact that he was not the one who had taught him constitutional law. ­Later, when a hymn Hatch had composed was sung as part of the program, Ted leaned over and whispered, “Songwriting. That’s what Orrin wished he w ­ ere d ­ oing.” I said, “That’s what we wished he w ­ ere d ­ oing too,” which elicited a laugh. At another point I said, “You know ­t hings have



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changed when you see Ed Meese [Ronald Reagan’s attorney general who had been in constant hot w ­ ater for questionable ethics] sitting at the front t­ able right u ­ nder the president’s nose.” “Yes,” Ted agreed, “rather than in jail where he belongs.” ­After I left Amnesty in 2006, I rarely saw the senator, who was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2008 and died the next year. It was a ­great honor to have known him, even slightly, and naturally I wrote to him during his illness. His wife, Vicki, replied by hand: “Your kind note means the world to Teddy and me,” she said, and then she added, “You ‘get’ him in a very special way and that has touched both of us.” 6

* * * ­ ecause of the personal nature of our friendship, I did not besiege Senator B Kennedy with requests related to Amnesty’s po­liti­cal agenda, much, I’m sure, to the frustration of our staff. Many other members of Congress on both sides of the aisle ­were readily available to us as ­were top officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations.7 Among ­t hose who saw themselves as championing h ­ uman rights was a Demo­cratic senator from New Jersey named Robert Torricelli, and it was through him that I met and struck up a friendship with Bianca Jagger, whom he had been dating and who had attended an Amnesty donor event at which the senator was our keynote speaker.8 Since her divorce from Mick Jagger in 1978, Bianca had shed her party girl image and taken on h ­ uman rights work as almost a full-­time job. A native of Nicaragua, she had visited her home country in 1979 with the International Red Cross and was shocked to see the oppression the Somoza regime had inflicted t­ here. That and her experience two years l­ater during a visit to a refugee camp in Honduras where she confronted a death squad trying to kidnap forty refugees transformed her into a h ­ uman rights activist. I wanted to enlist her as an advocate for Amnesty, so ­after the Torricelli event I asked her to have lunch with me. This precipitated both one of the more embarrassing incidents of my ­career and a helpful alliance for Amnesty. We met for lunch at one of Manhattan’s most select restaurants, Le Bernardin, b ­ ecause I had been advised that for all her commitment to social justice, Bianca still appreciated the “finer t­ hings in life.” I was, a­ fter all, trying to woo her to work with us. As is often the case when one is in the com­pany

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of a celebrity, the restaurant seated us in a prominent, highly vis­i­ble location. We settled in and began to get to know one another, I wondering to myself how a kid from Pittsburgh got to be dining tête-­à-­tête with Bianca Jagger—­a reflection that often came over me at Amnesty when I interacted with someone of considerable renown. “­Don’t screw this up,” I coached myself silently, at which point the restaurant delivered a complimentary snack of pink salmon mousse with crackers. I offered it to Bianca who sampled it demurely. I then scooped some mousse onto a cracker, raised it to my mouth and promptly deposited it down my front. Hoping against hope that Bianca had somehow magically not noticed, I was debating ­whether to try to retrieve the errant mousse or pretend to ignore the orange smear when Bianca leaned over as if to speak quite confidentially. “Darling,” she cooed in her marvelous Spanish-­ accented En­glish, “I believe you have spilled mousse all over your tie.” Over the next few years Bianca made herself available to us as a spokesperson and counselor. She knew every­body of cultural prominence, or, if she ­didn’t know them, she showed no hesitation using her name to gain access to them. She could be indefatigable in her devotion to other p ­ eople’s rights: I have already recounted in Chapter 5 the work she did in Texas trying to save Karla Faye Tucker from execution. And I was delighted she was in Amnesty’s corner, but I noticed that many in the ­human rights movement saw her as something of a dilettante. Prob­ably b ­ ecause she had first come to public attention through her association with one of the world’s most celebrated and enduring rock stars, had been photographed sitting on a white h ­ orse inside the Studio 54 nightclub, and in some circles was “famous for being famous,” the h ­ uman rights world, consisting as it was of hard-­working ­lawyers and researchers, academics and organizers, never seemed to take her seriously.9 This chafed at her ­because she had tried hard to prove her h ­ uman rights bona fides, and so the association with Amnesty served her purposes as well as ours. Like many celebrities, she could be particular—­I have rarely dined with anyone who issued more special requests as to how her food was to be prepared in restaurants—­but she also cared deeply about injustice and was never afraid to speak her most radical truth, sometimes too radical even for Amnesty. I also admired the fact that though she often complained about financial hardship, claiming she had made a disadvantageous settlement in her divorce, she per­sis­tently refused entreaties by publishers to write a tell-­a ll book about



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Mick Jagger, which would have brought her a lot of money. To do so, I think, would have reinforced in her mind at least the notion that she was ­little more than an appendage to a famous man. Bianca and I ­were in touch regularly during the last half of my Amnesty ­career and for a while afterward—­t he occasional phone call or dinner when I was in London. In 2008 I recommended that she receive an honorary degree from Simmons College in Boston where I was a presidential fellow. I saw this as a way both to thank her for all she had done for Amnesty and provide some of that recognition she so earnestly craved. I think she was grateful for the tribute, but the commencement address she delivered was a nightmare. Scheduled for about fifteen minutes, it ran far too long and was filled with leftist rhe­toric inappropriate to a celebratory occasion as well as partisan attacks on George W. Bush, which even I found over the top. When ­toward the end, she began a paragraph with “fi­nally,” ­there was applause throughout the auditorium. I was embarrassed and relieved that b ­ ecause her speech had gone on so long, it was time for me to leave for another appointment that prevented my attending the reception a­ fter the ceremony. I think Bianca was peeved that I w ­ asn’t t­ here, however, and I heard from her only one more time during the ensuing fifteen years when she asked me to endorse her candidacy for a public leadership prize. I was happy to do that but sorry our relationship had ended on a sour note. We had gotten what we each wanted from the other, however. I knew that I ­wasn’t and ­didn’t want to be a part of her world of glamour and notoriety—­something that had been obvious from the start when that salmon mousse made its cascading way into my lap.

* * * Four years before he died, John F. Kennedy Jr. had founded a magazine called George that was designed to integrate politics and pop culture or, to put it conversely, “a lifestyle magazine with politics at its core.”10 This concept was epitomized by a short-­lived HBO program called K Street, which was produced by the actor George Clooney. Largely improvised, it featured James Carville and Mary Matalin as the heads of a Washington lobbying firm, most of which are located on K Street. Real p ­ eople played themselves, and for the third episode I was called in my New York City office one morning in September 2003 and asked to join Senator Barbara Boxer, Demo­crat from California,

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in Washington, DC, that after­noon to appear on the show importuning the firm to stop representing Saudi Arabia ­because of the Kingdom’s abhorrent treatment of w ­ omen. It seemed to me to be a lot of effort for what would prob­ably be a five-­second clip that would hardly gain Amnesty or the Saudi situation much attention, but our communications staff in DC begged me to do it—­mostly, I think, ­because they wanted to lay their eyes on George Clooney—so I consented. As it turned out, the prob­lem was not that Amnesty and I got too l­ittle airtime but too much. I had long ago learned that putting my points in short, quotable sound bites was the best way to ensure that my words ­wouldn’t be entirely eliminated from tele­v i­sion interviews when the editors had to reduce ten minutes of recording to twelve seconds. On my way down to Washington, therefore, I perfected five or six such provocative observations—­I threatened, for example, to throw up a protest that would “eat your lunch” if the firm d ­ idn’t stop representing the Saudis—­hoping that at least one would make the final cut. During the taping, however, I deferred to Senator Boxer, as of course I would have done in real life, and let her take the lead in our “pretend” advocacy with Carville and Matalin. Boxer was one Amnesty’s most faithful allies on the Hill and one of the Senate’s most ardent champions of ­women’s rights, and I d ­ idn’t want to come off as the know-­it-­a ll man. When the episode appeared, I was chagrined to see that most of B ­ oxer’s comments had been cut, and I was made out to be the chief spokesperson of the cause of ­women in Saudi Arabia. I ­didn’t know if this was another instance of sexism at work or if my sound bites had just been better than hers, but in any case I was worried that we had alienated an impor­tant senator needlessly. The staff assured me I had done nothing wrong, and, a­ fter all, they had gotten to meet George Clooney. For Amnesty, George Clooney’s world, the world of entertainment, was a critical part of our efforts to build support for ­human rights in the general population rather than just among an educated elite. My pre­de­ces­sor at AIUSA, Jack Healey, had been a master at mobilizing musicians to perform concerts that generated excitement about both the organ­ization and the h ­ uman rights cause. The Conspiracy of Hope concerts (1986) and H ­ uman Rights Now world tour (1988) included such well-­k nown artists as Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel, Sting, and U2; made h ­ uman rights the exciting cause of the day; and expanded Amnesty’s membership and reach exponentially, particularly



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among young p ­ eople. For a band like U2 to appear at a stadium concert singing a song about the “­Mothers of the Dis­appeared” while videos of the Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights flash on a screen ­behind them and Amnesty activists sign up new members in the wings was a truly groundbreaking way to mobilize for a cause. While Jack was a­ dept at ingratiating himself with the musically exalted, I felt blundering and awkward in their com­pany. I knew very l­ittle about popu­lar ­music and nothing about putting on concerts. I was completely comfortable talking with politicians, world leaders, businesspeople, reporters, tele­vi­sion correspondents, high-­dollar donors, or, conversely, street organizers, radical leftists, and poor folk, but the first time I met Michael Stipe of R.E.M., for example, or the ­music executive Danny Goldberg, neither they nor I had the slightest idea what to say to one another. The singer-­songwriters Beth Orton and Aimee Mann did a concert for us in Los Angeles ­after which I went backstage to thank them. “­We’re so grateful to you, Beth,” I said to Aimee Mann. “No, that’s the other one,” she said bemusedly. The first reception held for me in New York City ­after I was chosen executive director was at the home of an Amnesty activist whose husband was the playwright Herb Gardner of A Thousand Clowns fame. Fortunately, I had seen the play so made no faux pas ­t here, and I had already become friends with another attendee, the poet and h ­ uman rights activist Rose Styron. But when a gnarly ­little man appeared with a handsome ­woman on his arm and every­one started clucking, I had to ask Rose who they ­were. “Why, Adolph Green and Betty Comden,” she assured me. It meant nothing to me, but I was afraid to ask more. Only ­after the event was over and I could research the question did I learn they ­were paired together longer than any other musical team in the history of Broadway and had written scripts or lyr­ics for such classics as On the Town, Peter Pan, Auntie Mame, and Singin’ in the Rain. Fortunately, if my knowledge of musicians and their craft was worse than inadequate, I was a bit more ­adept in the field of film and therefore considerably more comfortable with actors and actresses who ­were themselves often helpful ambassadors for Amnesty or the ­human rights cause in general. No one was more impor­tant in this re­spect than Patrick Stewart who, while one of the world’s ­great Shakespearean actors, had gained widespread recognition and acclaim through his role as Jean-­Luc Picard, captain of the USS En­ terprise on the mega-­hit tele­v i­sion series Star Trek: The Next Generation.

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Patrick is an exemplary ­human being, to say nothing of a stellar actor, and we became good friends. ­There was virtually nothing we asked him to do that he would refuse if he could possibly do it: voice-­overs for Amnesty ads, appearances at Amnesty annual meetings, testimonials for ­human rights campaigns. He even sponsored a scholarship program for young activists to take on summer internships or short-­term proj­ects and, most remarkably, arranged ­every year to meet personally with them to debrief on their experiences, which was naturally a huge thrill for the young p ­ eople. As he explained once to the AIUSA staff, his interest in h ­ uman rights had been sparked in the early 1970s when he had learned that members of a theater com­pany in Greece at the time of the junta had been arrested for producing a satirical work of Aristophanes. “I could not conceive of a society,” he said, “in which actors could end their days in jail simply for ­doing their jobs,” and he added, “I feel a continuing gratitude for my own personal freedom in the knowledge that o ­ thers elsewhere do not share in it.”11 Beth and I would often go backstage to his dressing room ­after one of his theater performances—­his solo depiction of e­ very single one of the characters in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol remains one of the most astonishing feats I have ever seen in the theater—­but what so struck me about him, in addition to his thespian expertise, his devotion to a multitude of justice c­ auses, and his kindness to the many fans who besieged him for an autograph, was his authenticity as a ­human being. That is not something actors easily embody, especially actors of his generation for whom British formality, exquisite manners, and a stiff upper lip are deeply ingrained. But I always sensed that Patrick was ­doing his best, both offstage and on, to hide as ­little of himself as pos­si­ble in contrast to many actors for whom taking on a role is the most comfortable way to be “themselves.” To see what I mean you have only to check out a Q&A session he did with young p ­ eople in 2017, long a­ fter I had left Amnesty. It is available on YouTube.12 A young w ­ oman asks him of what he is most proud besides his acting, and Patrick responds by explaining that vio­lence against ­women is among the ­causes that most touch him ­because his ­mother was a survivor of it at the hands of his f­ ather and what he c­ ouldn’t do for his m ­ other then, he hopes to do for o ­ thers now. Then he goes on to say that he has learned only recently, however, that his ­father came home from World War II suffering from what was then called “shell shock” and what we now know as post-­traumatic stress



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disorder (PTSD)—­something that accounts in part for the mistreatment of his m ­ other—­and though vio­lence is NEVER, NEVER justifiable, he almost shouts, he is also working now with an organ­ization that helps veterans address the complexities of reentry into civilian society. All this self-­disclosure is remarkable enough in such a context, and naturally it is met with applause. But then he does something truly unusual: very quietly he asks the young ­woman who put the question to him, “Are you alright?” She says, hesitantly, that she is. He asks her, “Would you like a hug?” She says she would, and he works his way through the audience and enfolds her in an embrace. Such compassion was prob­ably not why Queen Elizabeth appointed him to the Order of the British Empire—he is now properly addressed as “Sir Patrick”—­ but it is certainly why he won the hearts of every­one at Amnesty.

* * * Sometimes I was pretty brazen in seeking out a high-­profile person with whom I had some personal connection, however remote, to see if I could entice them to be of assistance to Amnesty in some way or another. The tele­v i­ sion journalist Robert Krulwich had been a student at Oberlin College when I was ­t here. The NPR correspondent Margot Adler, well known for her religious paganism, had been a heroine to many Unitarian Universalists when I was president of the denomination. And Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes was a second cousin, though we had never met before. Occasionally celebrities would seek me out to ask if they could help in any way. That was true of the actor Matthew Modine, the model and actress Marisa Berenson, the operatic soprano Barbara Hendricks, and the folk artist Suzanne Vega. (The po­liti­cal con­sul­tant Dick Morris also offered us his ser­vices shortly ­after he had resigned from Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign following a report in a tabloid that he had been involved with a prostitute and, in between getting his toes sucked, permitted the ­woman to listen in on a conversation he had with the president. I presumed this was part of an effort to rehabilitate his image, but for the life of me I c­ ouldn’t see how an association with Morris could be anything but trou­ble so I . . . ​ barely allowed him to get a foot in the door.) Relying on my tenuous connections or on celebrity volunteers, however, was not a strategic way to cultivate a cadre of high-­profile individuals who

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could help us elevate the visibility of ­human rights issues in the public realm. We ­were always struggling to break through the chaos of media noise that besieged ­every American in order to get them to focus on harm that had been inflicted on ­people often unfamiliar to them and far away, and high-­profile individuals could be instrumental in ­doing that. We also wanted to create some “buzz” around both Amnesty and ­human rights as the concerts had done a few years ­earlier. We needed, I thought, both a systematic way to nurture our relations with key leaders in the media and a well-­connected person in Los Angeles to recruit “big names” to our side. To address the former goal, we created in 1997 the Media Spotlight Awards. How better to win the attention of the media than to give them public recognition and positive reinforcement for d ­ oing the right t­ hing? For five straight years we held a major gala in New York City at which we presented awards to every­one from local newspapers across the country that had exposed instances of ­human rights violations in their own backyards to major players like Danny Glover, Ellen DeGeneres, Arthur Miller, and Paul McCartney, who ­were recognized champions of ­human rights. (McCartney was a bit of a stretch in terms of h ­ uman rights activities, but he was certainly a draw for the event!) Th ­ ese eve­nings ­were high-­powered and hectic and remain a bit of a blur in my mind except for the fact that, as I circulated around the room, introducing myself and thanking every­one for coming, I was never quite certain who I would find. On one of ­t hese eve­nings, I bumped into a ­woman who was obviously in a hurry. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “Hi, I’m Julia Roberts.” I was about to make some reply that I hoped would be gracious without being groveling—­Roberts was at the height of her acclaim at the time—­when the star of Pretty ­Woman went on to ask, “Could you point me to the loo?” Though ­these events rarely made any money—­interestingly enough, Amnesty, for all its name recognition, had connections with very few deep-­ pocketed philanthropists, would take no government money, and was so suspicious of corporations that only a handful could pass muster as donors—­ fund­rais­ing was not the principal goal. In terms of reinforcing media relations, the five Spotlight Award ceremonies (1997–2001) served their purpose. The storied 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley wrote me a­ fter the 1999 event, “Many of ­t hese benefits can be long, drawn out, boring affairs. Your eve­ning was sharp, focused and fun.”13 But the 9/11 attacks put an end to them.



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At that point New York City’s energy was focused elsewhere . . . ​and so was ours (see Chapter 6).

* * * Entertainment artists have a wide variety of motivations for getting involved in “­causes” of one sort or another. For many of them it is just one more way to advance their ­careers. For o ­ thers something may catch their fancy for a moment but fail to generate a lasting interest. Some restrict their volunteerism to anodyne associations such as Jerry Lewis’s forty-­five-­year connection to muscular dystrophy.14 The number for whom social justice is a deep-­seated, abiding passion, often grounded in some personal experience, is relatively small. This is especially true of potentially controversial social justice c­ auses such as h ­ uman rights. A few mega-­stars like Bono or Angelina Jolie, as well as Martin Sheen, Danny Glover, Richard Gere, and o ­ thers, have made h ­ uman rights work a part of their public identities, but they are the exception. When I was interacting with the world of Hollywood, we could count on two or maybe three hands the number of stars who ­were consistently available to bolster our interests and even fewer our coffers. I was repeatedly surprised at the small number of actors or actresses (as opposed to directors, producers, or studio heads) willing to make financial contributions, despite being well paid. The director Paul Mazursky (Blume in Love, Moscow on the Hudson, Down and Out in Beverly Hills) and his wife, Betsy, ­were huge Amnesty supporters and once hosted a large gathering at their home to raise funds for us from friends of theirs such as Leonard Nimoy. The room was crowded with glitterati; I offered a well-­proven pitch; Paul made an eloquent plea; and we netted about five hundred dollars. My theory was that well-­known names often thought that their names alone w ­ ere worth the price of admission to Heaven. Having celebrities identified with your organ­ization was generally a huge advantage, but t­ here could be downsides as well. Not all spokespeople, for example, both­ered to master the “script,” that is, the details of the issue they ­were promoting, and, if they veered into personal opinion at odds with your policy position, it could be hard to untangle the wires. Worse still, a star’s image could become tarnished by scandal (see “Hertz, Simpson, O. J.”). The actor Steven Seagal had been awarded ­People for the Ethical Treatment of

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Animals’ 1999 Humanitarian Award, and I met with him briefly ­because of his out­spoken support for Tibet and the Dalai Lama. He greeted me wearing his martial arts outfit, but something about him struck me as “off,” and I de­ cided we would steer clear of him. This proved to be a prescient decision as he was ­later accused by multiple ­women of sexual harassment and became a strong defender of Vladimir Putin. Fortunately, we rarely encountered prob­lems with our Hollywood allies, in part ­because we employed in Los Angeles an expert “star whisperer” named Bonnie Abaunza who vetted, recruited, cajoled, flattered, briefed, and, where necessary, pampered them into cooperation. Bonnie secured a host of premieres for us, including ­t hose for American History X (1998), Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), and ­Hotel Rwanda (2004), each dealing with a ­human rights–­ related topic, respectively, white supremacy, rights of Australian Indigenous ­people, and genocide. Premieres w ­ ere a helpful way of highlighting a h ­ uman rights challenge and signaling to the public that Amnesty represented a way of combating it. About the only kerfuffle I recall was when Amnesty associated itself with a movie called Lords of War (2005) ­because it focused on the evils of arms trafficking. We saw it as a vehicle for educating the public about this often-­ shadowy issue and produced a companion educational piece for the movie.15 The main character, a fictitious Rus­sian arms dealer named Yuri Orlov was played by Nicolas Cage. Unfortunately, in real life a man named Yuri Orlov was not only a courageous Rus­sian dissident but had been declared a prisoner of conscience, and in 1973 he cofounded the Amnesty branch in the Soviet Union.16 Quite understandably, he and his wife ­were not happy to have his name conflated with a notorious arms dealer, fictitious or not, and especially to have Amnesty endorsing the film. Of course, we had had nothing to do with the script or choice of name, but that hardly appeased the Orlovs, who ­were no doubt also peeved that no one in present-­day Amnesty appeared to remember Yuri’s heroism. Th ­ ere was not much we could do about this except extend elaborate apologies.

* * * At one point an Amnesty colleague and I thought we might write a book about what motivated actors and actresses to commit themselves to stopping



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­ uman rights violations, and, though that book was never written, it allowed h us to get to know several stars who exemplified such personal devotion. Three in par­tic­u­lar told us a lot about their stories. Starring in ­Hotel Rwanda prompted Don Cheadle both to explore his African roots—­the movie was filmed in Rwanda and South Africa—­and engage in efforts to stop the genocide then raging in Darfur, Sudan, as described in Chapter 4. Raised in the Midwest by parents who taught him to stand up for himself, Cheadle recalled an incident in childhood when a kindergarten teacher had slapped him and he had punched her right back. Both the teacher and young Don got in trou­ble. His m ­ other told the school, “When my son does something, you talk to me. You d ­ on’t put your hands on my son.” To Don she conveyed the lesson that “­t here are consequences, but you stand on what you think is right [so] you never have to look in the mirror and [feel] like [you] have caved on something that was wrong.”17 Cheadle took this attitude with him into both his education at California Institute for the Arts, where he challenged the system ­under which a small clique was consistently getting chosen for lead roles, and his movie ­career. During the filming in the Philippines of one of his early movies, Hamburger Hill (1987), he objected to the fact that the cast was being forced to perform in the jungle without the location being cleared and prepped. “­People w ­ ere getting hurt. A snake crawled in between our legs at one point. A coral snake. And t­ here is no getting bit . . . ​t hat’s it. ­You’re done.” Cheadle tried to or­ga­ nize a sick-­out among cast members. Every­body agreed, but on the appointed day “every­body stepped back,” he recalled, “and I’m the one person standing out in the front of the line!” ­Hotel Rwanda offered an opportunity to put t­ hese instincts for justice and equity to work in the larger world. As a fifth-­grader Cheadle had been deeply moved by the movie Night and Fog (1956), one of the earliest film depictions of the Nazi concentration camps. What he had learned about the Rwandan genocide reminded him of that formative exposure to evil. With the success of ­Hotel Rwanda and his nomination for best actor at the Acad­emy Awards, he found his visibility skyrocketing and, with it, his ability to command attention. A congressional del­e­ga­tion invited him to join them in visiting refugees from Darfur to learn more about the slaughter ­under way ­there. Cheadle arranged for the tele­v i­sion news program Nightline to accompany the mission to neighboring Chad to which many of the refugees had fled, and soon

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he found himself joining George Clooney in becoming a popu­lar spokesperson advocating that the international community do more to help Darfur. So prominent and authoritative a voice did he command on the subject that in 2005 he convened a meeting attended by such luminaries as Joseph Biden, then the ranking Demo­crat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Samantha Power, and o ­ thers to try to devise a strategy to shake the United States out of its lethargy on Darfur. Nor did Cheadle limit his activism to Darfur. ­Hotel Rwanda and his experience in Sudan had awakened a passion for Africa, and six months ­after his Darfur trip, he and his ­family flew to Uganda where they visited a shelter that protected some three thousand ­children from the Lord’s Re­sis­tance Army, a rebel militia notorious for forcing ­children into sex slavery and combat. This situation too he described on Nightline, thereby bringing a rarely discussed tragedy to national attention. In a poignant anecdote, Cheadle recalled how fascinated all the Ugandan c­ hildren in the shelter w ­ ere with his two young ­daughters. The ­children swarmed around them, mesmerized and ­eager to touch. What was it that had so caught their fancy? Cheadle ­couldn’t figure it out, but a local colleague fi­nally explained: “It is ­because they are so clean,” the colleague said. “They have never seen ­children so clean.” Cheadle recognized the paradox in being a celebrity-­activist: too much emphasis on the celebrityhood and the star is in danger of appearing to use victims of injustice simply to bring attention to himself; not enough energy put into a ­career and the star loses the cachet that makes for an appealing activist in the first place. When he was asked by the congressional del­e­ga­ tion to join the trip to Sudan in 2005, Cheadle worried that too many cameras would be focused on him as opposed to the refugees. “But I know,” he said, “that if [the journalists] c­ an’t feature me in some way, then t­ hey’re g­ oing to [ask], ‘Why do we need to go? Where’s the “sexy” in the story for us?’ So, it is always balancing celebrity interest with what ­you’re trying to do. And it can come back and kick you in the teeth. But I d ­ on’t think that’s an argument for not trying. If it is something that’s close to your heart and it is something that’s true, then your detractors are not ­going to deter you.” My impression was that ever since Cheadle’s childhood, they never had.

* * *



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Salma Hayek, who gained acclaim and an Acad­emy Award nomination for her role as Frida Kahlo in Frida (2002), made vio­lence against ­women the principal focus of her activism, collaborating with Amnesty in bringing attention to the hundreds of missing and murdered w ­ omen in the vicinity of Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua, Mexico, and testifying before Congress in support of the Vio­lence Against W ­ omen Act. Hayek’s involvement with this issue is both very personal and unusually hands-on. In our conversation she recalled one day when, as an eight-­year-­old growing up in Mexico City, she and her f­ amily came upon a man beating up his wife. When Hayek’s ­father tried to intervene, the beaten w ­ oman turned on him. “I was r­ eally shocked,” she said. “I could not understand why this ­woman would not be grateful. . . . ​ It went beyond anything that made sense to me—­which was very good ­because then you try to force yourself to understand ­t hings that are outside your ­little box.”18 What Hayek began to understand as she grew up w ­ ere the psychological dynamics of domestic abuse, the way feelings of fear and powerlessness tie some w ­ omen to violence-­prone men. As an adult she was determined to try to help w ­ omen break that pattern. She approached the challenge with the same energy and dispassion that she had brought in 1997 to a two-­week sojourn she had spent in one of M ­ other Teresa’s hospices in Calcutta: “I was very efficient,” she said of her hospice work. “I did some of the jobs the other volunteers ­didn’t want to do. . . . ​No one wanted to touch [the bodily fluids of t­ hose with dysentery] b ­ ecause they w ­ ere infected. I’d clean up the beds and floor and change [the patients] and carry them b ­ ecause they c­ ouldn’t move. . . . ​I would also deal with the lice. I would cut [the patients’] hair off. I was full of [lice] myself.” For Hayek this kind of direct engagement with suffering brought the greatest rewards, and she began to visit and support shelters for battered w ­ omen in Southern California. Leading a demonstration in Washington, DC, in support of survivors of domestic vio­lence, Hayek told the gathering, “Sadly, domestic abuse has  become almost a tradition in certain sectors in the Latin-­American ­community—­a tradition that gets passed on through generations.” But then she added, “The good news is that . . . ​our generation is the one that ­will make the change. We have more knowledge. We have more support. No longer can we say, ‘I ­can’t leave b ­ ecause I have no place to go.’ ” And she concluded

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with a plea: “In the Latino community, we [­ women] have been programmed . . . ​to be submissive. We have been taught to take the abuse and look the other way. . . . ​­Today we need to set a new example . . . ​of strength and dignity. . . . ​­We’re never ­going to be able to make somebody e­ lse change. But we can make that change ourselves.” When we talked with Salma Hayek in 2005, it was natu­ral to won­der ­whether the reason this issue touched her so deeply was ­because she too had been a survivor of vio­lence. At that time all she would say was that, though she did not experience abuse in her ­family of origin, “I’ve experienced vio­ lence in many forms.” Twelve years l­ ater the world learned at least part of what she meant when she penned an essay in the New York Times entitled “Harvey Weinstein Was My Monster, Too.”19

* * * Don Cheadle and Salma Hayek w ­ ere well-­established stars when we talked with them, but one other person we got to know was at an early stage in her ­career. Mia Kirshner had gained attention for her role as Jenny Schecter on The L Word, a groundbreaking treatment of lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons, and was about to star in The Black Dahlia (2006). The grand­ daughter of Holocaust survivors, Kirshner was drawn to the experience of refugees and marginalized populations around the world and determined to lend her support to them. That support took the form most notably of an unusual documentary-­style book entitled I Live ­Here, which Kirkus Review called “a visually stunning pre­sen­ta­tion of the lives of ­women and ­children surviving ­under the worst of circumstances in Burma, Mexico, Rus­sia and Malawi.”20 Mia had gone to all t­ hose places, interviewed refugees from the Chechen war, sex workers on the Burmese-­Thai border, the families of dis­ appeared ­women in Mexico, and t­ hose suffering from AIDS in Africa; given them cameras to rec­ord their lives; helped them to tell their stories; and then, in collaboration with graphic novelists, designers, and o ­ thers, produced a book of ­t hose photos and stories, proceeds from which went to Amnesty.21 Perhaps b ­ ecause her grandparents w ­ ere reluctant to talk about their own horrendous experiences, Kirshner de­cided to become a conduit for ­others to talk about theirs. She started researching the book with a trip in 2000 to a refugee camp in Ingushetia, a Rus­sian republic near Chechnya, and some-



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time ­later to a brothel in Thailand. In both situations she was torn between her desire to intervene to help individuals and her recognition that the most effective t­ hing she could do was to get word out about the unfolding tragedies. While she was right in the ­middle of filming an interview with a ­woman in Ingushetia, for example, the ­woman’s estranged husband, who had molested their ­children and knifed the w ­ oman, arrived a­ fter ten months of separation and insisted that his wife and kids return with him to Chechnya. “The kids started crying and the w ­ oman started shaking,” Mia told us. “My instinct is ­there is no way I’m leaving this ­woman alone . . . ​and I said, ‘­You’re not leaving.’ ” She l­ ater helped the w ­ oman buy a small h ­ ouse, and, though she was criticized by journalists on the scene for getting personally involved, she said to herself, “Fuck it. I ­don’t agree with that. I’m not ­here as a journalist. I did the right ­t hing.” In the brothel on the Burma-­Thai border, however, Mia concluded that ­doing the “right t­ hing” was far more complicated. She had gained access to the brothels by telling the brothel man­ag­er that she was a student writing a paper on the spread of HIV among sex workers. “It was quite scary in ­t hose brothels,” she recounted, and then described several she had visited. [At one of them] they lock the doors ­behind you and I felt so very ­vulnerable. . . . ​­There ­were about nine girls and some of them appeared to be underage. . . . ​­These concrete walls with crummy l­ ittle mats and lipstick smears on the walls. . . . ​W hat do you do? How do you leave a situation like that? And how do you interrupt the flow of ­t hings? By saying something? By actually trying to remove some of ­t hose girls? It was a very difficult ­t hing [for me] to just walk away. . . . ​But then I thought about Ingushetia, and how you upset the balance of t­ hings ­unless you have a huge network ­behind you. And I ­didn’t have that ­t here. I was ­t here on my own. Do you think I did the right ­t hing? Merely by putting herself into ­these contexts, struggling with how to resolve them and then giving ­t hese ­women and girls the voice and agency with which to share their travails, to try to awaken an indifferent world, Mia was ­doing more of a “right ­t hing” than most in the entertainment community—­ indeed, than most of us anywhere. “Actors are pampered and coddled,” Mia

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said. “I think a lot of actors are smart enough—­how can I say this kindly?—­I think a lot of actors realize how lucky we are and how much they have and how much [good] they could do with their lives.” The implication was obvious: why a­ ren’t more of them d ­ oing it? But then that w ­ asn’t a question for only the entertainment industry but for all of us, a question we asked repeatedly at Amnesty. I concluded our interview by asking Mia, “How has your activism changed you?” She replied, “It’s made me simpler. You realize what you r­ eally need and what’s impor­tant. Do you need that extra dress or that perfume or that piece of ­music? It’s your friends and your community and your ­family, your safety and your freedom. This sounds like a cliché, but I do think it becomes about the essentials.”22 I saw that frequently at Amnesty and felt it for myself. When h ­ uman beings are exposed to the suffering of ­others, we have two choices: to be indifferent or to let it change us. ­Those few Hollywood stars who tried to amplify the suffering rarely escaped unchanged from their exposure to it and did the rest of us the f­ avor of making it more difficult for us to be unaffected e­ ither.

* * * Among the t­ hings I never got accustomed to at Amnesty was the reach of the organ­ization into the ranks of well-­k nown ­people and not by any means in Hollywood alone. Yoko Ono gave us the rights to use “Imagine” for a two-­year public education campaign about ­human rights. Christo and Jean Claude contributed proceeds from the sale of some of their artwork. I would regularly be signing thank-­you letters to major donors and see that I was writing to the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, the author Sebastian Junger (The Per­ fect Storm), the theologian Sam Keen (To a Dancing God), the CEO of Goldman Sachs and ­later Trea­sury secretary Hank Paulson, the ice cream magnate Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s, Irving Berlin’s ­daughter Linda Louise Emmet, the columnist Art Buchwald, the designer Diane von Furstenberg, or the artists David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, or Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. At one time or another I met with most of ­t hese folks to thank them for their gifts (and solicit more!). Junger, for example, had spent time with Ahmad Shah Massoud of the Afghan Northern Alliance, a famed re­sis­tance



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fighter against the Soviets and Taliban, and so was quite well informed about the h ­ uman rights situation in Af­g han­i­stan. Keen I visited at his Northern California compound, where he greeted me from a trapeze he had erected to teach the spiritual art of “letting go” and where I resisted his entreaties to experience similar enlightenment. Cohen never made more than a nominal contribution to Amnesty ­because he was focused on transferring money from the defense bud­get to domestic purposes, and Emmet practically threw me out of her gorgeous Paris apartment ­because Amnesty was not nearly radical enough for her taste. But it was Coosje van Bruggen—­who along with her husband Claes Oldenburg w ­ ere best known for their gigantic outdoor sculptures of realistic everyday items, such as the spoon holding a cherry outside the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the binoculars adorning the front of a building in Venice, California, or the old-­fashioned typewriter eraser at the National Gallery Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC—­who became a good friend. Coosje, who was of Dutch heritage, was warm and vibrant as well as impatient and opinionated. I spent many an hour in her huge loft apartment in Soho listening—­and one did ­little other than listen to Coosje—­explain that Amnesty was being far too cautious or retrograde about one issue or another, but then I took comfort in her telling me that when she first met Claes, she thought him a “typical imperialist American.” W ­ hether imperialist or not, Claes in contrast was shy, almost taciturn, lighting up only when discussing his art. What­ever her reservations about AI, Coosje helped us in a variety of ways, arranging, for example, a sale of artworks at the famous Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City to benefit AIUSA and fantasizing with me about asking her friend, the noted architect Frank Gehry, to design an office building in Washington to ­house all the American ­human rights organ­izations. When her d ­ aughter Maartje was to be married at Claes and Coosje’s stunning chateau in the Loire Valley, Coosje arranged for Beth and me to fly over so that I might perform the ceremony. Each guest received a small sculpture Claes had fashioned of a wedding cake, in addition of course to edible wedding cake, and when I returned to New York, Claes and Coosje invited me, in lieu of a fee, to pick out one of Claes’s prints. I chose one whose colors and shape attracted me, even though I had no idea what it depicted. “Do you know what it’s called?” Claes asked me. Putting my foot once again squarely in my mouth, I said, “Diseased kidney?” “No, no, no!” he barked. “Flying Pizza! It’s a pizza!”

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Shortly before I left Amnesty, Coosje was diagnosed with breast cancer and, ­because she was unable to take pain medi­cation, experienced much discomfort before she died in early 2009. If ­people like Coosje did all they could to help Amnesty, ­others ­were more reticent. One of ­t hose who most disappointed me was the sex therapist and media maven Dr. Ruth Westheimer. I met Dr. Ruth at one of the Re­nais­sance Weekends in Hilton Head, South Carolina—­gatherings over New Year’s that had been started by Bill and Hillary Clinton and their friends and that attracted a wide variety of power players from Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer to feminist icon Betty Freidan. Beth and I had been invited b ­ ecause of my Amnesty credentials and my friendship with a regular attendee, Rabbi Harold Kushner (When Bad ­Things Happen to Good ­People), and though I always felt wildly out of place t­ here, I was sometimes able to make helpful contacts for Amnesty. When I ran into Dr. Ruth in Hilton Head, I asked her if we could meet when we w ­ ere both back in New York. She agreed, and a few weeks l­ater the head of our LGBTQ+ rights program and I paid a call on her in her apartment. Since she represented herself as being exceptionally open and forthright about all sexual m ­ atters, we wanted her to join us in speaking out against the pervasive vio­lence so often experienced by LGBTQ+ ­people around the world. I thought it would be an easy ask, but, boy, was I wrong. Such a ­thing would be far too po­liti­cal for her, she said. Of course she opposed such violence, but to remain effective, she had to be able to speak to p ­ eople who held all sorts of views. “But surely not to ­people who support vio­lence against gay, lesbian or trans ­people,” I countered. No, ­can’t do it. Far too po­liti­cal. All I could say to myself was “wow!”

* * * No m ­ atter how in­ter­est­ing it was to interact with well-­k nown individuals—­ like Studs Terkel, who commandeered my car ­after interviewing me on his show and had me drive him to vari­ous appointments around Chicago—it was usually less celebrated ­people who ­really intrigued me. Two of the most captivating ­people I came to know ­were Loung Ung and Paul Fussell—­about as dif­fer­ent as two p ­ eople could be but with one very power­f ul t­ hing in common: they w ­ ere both storytellers par excellence.



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Loung Ung escaped the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia in 1980 when she was ten years old. She subsequently wrote a poignant book about her experience entitled First They Killed My ­Father. ­Here’s an excerpt that gives a taste of Loung’s prose: ­ fter he hid from the soldiers for twenty months, they fi­nally found A [Pa]. . . . ​I have heard many stories about how the [Khmer Rouge] soldiers kill prisoners and then dump their bodies into large graves. How they torture their captives, behead them, or crack their skulls with axes so as not to waste their precious ammunition. I cannot stop thinking of Pa and ­whether or not he died with dignity. I hope they did not torture him. Some prisoners are not dead when they are buried. I cannot think of Pa being hurt this way, but images of him clawing at his throat, fighting for air as the soldiers pile dirt on him flood my mind. I cannot make the pictures go away! I need to believe they did not make him suffer. Oh, Pa, please ­don’t be afraid.23 I have read dozens of accounts of ­human rights crimes and their victims. It is very hard to describe such experiences without resorting to clichés or gratuitous emotional exploitation, falling into the maudlin or treacly or being consumed with a rage so all-­encompassing that it makes it difficult for ­others to identify with the pain. Loung Ung avoids all ­t hose pitfalls. Her words are clean and piercing and s­ imple and devastating, all at the same time. One eve­ning Loung was our guest at an event for Amnesty supporters. She told her story straightforwardly, just as she had in the book. In the course of her remarks, she mentioned in passing that her book had never been translated into Khmer so Cambodians could not access her account if they did not read En­glish. But for whom would it be more impor­tant to learn of her journey than native Cambodians, I thought? I asked Loung how much it would cost to publish a Khmer edition. About ten thousand dollars, she said. We raised it on the spot. It was a small t­ hing to do, but a c­ ouple years l­ater when Beth and I ­were in Cambodia and visited the Tuol Sleng prison, where so many Khmer Rouge prisoners ­were held, as well as the killing fields where so many ­were slaughtered and buried, we took satisfaction in seeing that First They Killed My ­Father was prominently on display . . . ​in both En­glish and Khmer.

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Paul Fussell was a storyteller of a dif­fer­ent but equally power­ful kind. One day I received a letter from a w ­ oman in Philadelphia I did not know named Harriette Behringer. She asked me if I would do the memorial ser­vice for her husband, Paul. She was a member of First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia and an Amnesty supporter so knew me as both a minister and a ­human rights leader. I had vaguely heard of Paul Fussell, got back in touch with her to express my condolences, and was surprised to have her say, “Oh, Paul is not dead.” “Is he ill then?” I asked. “No, no, he’s better than he’s been in years. ­We’re just planning ahead and want to book you now.” I’d never received such advanced notice before, and, not knowing ­either of them, I thought it might be wise to meet before I performed a memorial ser­v ice . . . ​whenever that might be. In March 1999 I was in Philadelphia on Amnesty business and paid a call on Paul and Harriette at their apartment in the central city. By that time I had placed him as an eminent cultural historian who was best known for both his treatment of warfare in The ­Great War and Modern Memory and ­Doing ­Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, as well as his explication of social class in Caste: A Guide Through the American Status System.24 Over delicious cheese bread and prosciutto-­wrapped asparagus, Paul told me about himself. His experience as a combat infantryman in World War II had ­shaped his life, not in the way it shapes many veterans who surround their years of ser­ vice with an aura of patriotism and resolve but as what he called a “moment of awakening” in which he realized that he “was not and would never be in a world that was reasonable and just.”25 He resolved that he would explain as cold-­bloodedly as pos­si­ble what war was ­really like: “In the morning the attack went forward all around us, and . . . ​we had our first experience of the most awful t­ hing you can see in combat—­your fellow GIs savaged by machine-­ gun and mortar fire, screaming, bleeding, thrashing about on the ground in agony, calling on ­Mother. We stared horrified, helpless to do anything. ­Later . . . ​one of my men saw something ­he’ll never forget . . . ​a bloody liver or kidney or similar organ blown out of one of our attacking soldiers.”26 ­These and similar experiences made Fussell determined to follow Henry James’s advice to “try to be one of the ­people on whom nothing is lost.” How that manifested itself was in a keen intellect buffeted by an absorbing sentimentality, a curmudgeonly pre­sen­ta­tion of himself that barely hid his fragility. “I was relieved to stop teaching,” he said, “­because I cried in class



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when I read aloud passages in books that meant the world to me.” For all his hatred of war, he observed, it was “better than ­running,” and for all his disgust at militarism, he wanted his memorial ser­v ice to end with the “­Battle Hymn of the Republic.” As it turned out, I never got to do that ser­v ice. By the time Fussell died in 2013, he had moved west to be near his ­children; Harriette had succumbed to dementia so was in no position to recall the unusual request she had made of a stranger fourteen years before; and I learned of his demise only from an obituary in the New York Times. It was prob­ably for the good, in any case: having met such a complicated man only once, I’m not sure I could have done him justice, but even ­t hose few minutes in his com­pany had enriched me. What Fussell had in common with so many other high achievers who graced my life while I was at Amnesty was this: they w ­ ere all afraid. Afraid of exposure, dishonor, failure, tears. A prominent politician who called a ­family member ­after ­every media appearance to ask, “How did I do?” A heralded actress anxious that the world would discover she had never finished high school. A successful businessman who would lie awake at night worried that his com­pany’s stock price would fall. Most of t­ hose whom Amnesty served had far more serious fears: fears of harassment, assault, incarceration, death. ­People of color lived with the threat of abuse ­every day. But it was still helpful to be reminded that neither wealth, privilege, nor applause exempted a person from being terrified.

CHAPTER 8

The Inside Scoop

“Sit down and shut up!” commanded the chair of the board of Amnesty International USA to a member of the staff who was criticizing something the board had done. “No. You shut up, you stupid cow!” replied the staff member. This was during the board meeting in 1994 at which the search committee was introducing me to the full board as its candidate to be executive director. I had worked with boards of the Unitarian Universalist Association for fifteen years; I had served on several national boards, including P ­ eople for the American Way and the Planned Parenthood Federation of Amer­i­ca. I had seen lots of conflict at board meetings. But I had never heard an exchange like that between a board and staff member. Obviously, ­t here was trou­ble right ­here in River City. Most of the p ­ eople I met at Amnesty over the next few months w ­ ere as kind and gentle as could be, but the percentage of ­people who seemed furious most of the time and the number of cruel ­t hings they said to each other was far greater at Amnesty than in any other context in which I had worked. ­After a while I figured out the source of the prob­lem—­two sources, actually. The first was rooted in the structure of the organ­ization ­going back to its founding in 1961, and the second stemmed from the nature of h ­ uman rights work.

* * * For the first de­cade of its life, Amnesty was a relatively small organ­ization with membership concentrated in the United Kingdom and Eu­rope. By 1968,



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for example, only eigh­teen groups had been formed in the United States, all of them in the East, with a total membership of less than one thousand. Then Ginetta Sagan arrived. Ginetta had been a member of the Italian Re­sis­tance during World War II ­after her Catholic f­ ather had been shot dead and her Jewish m ­ other deported to Auschwitz. At age twenty Ginetta herself was taken prisoner and held in a small ­house where she was raped and tortured. One day one of her guards tossed her a loaf of bread inside of which was an empty matchbox containing a slip of paper with the word “corragio”—­courage. Someone knew where she was! Forty-­five days a­ fter her capture two German soldiers removed her from the ­house and pushed her into a waiting car. Thinking she was ­going to be executed, she prepared herself for the end, but the Germans turned out to be defectors from the Nazi military who drove her to a convent hospital where she gradually recovered from her ordeal.1 ­These experiences provided the source of her commitment to h ­ uman rights. Ginetta eventually migrated to the United States, married a doctor named Leonard Sagan, and became active in an Amnesty International group in Washington, DC. When she and Leonard moved to Atherton, California, just south of San Francisco, in 1968, she was determined to spread the word about the organ­ization. Drafting an Atherton neighbor named Joan Baez to do a 1971 concert to raise money for Greek po­liti­cal prisoners, Ginetta began to spread the word about Amnesty in the western United States. In the next few years, she helped found something like seventy-­five groups and raise AIUSA’s membership to around seventy thousand. When the Nobel Peace Prize was presented to Amnesty International in 1977, the organ­ization was widely regarded as the most respected h ­ uman rights organ­ization in the world. ­Those ­human rights concerts that my pre­ de­ces­sor, Jack Healey, had fostered cemented that reputation and garnered a huge increase in membership in the United States—to about four hundred thousand dues-­paying supporters, not including thousands more student activists on high school and college campuses. Exciting as all this expansion was, it was also unnerving, especially to longtime local group activists. Their experience of Amnesty had been that of a volunteer-­driven, decentralized, apo­liti­cal, local group–­focused organ­ ization writing letters to ­free prisoners of conscience overseas whose cases had been verified by the International Secretariat in London.

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That model may have worked fine when ­t here ­were a thousand members in AIUSA and very few central staff; when the AIUSA board could comfortably include a po­liti­cal conservative like William F. Buckley Jr.; when few ­women worked outside the home and p ­ eople had time to attend midweek, night-­time group meetings in church halls or public libraries; when letter-­ writing was the principal mode of long-­distance communication; and when “­human rights” w ­ ere understood to be primarily the rights of courageous individuals being assailed by miscreant governments. But an organ­ization of more than four hundred thousand participants cannot be run successfully by volunteers alone, and by the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was becoming more and more obvious that ­human rights crimes extended well beyond the mistreatment of individuals: they ­were being committed by corporations as well as governments, armed opposition groups as well as national militaries. Changes in size, focus, and culture w ­ ere impacting Amnesty, and some in the organ­ization w ­ ere not prepared for it.

* * * Standing less than five feet tall (she had been nicknamed topolino—­“ ­little mouse”—by her fellow partisans in the Re­sis­tance), Ginetta Sagan was a firecracker of energy, determination, and forthright opinion, even a­ fter she was diagnosed with cancer in the early 1990s. When President Clinton presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House in 1996, she was not content just to thank him for the honor but insisted on using her ac­ cep­tance remarks to encourage him to be more forthcoming in his support of h ­ uman rights, particularly in China. Ginetta was always very supportive of me, and in turn I did every­t hing I could to stay in her good graces. I called on her ­every time I was in the Bay Area, I participated in tributes to her, and I raised money for a fund in her honor to support ­human rights on behalf of ­women. In fact, that effort resulted in one of the strangest (and least successful) fund­rais­ing calls I ever made on one of the country’s wealthiest w ­ omen. Ginetta and her husband, Leonard, had met a ­woman named Barbara Piasecka Johnson on a cruise in the Mediterranean. Piasecka Johnson was the third wife of the late J. Seward Johnson, one of the heirs of the Johnson and Johnson fortune. Though she held an MA in art history from the Univer-



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sity of Wrocław, she was working as Seward Johnson’s chambermaid when they met and subsequently married in 1971. Seward Johnson died in 1983, and Piasecka Johnson inherited his $400 million fortune, including his 226-­ acre Prince­ton, New Jersey, estate, Jasna Polana. It was Jasna Polana (“bright glade” in Polish and the name of Tolstoy’s home) to which Leonard and I ­were invited for lunch in 1995 to solicit what he was certain would be, at minimum, a one-­million-­dollar gift to the Ginetta Sagan Fund. Jasna Polana was a faux French chateau in the neoclassical style, a main building with two attached wings in a U-­shape surrounding a courtyard entered through an im­mense arched portal. Piasecka Johnson was not available when we arrived at the appointed hour, so we ­were deposited in a large living room decorated with floor-­to-­ceiling baroque paintings. When the mistress of the ­house fi­nally arrived, we chatted briefly—­I was not entirely sure she knew who Leonard was and she certainly ­couldn’t fathom who I was—­and then ­were ushered into an elaborate dining room with a ­table that could easily have seated twelve or more. We ­were served what I have to say ­were the toughest lamb chops I have ever tried to chew, though we ­were assured they had come from the property’s own stable of lambs, one of whom had just been slaughtered that morning for our delectation. If I d ­ idn’t enjoy the chops, Piasecka Johnson’s dog certainly did b ­ ecause it was served the same meal but in a gold-­plated bowl on the floor—at least I trust it was gold-­plated. Fi­nally, Leonard worked his way around to the point of our meeting, explaining how ­women ­were mistreated around the world and how the Sagan Fund could remediate that, but it quickly became obvious that our hostess had no interest in h ­ uman rights and almost as l­ ittle in Ginetta. Before Leonard could get the words “one million” out of his mouth, Piasecka Johnson cleverly cut him off. “No more talk of such horrible t­ hings,” she said. “Let’s turn to the ice cream course,” which both we and the dog promptly did. It was a lot better than the lamb chops! Pleasant as my relations ­were with Ginetta herself, she was the lodestar around which a group of disgruntled members revolved. In a letter to the AIUSA board written in 1993 ­after my pre­de­ces­sor’s departure and designed to influence the se­lection of a new executive director, Ginetta articulated the many grievances she and her companions had: “In the 1980s . . . ,” she wrote, “staff size increased rapidly. . . . ​Staff was needed to manage staff; staff was needed to support staff. Volunteers—­many exceptionally gifted, well-­trained,

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experienced in AI work and distinguished in their fields—­were forgotten.” Local groups received less attention; h ­ uman rights issues well beyond Amnesty’s original purpose of freeing prisoners of conscience (what Amnesty called its “mandate”) w ­ ere being pursued. AIUSA “has evolved . . . ​from its function as the U.S. section of an international organ­ization into an increasingly autonomous lobby aimed more and more at U.S. foreign and domestic policy reform.” Ginetta also lamented that “the ascendancy of conservatism and the Republican sojourn in the White House [during the Reagan/Bush I years] w ­ ere greeted by AIUSA with antagonism and suspicion.”2 I was not entirely unsympathetic to some of t­ hese concerns. What distinguished Amnesty from virtually all other ­human rights NGOs that had blossomed since the 1960s was that it justifiably claimed to have a grassroots membership and the ­human rights movement, which was largely made up of ­lawyers, academics, researchers, and authors, desperately needed a broader base to pressure governments and corporations to take h ­ uman rights seriously. Moreover, it was indeed a prob­lem that ­human rights, which during the Cold War had claimed the fidelity of conservatives who liked its bashing of Communist regimes, was now perceived as largely a fiefdom of the left. The more I learned about Amnesty and the h ­ uman rights cause, however, the less credence I put in most of Ginetta’s objections. Volunteers are extraordinarily valuable, but any large organ­ization of volunteers soon discovers that to be effective, volunteers must be or­ga­nized, trained, and managed. That requires staff. At AIUSA some long-­term activist members saw it as their prerogative to manage staff, which made for no end of conflict. It was true that local groups w ­ ere declining in numbers when I came on the scene and that prisoner of conscience cases ­were less numerous in the 1990s than they had been in the 1960s. But the former was b ­ ecause of the societal changes I’ve mentioned, not ­because perfidious staff ­were conspiring to downgrade the importance of local groups, and the latter occurred b ­ ecause governments ­were getting smarter about not imprisoning high-­profile dissidents. If they ­weren’t hiding them, they ­were killing them instead. Fi­nally, the idea that Amnesty should limit itself to a narrow number of ­human rights violations not for strategic reasons, which would have been fine since all organ­izations have to prioritize, but in order to abide by a preordained script called “the mandate” and that AIUSA could not advocate for “U.S. foreign and domestic policy reform” was self-­defeating. And of course,



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the reason many American conservatives abandoned the ­human rights movement was largely b ­ ecause they became itchy when it started to criticize the United States. What both­ered me most about many of the internal critics, however, was not their policy positions but how nasty they ­were in pressing them. To listen to some of them, you would have thought staff members drank the blood of babies. “All ­t hese students are ruining Amnesty!” ­t hey’d say. “If you ­aren’t a member of a local group, you should get out!” “If you ­don’t care about ­every country in the world with equal fervor, ­you’re not a real ­human rights activist!” “If you want to expand the mandate, you must not give a damn about POCs!” The telling lengths to which this mindset went ­were illustrated to me early on when, thinking the AIUSA board could use some well-­k nown names and heavy hitters to increase its prestige and impact, I convinced two friends of mine with outstanding h ­ uman rights expertise to submit their names to the nominating committee. F ­ ather Robert J. Drinan, a Jesuit priest, had been a revered member of Congress from Mas­sa­chu­setts and was at the time an outstanding ­human rights scholar at Georgetown University. Harry Barnes, who had been US ambassador to Romania, India, and Chile and was in part responsible for ending the reign of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, was former president Jimmy Car­ter’s main ­human rights adviser at the Car­ ter Center. When the nominating committee called ­Father Drinan, they had only one question for him: “Which local group do you belong to?” Drinan had to admit that the answer was “none.” When they asked Harry Barnes why he had submitted his name to them, he replied truthfully, “­Because Bill asked me to.” That too was the wrong answer, and, without pursuing their qualifications further, the committee chose to nominate neither.3 It was also striking to me that while ­t here was a wide racial, ethnic, and country-­of-­origin mix among Amnesty staff and student group members, most traditional local groups ­were almost all exclusively white. I made sure that we always kept parity between ­people of color and white p ­ eople in our se­nior staff leadership and that we had diverse voices in terms of both race and gender identity represented throughout the staff levels.4 Student groups regularly attracted a diverse constituency, including lots of foreign students. But the activist membership was overwhelmingly white, and the ones who ­were tied to the traditional model, having been early adopters of one set of

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policies, strategies, and tactics and having received acclaim and power in that system, w ­ ere having a hard time adapting to a new world and a changed organ­ization. The fact that many of the agents of that change w ­ ere young and/ or p ­ eople of color did not mean that the resisters ­were racists, but it did mean they w ­ ere wed to a system of white privilege and supremacy that was all too typical of white-­founded organ­izations, especially one modeled on British colonialism. The idea that a student from Sri Lanka, let us say, who was studying in the United States, might be attracted to Amnesty ­because it spoke up on behalf of refugees from the horrendous conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers was only natu­ral. It was the way many ­people came to the ­human rights movement—­through concern about their own cohort. To expect that student to care as much about ­human rights victims in Mali, say, was absurd. To insist that American Amnesty members, including members of color, not advocate against racist police in the United States in order to preserve Amnesty’s reputation for po­liti­cally neutral fact-­gathering was to put pride before justice. A ­ fter all, many American social justice organ­ izations managed to criticize American practices without losing their reputations for accuracy. Was Amnesty so much more intellectually corrupt than the ACLU, for example, that its members had to wear blinkers where their own countries ­were concerned or risk the organ­ization’s credibility? ­These w ­ ere the structural reasons so many Amnesty members seemed angry, but lots of organ­izations go through transitions in purpose and strategy without tearing themselves apart, as Amnesty appeared to be ­doing. ­There had to be something ­else at play h ­ ere.

* * * ­ uman rights work, even more than some other social justice c­ auses, often H involves easily identified good guys and bad guys—­indeed, often perfidiously evil guys who do t­ hings like cause c­ hildren to dis­appear or order mass extinctions of ethnic communities or torture prisoners in the most hideous ways. Protecting access to abortion, the environment or the separation of church and state, reforming gun laws or ending poverty—­a ll t­ hese c­ auses have their adversaries as well, and sometimes callous, infuriating adversaries, but usually not adversaries who are purposely and directly killing ­people



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or inflicting intentional physical pain on the helpless. ­Human rights abuses like ­these warrant enormous anger. It is an appropriate response to the outrages perpetrated e­ very day. Unfortunately, a certain number of ­people find the h ­ uman rights movement a compatible place to expend their energy exactly b ­ ecause it is a context in which anger is acceptable and commonplace. It is a lot safer to focus one’s anger on Radovan Karadžić, Kim Jong-un, Bashar al-­Assad, or some vicious general than on one’s parents or ­children, partner or boss. The former are unambiguously rotten and provide the perfect, socially acceptable targets for rage. The prob­lem is, however, that many of the adversaries of ­human rights work cannot be confronted face to face ­because they are too power­f ul, too far away, or too protected by armed guards. Opponents of abortion can be debated on tele­v i­sion, shamed on social media, or faced down outside abortion clinics. Corporations releasing toxic chemicals into the environment can be addressed at shareholder meetings. Legislators who oppose gun control can be queried in town halls or buttonholed in the halls of Congress. Even the president of the United States can be picketed or made to feel uncomfortable, despite occupying the protective cocoon of the White House. But t­ here is almost no way for an average citizen to gain access to the president of China or a Rus­sian military commander in eastern Ukraine or a torturer in Iran. The result is that all that anger gets displaced on p ­ eople closer to home—­ namely, your fellow ­human rights workers. If the good guys ­aren’t winning, it’s got to be b ­ ecause other h ­ uman rights p ­ eople a­ ren’t working hard enough or are pursuing a flawed strategy or a­ ren’t listening to me. I ­don’t claim that this dynamic is at work in other ­human rights organ­ izations, most of which are run by professionals rather than focused on volunteers, nor do I suggest that all Amnesty’s volunteers or even a majority displayed the traits I have described—­far from it—­but it d ­ oesn’t take a majority to turn an environment toxic. Sometimes that toxicity was manifest in a florid obsession with bureaucratic rules and orga­nizational minutiae. My least favorite responsibility at Amnesty was attending the biennial international conclaves called ICMs (International Council Meetings) at which more than four hundred representatives from more than fifty-­five countries who spoke more than a dozen languages met for more than a week to debate page a­ fter page of Amnesty

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policy positions, operational regulations, and procedural norms and to adopt them by “consensus.” So impassioned did some AIUSA delegates become about ­t hese details that one of them practically hyperventilated over w ­ hether our del­e­ga­t ion would support the words “and so” or the word “therefore” in one proposed resolution. One morning at the meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, I had just awakened, made my way to the bathroom, and was sitting on the toilet when one of our delegates peeked through the l­ ittle ventilation win­dow a few feet above my “throne” and shouted, “Bill, Bill, do you f­ avor version 7.1.2a or 7.1.2b on resolution R65 that ­will be coming up this morning?” Only ­after I had promised to meet her for breakfast to hash out that impor­tant question would she agree to go away. What a tragic waste of energy and money, I always thought to myself at ICMs as I sat in interminable meetings and watched my life slip away from me: to bring four hundred smart, creative ­people together from all over the world not primarily to learn about ­human rights crimes or strategize about how to stop them, not to share skills or hear from world leaders, but to immerse ourselves in froth. It was a case of democracy run amok. Occasionally, though, something groundbreaking happened—­such as when the organ­ization de­cided to take on violations of rights occasioned by sexual orientation or fi­nally agreed to address social and economic rights violations and not just civil or po­liti­cal, or when it de­cided to permit itself to support or condemn armed military intervention in the name of ­human rights. But, with a few exceptions, ­people seemed to forget or ignore what had been de­ cided as soon as they left the convention venue. For all my re­sis­tance to ICMs and Amnesty’s neurotic obsession with pro­ cess, they represented a kind of passive-­aggressive dysfunction that was nothing compared to the outright ugliness that could seize hold on occasion. The worst of that during my tenure concerned an AIUSA volunteer who was allegedly targeted for retaliation by Guatemalan secret agents—­t hreatened, harassed, even abducted, though ultimately not physically harmed—­because of advocacy the volunteer had done on Guatemalan rights violations. Though it was extremely rare for Amnesty-­affiliated p ­ eople to be subject to such personal intimidation, it was far from inconceivable that this could happen, even in the United States, and AIUSA took the threats very seriously. To our astonishment, however, a reporter for the New York Times challenged



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the veracity of some of our volunteer’s claims, and, when an investigator looked into the case, he was unable to substantiate the story. This threw the organ­ization into turmoil for more than two years—­months and months of rancor, recrimination, and vitriol between factions of the board, between activist members who supported the volunteer’s account and board members who doubted it, and between staff who ­were sympathetic and ­t hose who saw this as a test case of Amnesty’s commitment to “follow the evidence” no ­matter how uncomfortable its destination. Threats ­were even made against the livelihood of a board member who gave credence to the investigator’s conclusions. In the ­middle of all this turmoil, a writer for the New Yorker, smelling a story with a compelling web of contradictions, began nosing around and ultimately published a thorough account of the case in that respected magazine.5 The story did not make Amnesty, the volunteer, or me look good. What was the proper role of an executive director when an organ­ization appears to be imploding, I asked myself repeatedly? Both sides in the dispute wanted me to declare a position. On the one hand, I was disgusted by the be­hav­ior of many of the participants in the saga, believing they had v­ iolated some of Amnesty’s most fundamental commitments to balance and truth-­ telling, and I called them on it as best I could. On the other hand, I saw the most impor­tant part of my job as keeping the organ­ization focused as much as pos­si­ble on its fundamental mission to stop h ­ uman rights violations around the world. The only ­people who would benefit from AIUSA collapsing ­were ­human rights criminals. Try as I did to support the board in navigating t­ hese dangerous shoals, I c­ ouldn’t ultimately save them from shipwreck. By insisting that the staff attend assiduously to the daily business before us, however, by continuing to appear in the media talking about ­every h ­ uman rights prob­ lem except the volunteer’s case, and by assuring our donors that no m ­ atter our internal stresses, we ­were still an effective agent for ­human rights change, I hoped to salvage what I could from a disastrous situation. I’m sure I made my share of ­mistakes, and almost every­body was mad at me, as much for not relieving them of the pain of conflict as for not joining their team, but I lacked the power to stop folks from fighting. I knew that if I joined one faction or the other outright, I would lose what­ever power I had to help the organ­ization recover when the fighting fi­nally played itself out. That my strategy succeeded at least in part even the New Yorker acknowledged. The penultimate paragraph of the article about the case began, “Although

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the . . . ​case diverted AIUSA’s attention from other issues related to Guatemala, Amnesty’s work around the world has continued unaffected. (For example, the organ­ization helped secure the release of six reform activists in Malaysia, a Mexican general imprisoned for criticizing army abuses, and the Guinean opposition leader Alpha Condé.)” 6 No one should take on a leadership role, however, who is not prepared to be pilloried occasionally, sometimes justly, sometimes not. I think it was Casey Stengel who said, “The secret of a ­great baseball man­ag­er is to keep the three guys who hate your guts away from the five guys who are undecided,” and that goes for man­ag­ers of nonprofits as well.7

* * * I’m glad to say that as far as I can tell, the Amnesty of ­today has rid itself of many of the flaws I have described. That even back then it still managed to do as much good as it did, despite its weaknesses, is a tribute to the skill and devotion of all ­t hose in the organ­ization who kept their eyes on the prize. Amnesty USA had a remarkably devoted grassroots membership of something like 360,000 p ­ eople in 1999, 86 ­percent of whom said they w ­ ere “deeply committed” to the organ­ization’s cause—­t he highest commitment level of seven dif­fer­ent cause NGOs surveyed by the pollster Peter Hart.8 That membership number did not include participants in about 1,500 high school and college groups who supplied the organ­ization with a kind of cutting-­edge vibrancy rarely found in well-­established nonprofits. I loved the student groups and accepted ­every opportunity I could to speak on campuses; I wanted to protect them as best I could from disillusionment or cynicism. As a result of this commitment and energy AIUSA frequently spearheaded imaginative ways of advancing h ­ uman rights. Some of t­ hese took inspiration from Saul Alinsky’s fifth rule for radicals that “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” 9 During our campaign in 2000 against ­human rights violations in Saudi Arabia, for example, our young activists, aware that a man had received seventy-­five lashes for mistakenly bringing into the country two choco­late bars that contained liquor, threw up a series of signs outside the Saudi embassy riffing on the old Burma Shave highway advertisements. “Liquor flavored sweets/Such lovely treats,” the signs read. “Bring back some from



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vacation/Unless Saudi’s your destination/Then, beware what’s in your choco­ late stash/Or you could get a taste of the lash.”10 Ridicule is so effective, Alinsky said, ­because ­t here is no defense against it, and “it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”11 One of the best examples of that took place in the stiflingly repressive country of Belarus in 2011 when protesters gathered in the main square in Minsk carry­ ing no signs, chanting no slogans, but simply setting off their cell phone alarms si­mul­ta­neously. This prompted the government to draft a law prohibiting p ­ eople from standing together and d ­ oing nothing.12 ­These relatively low-­tech tactics ­were supplemented by the first stirrings of recognition that social media could be a power­f ul tool for change. T ­ oday, having witnessed the color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere in which text messaging and online organ­izing played such an impor­tant role, we take it for granted that social change agents ­will employ all manner of technological tools to outfox their adversaries. In 1996, though, only 29 ­percent of Amnesty USA members had internet access, and the United States was the most broadly wired country in the world!13 Nonetheless, in that year AI posted on its website an interactive commemoration of the Tian­anmen Square massacre in both Chinese and En­glish designed to be downloaded on a floppy disk (remember ­those?), thereby potentially bypassing the Chinese firewall.14 By 2005, following its launch in 2002, AIUSA’s Online Action Center, through which activists could deluge governments with electronic appeals for redress of h ­ uman rights violations, had upward of four hundred thousand subscribers. And, as I’ve mentioned, the organ­ization had begun to employ satellite technology, such as its “Eyes on Darfur” proj­ect that kept tabs on villages in Sudan at risk of annihilation, so members might have up-­to-­date data to share with decision-­makers.15 ­Today ­human rights defenders have even more sophisticated tools at their disposal, such as the kind of open-­source data analy­sis done by Bellingcat.16 Occasionally someone would challenge the effectiveness of grassroots activism as a vehicle for ­human rights change. Local ­human rights groups such as the Ken­sington Welfare Rights Union in Philadelphia relied on community support, and of course the civil rights and antiwar movements, as well as the strug­gle for LBGTQ+ rights, to say nothing of Black Lives ­Matter and other racial justice organ­izations t­ oday, ­were all built from the ground

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up. But most international h ­ uman rights organ­izations d ­ idn’t try to cultivate everyday activists, except perhaps as donors, preferring to rely on such tactics as exposure of violations by the media, personal appeals to power brokers, or l­egal remedies of one sort or another. I found the pitting of specialized expertise against grassroots activism to be perplexing. It is certainly true, as I’ve described above, that working with volunteers can be demanding and frustrating and equally true that many governments and armed opposition groups are skilled at disregarding public opinion. Grassroots activism has its limits, as witnessed by the fact that the brutally comic government in Belarus is still in power. But surely we ­don’t want to restrict ­human rights advocacy to ­lawyers, academics, journalists, and professional researchers. That would be to condemn the movement to even greater powerlessness than currently obtains. The goal of any social change effort is to create a virtuous circle. Occasionally that circle begins when wielders of power decide it is in their interest to construct new rules or models of be­hav­ior for one another. The best example of that are the laws of war (international humanitarian law) that w ­ ere created to regulate conflicts among states. Gradually ­those laws became more and more embedded in international norms u ­ ntil t­ oday any nation that intentionally targets civilians or starves prisoners of war is considered an outlaw nation by most civilized states. Far more often, however, a virtuous circle is initiated by the victims of ­human rights violations themselves and their allies. Discontented with current conditions, an abused group ­will make its dis­plea­sure known through every­thing from petitions to direct action to disruption. Th ­ ese demands w ­ ill spark the consciousness of a sympathetic cohort—­early adopters of outrage, if you w ­ ill—­who help magnify the original complaint. This was the role Amnesty often played. But a virtuous circle is not complete ­until some wielders of power are made to see that it is in their best interests to codify the desired changes in law or policy. This in turn makes the new conditions normative and eventually second nature to new generations. As D. H. Lawrence observed, “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next.”17 The movement for disability rights, for example, was initiated by persons with disabilities who refused to be marginalized and ignored any longer. But it was not solidified u ­ ntil the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act



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in 1990 and the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2008. At that point re­spect for the rights of ­people with disabilities was not only the law; it was well on its way to becoming a widely recognized norm, violation of which would be regarded as boorish and backward, particularly by younger generations. Once law and norms are congruent, we have a virtuous circle. Obviously, such a pro­cess requires both education and action on the “street”—one of the most promising developments of my Amnesty years was the growth of indigenous h ­ uman rights organ­izations, particularly in the Global South, and hence growing recognition of the power of ­human rights concepts and language—as well as sophisticated media, ­legal, and po­ liti­cal strategies at the “grass tops.” If t­ here was any doubt that Amnesty’s emphasis on p ­ eople power mattered to at least some governments, that was dispelled by the number of times ­t hose governments tried to influence Amnesty’s opinion of them. I had several direct experiences of that myself. Out of the blue, the UN ambassador from Qatar, for example, invited me to dinner at La Grenouille, then one of New York City’s most esteemed (and expensive) French restaurants. During a splendid meal, the ambassador sought to convince me of Qatar’s stellar ­human rights rec­ord and even invited me (“and your ­family”) to come to Qatar, all expenses paid, to see for myself. “Stay as long as you like,” he said. “Enjoy the beaches.” Actually, Qatar had a relatively good rec­ord compared to many other Arab states, and, more to the point, ­under Amnesty’s structure, I had nothing to do with evaluating individual countries—­t hat was the job of researchers at the International Secretariat—­but I d ­ idn’t enlighten the ambassador about my inability to help him ­until the after-­dinner drinks had been served. In the case of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, I only got some lovely pastries out of his effort to lobby me. Obiang is an infamous strongman who had been in power at that point since 1979 and is still as of this writing. I was well aware of his government’s ­human rights crimes, which only made me more interested in meeting him when his henchmen invited me to coffee at the Pierre ­Hotel in New York. Equatorial Guinea is one of the poorest countries in the world and a suite at the Pierre one of the most expensive ­hotel accommodations, but nothing is too good for a leader

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with as stellar a reputation for corruption as Obiang. A ­ fter a few minutes of chit-­chat between his underlings and me, Obiang made a solemn entrance—­I was struck by how unimpressive he was physically for someone who presided over such a regime—­and began to complain about his mistreatment by Amnesty. I listened politely and then, having boned up on the victims of abuse, began asking him about specific cases of torture, disappearances, and po­ liti­cal killings—­names, dates, details. I then handed him a list of ­people we ­were concerned about. He denied knowing anything about ­these ­matters, but it was obvious the conversation was not g­ oing in the direction he or his American public relations flaks who w ­ ere trying to help him improve his image had anticipated. “The president has another appointment now,” one of his minions quickly interjected, and Obiang stood up abruptly; we shook hands, and he was gone. I noticed some years l­ ater that still seeking respectability, Obiang had given UNESCO $3 million (from, again, his desperately poor country) to finance a prize in the life sciences that UNESCO was forced to disavow a­ fter h ­ uman rights organ­izations criticized the agency’s association with such a character.18

* * * I’ve often thought it a shame that just as you get pretty good at something— in my case, r­ unning nonprofits—­it’s time to retire. I was a lot better CEO at Amnesty than I had been at the Unitarian Universalist Association, and I was better still at the Unitarian Universalist Ser­vice Committee, where I was president from 2010 to 2016. This is not a book about nonprofit management—­ there are more than enough of ­t hose—­but ­here are five random rules of the road for shepherding NGOs that d ­ on’t always make it into t­ hose primers. Take care of the money and almost every­thing ­else w ­ ill take care of itself. I’m stunned at how many nonprofit CEOs dislike raising money. I always found it fun—­sort of like a puzzle. What set of moves ­will unlock this person’s generosity? And if y­ ou’re keeping the organ­ization solvent, it’s a lot harder for anyone to object to ­t hings you do that are more controversial. Strategic planning committees are for the birds. I ­don’t mean you s­ houldn’t have a sense of orga­nizational priorities or direction, but that should be an ongoing pro­cess, not a formal undertaking ­every five years. Have you ever seen a strategic plan that anyone actually followed? I h ­ aven’t.



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Always be the b­ earer of bad news. You d ­ on’t want the board or staff to find out about an orga­nizational disaster from somebody e­ lse first. When a staff member embezzles money or murders his ­father, both of which happened at Amnesty, your first call is to the board chair. It’s in the job description of a certain percentage of staff to be disgruntled. I’ve never seen a nonprofit in which at one time or another some staff members did not mutter about “low morale.” As long as it’s no more than about 20 ­percent of staff, ­you’re d ­ oing fine. Never be afraid of being a lame duck. At each of the three major organ­ izations I ran, every­one knew my departure date years before I left. At the UUA, the terms w ­ ere l­imited to begin with by the bylaws, but at Amnesty and UUSC I negotiated and then announced the end of my tenure four or five years before it happened. Far from reducing my power, it increased it. Why bother firing someone who ­will be gone soon enough anyway? I enjoyed managing the organ­ization, which was a good t­ hing since it was at least 50 ­percent of the job, but I enjoyed a lot of other t­ hings even more. One of t­ hose, it ­won’t surprise you to know since I was trained as a preacher, was public speaking.

* * * Over the course of my twelve years at Amnesty, I spoke at 147 colleges or universities ranging from Pensacola Ju­nior College to Harvard, Yale, and Prince­ton, with the Mongolian National University in Ulan Bator thrown in for good mea­sure. One of the most in­ter­est­ing of ­t hose occasions was a debate before the Yale Po­liti­cal Union in which I and my student partner ­were to argue the pro side of the proposition, “Resolved: Corporations should take ­human rights as seriously as they do profits.” The winners of the debate ­were determined by vote of the audience, and we lost. I ­didn’t mind losing, but I was struck during the pre­sen­ta­tions on both sides by the jeers, hisses, and catcalls from the audience coupled with questions during the Q&A posed in the form of, “I rise, Mr. Speaker, to challenge the gentleman’s odious assumption that . . .” At first, I reveled in such bravado, giving as good as I got, matching wits with some of the smartest kids in the country, returned in my memory to high school debate class where the clever putdown was the sine qua non of success. But as I drove home from New Haven that night, I reflected

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on what a silly game we had all been playing, and I wondered w ­ hether the students knew it. Certainly I have spent a lot of time in my ­career, both at Amnesty and before and ­after, arguing my case in as compelling a way as pos­si­ble, trying to disarm my intellectual adversaries with charmingly biting repartee, but I had also concluded long ago that such contentiousness was hardly the best way to arrive at truth and that it appealed to all my worst instincts: the tendency to posture, the unwillingness to admit ­mistakes, and a refusal to grant myself or o ­ thers access to my heart. What I had been a part of at Yale was modeling how not to learn and how not to be au­then­tic. What I had indulged was the students’ acting out of contempt prompted by their fear, pain, and anger. I w ­ asn’t sure it r­ eally mattered except that Yale was teaching ­f uture leaders of the country some pretty destructive lessons. Maybe it was preparing them for the coarsening of po­liti­cal discourse we have witnessed in recent years, or maybe it was seeding it. In any case, when one of the students followed up a few days ­later to see how I had found the experience, I told him that if they ever invited me back, I had a topic to propose. “Oh,” the student said eagerly, “we’d love to have you back. What is it?” “Resolved,” I said, “that the Yale Po­liti­cal Union is Bad for the Soul.” N ­ eedless to say, I was never invited back. But I was invited lots of other places, and I tried to accept as many invitations as I could, ranging from the Holocaust Museum to the American Bar Foundation to the William Butler Yeats Society to the Circumnavigators Club (open to ­those who have crossed ­every latitude at least once, though not necessarily on the same trip). The club even had its own song, the first verse of which was ­ e’re the Circumnavigators and we know our way around, W We have box’d the w ­ hole earth’s compass and are back h ­ ere safe and sound. ­We’re the Circumnavigators, hale and hearty, full of rum, You can join this magic circle when you do as we have done.19 I spoke to the club about how travelers could advance ­human rights in the countries they visited, although they d ­ idn’t seem too interested in my message, perhaps b ­ ecause they ­were so “full of rum.”



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Most of my public appearances w ­ ere of a more serious nature, however, than ­t hose at the Yale Po­liti­cal Union and the Circumnavigators Club. One that was particularly revealing involved a debate in 1999 with John Bolton, who was out of office at the time but would l­ater become UN ambassador ­under George W. Bush and national security adviser to Donald Trump. In my effort to broaden the po­liti­cal appeal of h ­ uman rights, I had approached Owen Harries, editor of the neoconservative journal the National Interest, and proposed that he carry a series of columns written by me and a conservative thought leader of his choice discussing the importance of h ­ uman rights. He chose Bolton, and the two us exchanged three letters each in the pages of the magazine and l­ater reprised our disagreements before the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville, V ­ irginia.20 Bolton had lived up to his reputation for unpleasantness by calling me “hopelessly incoherent” in the pages of the magazine, which gave me license to quote that estimation to the Charlottesville audience with preemptive apologies should they also find me so—­a gambit that triggered a laugh. More impor­tant, in both the magazine and the debate, Bolton disclosed what r­ eally both­ered him and other conservatives of his ilk about ­human rights: that they do not give primacy to the United States but ­favor “a world order in which Amer­i­ca is simply one more part of the food chain.”21 I, on the other hand, believed that while the United States was a critically impor­tant part of the food chain, we would ultimately be eaten alive if we ignored h ­ uman rights claims at home and gave them short shrift abroad.

* * * Fortunately, most of my audiences w ­ ere more sympathetic to h ­ uman rights than John Bolton, but that ­didn’t mean they failed to ask critical questions. In the appendix of this book, I’ve listed some of the most common questions I received along with the answers I e­ ither gave then or would now. But I noticed ­t here was one question above all that kept coming up—­from students, from the el­derly, in interviews with journalists, and just about anywhere I found an audience. One w ­ oman at a World Affairs Council meeting put it this way: “How can you stand it? I mean, e­ very day your job requires you to hear, to see, to read about, ­human beings treating each other like garbage—­ raping, torturing, killing, mutilating. It’s just too much. How can you stand

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it—­a ll the pain and death? How do you retain even the slightest faith in the goodness of humanity?” I got that question so often—­a question about evil and redemption, tragedy, grace, and hope, I thought it so impor­tant, and I strug­gled so hard to answer it that I think it deserves a chapter of its own and is a fitting note on which to end this book.

CHAPTER 9

Despite Cruelty

“Do you get depressed by your work?” “Has it helped that y­ ou’re a minister?” “Has your work changed your understanding of life’s meaning?” “How do you go on?” All t­ hese w ­ ere variations on a theme, a question h ­ uman beings have asked themselves for millennia: given all the viciousness in the world, does life have sufficient meaning to warrant perseverance, to sustain faith? Not faith in God necessarily but faith in the h ­ uman enterprise. My questioners w ­ ere asking for a source of inspiration, a way to hold despair at bay, a word of assurance on which to draw as they went about trying to heal the world. They had, you see, eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They had learned perhaps that the Bosnian Serb paramilitary leader Duško Tadić had forced one of his Muslim prisoners to emasculate another with his teeth and that the first prisoner had gone mad and the second had died.1 In light of that knowledge, they ­were asking if ­human beings ­were indelibly fated to include monsters among their numbers. They w ­ ere asking about the direction of history: Are we h ­ umans making any pro­gress? And some w ­ ere asking a very personal question borne out of the pain of their own lives or their fear of death. Whenever I received this question—­The Question—in any of its nuanced forms, I always felt embarrassed and ashamed ­because the questioner assumed that I had somehow managed not to be benumbed to the heartache I saw and heard about constantly. If I was being entirely honest, I would have to say that I was often highly defended emotionally against truly feeling the misery I encountered.

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­Those defenses could be breached of course—in that prison in Liberia or that refugee camp in Darfur; while listening to the halting stories of survivors; and in visits to places like Dachau, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, or Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, where former Khmer Rouge prisoners conduct the tours. In San Salvador it was the tiny room—­just two small beds and a washstand—at Central American University where Elba and Celina Ramos, the ­house­keeper and her ­daughter, ­were almost incidentally put to death by the Salvadoran military along with the real targets: six priests who had been negotiating an end to hostilities between the government and the rebels. I could hardly pull myself away from that h ­ umble death chamber. But most of the time the endless descriptions of torture or disappearances or extrajudicial killings became just so many words on paper. ­Shouldn’t I be perpetually on the verge of tears? ­Ought I to emulate the nightclub guests in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum who pay for the privilege of cutting up onions to make themselves cry?2 And then ­there was another cause of my embarrassment and shame when confronted with The Question: I d ­ idn’t have a satisfactory answer. Had I been able to fall back on a conventional religious rationale—­like trust in God’s providence—­I would have had a considerably easier time of it. At least ­until some smart-­a leck had challenged me with the classic query, “If God is both benevolent and omnipotent, why does God permit such suffering?” The technical name for that quandary is “theodicy,” and I had studied it thoroughly in theological school. But I no more believed in a God that controlled or guided h ­ uman affairs than I did in trolls. Had I been more of a disciple of Friedrich Nietz­sche (which as a young man I thought I was), I could have pointed out that the premise of the question is that pity is an admirable t­ hing when in fact pity is merely the emotion the weak use to manipulate the strong and the strong use to express superiority over the weak. The prob­lem was that even Nietz­sche ­didn’t r­eally believe—or practice—­t hat. His final breakdown was prompted by the sight of a ­horse being mercilessly beaten in the streets of Turin. As his friend Maria von Bradke once observed, “The inner strug­gle with his pathologically delicate soul, overflowing with pity, was what led him to preach ‘Be hard!’ ”3 Besides, without the h ­ uman capacity to pity, t­ here would be no such t­ hing as ­human rights. And so, with both God and Nietz­sche dead, as the old joke had it (“God is dead”—­Nietzsche. “Nietz­sche is dead.”—­God), I was forced to devise another answer.



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It’s not that I stood mute in front of ­t hose ­eager, imploring ­faces. I had several practiced answers at hand. I would talk about the importance of keeping balance in our lives, of nurturing joy and frivolity as a counterweight to the sad and somber. “If we exhaust ourselves with our weeping,” I would ask, “what good w ­ ill we be to anyone?” I would recite the stories of courageous ­human rights heroes who had experienced torments far beyond what most of us could imagine and yet who still managed to persevere. One of our own staff members had lost two of her ­little c­ hildren to the Guatemalan military, two c­ hildren stolen out from u ­ nder her nose. She herself was forced into exile and yet never gave up fighting for other ­peoples’ rights. “If ­t hose who have encountered the worst of humanity can find it in themselves to keep the faith,” I would say, “then surely you and I can muster the fortitude to be their allies.” Fi­nally, I would point to a series of ­human rights successes over the previous de­cades and sometimes tell a story of a visit I had paid to Syracuse University to give a lecture. Before the lecture, the university president and a group of faculty members entertained me at dinner. “Let’s ask ourselves this question,” the president said ­after dessert had been served. “Are ­human rights better or worse off ­today than they w ­ ere two hundred years ago?” With only one exception, the faculty members all insisted that the ­human rights situation was better in 1806 than 2006. Fi­nally, I could contain myself no longer. “Are you folks serious?” I asked in my typically tactful manner. “Why, just in the few years I’ve been with Amnesty, ­we’ve seen the creation of the International Criminal Court and the War Crimes Tribunals for the Former Yugo­ slavia and Rwanda; a proliferation of local h ­ uman rights groups in virtually ­every country on the planet; rape in the course of war declared a war crime; ­women’s rights taken more seriously than ever before; the British Law Lords rule that sovereign immunity does not prevent the prosecution of dictators like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; worldwide condemnation of the US use of torture in Iraq; the US Supreme Court ruling the execution of juveniles and ­t hose with intellectual disabilities unconstitutional—­a nd you d ­ on’t think ­human rights are better off t­oday than in 1806 when slavery was still enshrined in the US Constitution and serfs still toiled the steppes of Rus­sia?” 4 All three ele­ments of my answer w ­ ere valid—­exhaustion serves no one, heroes are inspiring, and the h ­ uman rights movement has made g­ reat strides—­but if they ­were valid, they ­were not complete, certainly not complete

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enough. Not enough to satisfy the anguish b ­ ehind The Question. So I want to try again. Nothing I say can extinguish the heartache of the wronged or the fact that life is constricted, tragic, and stained, raining down wounds like confetti. I cannot escape the categorical limitations of my life as a comfortable white man whose answers may not square with the experiences of ­others. Then, too, as the theoretical cosmologist Katie Mack tells us in her book The End of Every­thing, “In about five billion years the sun ­will swell to its red ­giant phase . . . ​and leave the Earth a charred, magma-­covered rock.”5 But despite all this and since w ­ e’ve got a ­little time ­until the swollen sun annihilates us, I want to try again.

* * * To summon hope it is necessary to first speak of evil. I do so with trepidation b ­ ecause I remember Primo Levi’s observation that to “understand [the Holocaust] . . . ​is almost to justify [it].” 6 Then, too, the word “evil” is a slippery cad in the hands of ­people like George W. Bush, who applied it willy-­ nilly to anyone he considered a “terrorist” and any country he considered an implacable ­enemy. For ­human rights purposes, it w ­ ill do to understand “evil” as that which radically, systematically, and intentionally destroys ­human dignity. The anal rape of seven-­month-­old babies as a weapon of war in Congo.7 The Soviet practice of tying po­liti­cal prisoners to a beam and then rolling them down 365 steep steps to their inevitable deaths.8 The practice of the East German police of creating “scent samples”—­bottles containing the bodily secretions of dissidents so that ­t hose opponents of the regime could be tracked down by dogs if necessary.9 ­These are instances of the radical, systematic, and intentional deprivation of h ­ uman dignity. But what­ever our understanding of evil, it behooves us to try to decipher it ­because to simply throw up our hands in despair is to surrender to villainy. ­After all, Primo Levi qualified his caution: to understand evil is almost, but not quite, to justify it. To try to understand evil is the first step t­ oward containing it. Let us first exclude psychopaths from our consideration. It is far too ­simple to attribute po­liti­cal evil solely to a group of sadists. I am far more interested in ­t hose who would score in the normal range on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory but who still truck in brutality.



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In a fascinating article entitled “Cruelty’s Rewards: The Gratifications of Perpetrators and Spectators,” the neuropsychologist Victor Nell traces the ­human proclivity to vio­lence from the predation of our animal ancestors through the adaptation of hunting in the Pliocene Epoch to the emergence of cruelty about 1.5 million years ago as a means of maintaining personal and social power. “­Today, as in the past,” Nell writes, “aggression linked to a readiness to inflict pain is a route to prestige, leadership and social mastery,” generated, he argues, by a “species-­wide evolutionary origin.”10 The blood of our prey signals victory. If that is true, then a propensity for vio­lence may be written into the ­human brain—or at least the male brain. But since millions of p ­ eople manage to go through life without d ­ oing physical damage to o ­ thers, t­ here must be mechanisms to control that propensity. Or, put another way, which conditions release our basest impulses and which our gentler? To ­t hose questions we have ready answers. I am sure ­t here are exceptions, but what is exceedingly common is that ­t hose who end up inflicting abuse on o ­ thers have themselves been subjected to it first. Mika Haritos-­Fatouros surveyed sixteen ex-­military policemen who had been trained ­under the Greek dictatorship to administer torture. The policemen all reported that “degrading and illogical acts ­were forced upon [them during training]. . . . ​‘They made us eat the grass of the camp;’ . . . ​[The policemen] all described a daily routine of flogging in which they ­were often forced to run to exhaustion, fully equipped, and ­were beaten at the same time. . . . ​‘We had to learn to love pain.’ ”11 To such humiliations ­were added the appeal of their commanders’ authority, the camaraderie of the group, desensitization (they watched as more seasoned torturers committed atrocities on the prisoners), dehumanization (prisoners who w ­ ere regarded as less-­than-­ human scum), a comforting narrative (“You are serving your country!”), and an assurance of impunity. Et voilà: a torturer! James Dawes interviewed Japa­nese war criminals for his book Evil Men and found similar dynamics at work: “You must erode the identity of t­ hose you need to do the killing, w ­ hether soldiers or torturers,” he writes, “by systematically humiliating them and stripping them of their normal domestic identity.”12 But crucially, Dawes did more than just dissect cruelty; he also outlined “what makes ­people perform be­hav­iors we call altruistic.” What, in other words, discourages vio­lence and countermands evil? ­Here are some of the t­ hings he found:

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• attaching an identity to a previously anonymous victim; • contradicting the claim that the victims are radically dif­fer­ent from “us”; • providing information about the victims that elicits sympathy; • assuring bystanders to cruelty that, if they object, they w ­ ill not be alone; they ­will have companions; • simplifying the issue at hand; making the narrative of injustice easily understood; • recognizing that one altruistic intervention often leads to another; and • encouraging faith and trust in p ­ eople.13 When I read Dawes’s book, I was struck that almost e­ very one of the strategies he mentions are ones that Amnesty and the larger h ­ uman rights movement utilize. As we have seen, the genius of Amnesty is to tell the stories of victims of h ­ uman rights abuses in a way that makes them recognizable individuals and hence accessible to ­others. By organ­izing ­people into a movement, Amnesty assures incipient activists that they are not alone and helps increase the odds that one altruistic intervention ­will lead to another. What this means is that just as we understand what fosters evil, so we have a pretty good idea of how to kindle virtue. During the week I was writing this chapter, the ­great psychologist Albert Bandura died.14 Bandura had a very s­ imple idea: that ­people learn from observing other ­people’s be­hav­ior. ­Children as young as eigh­teen months who see caring be­hav­ior expressed ­toward o ­ thers respond with care to other c­ hildren who are in pain.15 But even if ­t hese mechanisms work at the level of individuals, are they sufficient to combat massive structural forces impeding the cosmopolitan ideal? H ­ uman rights depend on cosmopolitanism, ­after all: the notion that at the end of the day what ­human beings share in common is more impor­tant than what divides us and that therefore we need to re­spect one another despite our differences and play by the same rules. But that vision of universalism flies in the face of some pretty power­f ul countervailing impulses. Take kin se­lection theory, for example. If t­ here is one t­ hing that evolutionary ge­ne­ticists agree on, it is kin se­lection theory: the idea that h ­ uman beings ­will do what­ever they can to guarantee the survival of their own gene pools, their own direct descendants. If I have to choose between saving my child from the grip of a crocodile’s jaw or saving yours, not only ­will my child



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get the nod, but, tragic as that choice may be, no ethicist would consider it immoral. How do we suspend our biases in f­ avor of our own offspring, our own tribes, long enough to allow for the rescue of your child as well? Or take child development. The way a small child gains an identity is by noticing the similarities that child shares with other ­people but also the dif­ ferences. “I am like X but not like Y.” I have met lots of mixed-­race persons, but no one who claims no racial identity at all, complicated as some such identities are. I know a growing number of ­people who are nonbinary in their self-­assigned gender identities, but being nonbinary is itself an identity that differentiates them from o ­ thers. And I have known a few p ­ eople who claim to be “citizens of the world” but not one who was not born somewhere. How do we reconcile our healthy psychic need to differentiate ourselves from ­others with the imperative to recognize the universality of what we share with them as well? Racism, sexism, tribalism, exacerbated by economic in­equality and a growing scarcity of land and resources resulting from climate change—­a ll ­t hese threaten to harness our kin se­lection biases and our need for a differentiated identity and to trample the cosmopolitan ideal into dust. And yet . . . ​t hat ­hasn’t happened . . . ​yet. For all the setbacks the ­human rights regimen has experienced; for all the books that have been published with titles like The Endtimes of H ­ uman Rights;16 for all the Putins, Xis, Orbans, and Trumps in the world; for all the suffering in American, Chinese, and Rus­sian prisons, in Myanmar and Palestine, Af­ghan­i­stan and the Central African Republic, Venezuela and Honduras—­despite all this the cosmopolitan ideal is not dead. In fact it is the prevailing normative sentiment of worldwide culture. It’s true that the adversaries of ­human rights, the foes of cosmopolitanism, have a ­great deal of po­liti­cal, economic, and military power—­far more than ­those who would uphold ­human rights standards. Yet it is also true that the deployment of that po­liti­cal, economic, and military power is largely wielded in accordance with cultural norms. Sometimes t­ hose norms reinforce parochialism, particularly in a nation that is isolated or feels itself u ­ nder threat. But at the global level where all voices can be heard, it is a very dif­fer­ ent story. Even in the face of evolutionary predispositions to vio­lence, the ge­ne­tics of kin se­lection, the appeal of group solidarity, the power of nationalism, and any number of other enticements to harm ­others, h ­ uman beings

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have created cultural norms that might not obviate our basest urges but can certainly mitigate them. And t­ hose h ­ uman rights norms are about as widely accepted a cultural ideal as we h ­ umans have yet in­ven­ted. How can I say that? ­Because the be­hav­ior of tyrants gives the game away. It is certainly true that ­t here are a few po­liti­cal leaders like Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin who may not care what the world thinks of them. But why does even Putin pretend he was elected demo­cratically and deny that he poisoned his po­liti­cal opponent Alexei Navalny? Why did he frame his invasion of Ukraine as a virtuous crusade against “Nazis” and claim his troops committed no war crimes? Why does China’s Xi Jinping label his detention camps “friendly vocational training centers”?17 If he is proud of his reeducation through l­ abor camps, why d ­ oesn’t he advertise them on Chinese tele­v i­ sion? Why does China claim it has its “own variety of democracy” rather than just revel in its authoritarianism? As Sarah Cook of Freedom House put it, “The fact that the [Chinese] regime feels the need to consistently justify its po­liti­cal system in terms of democracy is a power­f ul acknowl­edgment of the symbolism and legitimacy that the term holds.”18 Why did Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman pretend he had nothing to do with the dismembering of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi? If Khashoggi was an evildoer, why not trumpet his just deserts? Why did Aleksandr Lukashenko, the “brutal and erratic” dictator of Belarus, claim that he forced down a plane carry­ing a po­liti­cal opponent ­because ­t here was a “potential security threat on board” rather than acknowledge that he wanted to capture and imprison a rival?19 Why does Hungary’s Viktor Orbán call himself an “illiberal demo­crat” but still a “demo­crat” rather than a self-­ avowed “authoritarian?” Why does the Myanmar military insist it ­will introduce ­free elections eventually? When was the last time a country invited a CNN news crew into its torture chambers? Certainly, Genghis Khan or Tamerlane or Lenin or Idi Amin would have had no such compunctions (though it was said tears came into Lenin’s eyes e­ very time he heard Beethoven’s “Appassionato”). I could offer dozens more examples of the subterfuges engaged in by despots (even the Nazis arranged for the concentration camp at Theresienstadt to be converted into a “propaganda camp” or “model ghetto” to deceive the Danish Red Cross when it demanded to visit in 1944),20 but the key question



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is “why?” Why do t­ hese power­ful “masters of the universe” want to hide their dirty deeds? The answer is b ­ ecause they know that their actions are at odds with the defining characteristics of a civilized society. Sometimes ­t here ­will be consequences, internal or external, for defying t­ hose norms: young p ­ eople in the streets, corporations too skittish to make investments, allies too embarrassed to maintain relations, an indictment by an international or foreign court, a revolutionary response. Often ­t here ­will not. But the autocrat can never be sure. And consequences or not, the norms and the shame and the worry remain. Occasionally even some of the most brutal h ­ uman rights criminals let slip their veil of indifference to the potential burnt harvest of cruelty. ­Here are two examples. General Paul Aussaresses was a frequent employer of torture during the French-­A lgerian War and a prominent defender of its use afterward. But in his 2001 memoir The ­Battle of the Casbah, he recounts a telling conversation with a doctor over the dead body of an Algerian prisoner who had just died ­after being waterboarded: I called in the doctor, who was an old friend from my school days in Bordeaux. “I was talking to the prisoner and he fell ill,” I said unconvincingly. “He told me he had tuberculosis. Can you see what’s wrong with him?” “You ­were talking to him? But he’s drenched. You must be kidding!” said the doctor. “No, I w ­ ouldn’t do such a ­t hing.” “But he’s dead!” “It’s pos­si­ble,” I answered, “but when I asked for you he was still alive.” Since the doctor was still complaining, I lost my cool and said: “And so? You want me to say that I killed him? Would that make you feel better? Do you think I enjoy this?” “No, but then why did you come to get me if he’s dead?” I ­didn’t answer. The doctor fi­nally understood. I had called him so he would send the body to the hospital and get it out of my sight once and for all. (emphases added)21

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Or consider this testimony of a truck driver before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugo­slavia who had just arrived at the scene of a massacre by Bosnian Serb soldiers of a group of bound and blindfolded Muslim men: “In that heap, in that pile of dead bodies, who did not resemble p ­ eople any longer, this was just a pile of flesh in bits, and then a ­human being emerged. I say a h ­ uman being, but it was actually a boy of some five to six years. It is unbelievable. Unbelievable. A h ­ uman being came out and started moving ­towards the path, the path where men with automatic ­rifles stood ­doing their job. And this child was walking t­ owards them. All of t­ hose soldiers and policemen ­there, ­these ­people who had no trou­ble shooting. . . . ​ And then all of a sudden they lowered their ­rifles and all of them, to the last one, just froze.”22 The commanding officer had ordered the soldiers to shoot the boy, but none of them, including the officer himself, would do it. They just turned the child over to the truck driver who took him to the hospital. Why d ­ idn’t Aussaresses exude pride at having killed his Algerian prisoner? Why did the Bosnian Serb soldiers “just freeze?” B ­ ecause on some level Aussaresses knew that what he was ­doing was wrong. On some level the soldiers knew that to kill the ­little boy was a bridge too far—­too far beyond the norms of civility into the wilderness of the monstrous. What they had already done was hideous. Their attacks of “conscience” in no way redeem them. Many ­people w ­ ill won­der what good moral norms and h ­ uman rights standards do if they can be ­v iolated with such flagrant, if not unabashed, impunity. It is a common challenge to ­human rights advocates, and it is a good question. But an equally good question is, “Where would we be without them?” Do we r­ eally want to live in a world in which killing your po­liti­cal enemies, cleansing your nation of ethnic minorities, and torturing your captives are not be­hav­iors subject to rebuke? Do we prefer a world in which exploitation of the poor and harsh treatment of the powerless are considered ­t hings to be proud of? If the standard for hope is the appearance of a perfectly just world, then hope is doomed. But I am not looking for a just world; I am looking for a less unjust one—­not a world of pure virtue but a world of less wickedness. As the critic Susan Sontag wrote in her diary, “The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation—­however minute.”23 I am not looking for a world in which you ­don’t try first to save your own child from the crocodile but one in which you go back into the swamp to try



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next to save somebody e­ lse’s. I’m not looking for a world with no racial or ethnic conflict; I’m looking for a world in which such conflict is contained enough that ­people of ­every race or ethnicity have a shot at a good life. As I used to tell employees who w ­ ere bickering with one another, “I d ­ on’t care if you ­don’t like one another; I ­don’t even care if you despise each other; I only care that you figure out how to work together during office hours.” I identify with the sentiment voiced by Stacey Abrams, the po­liti­cal wunderkind from Georgia, when she said that she was not an optimist but an “ameliorist” who sees the glass half-­f ull but figures it may contain poison and so “is always . . . ​ on the hunt for the antidote.”24 If the goal is not a perfect world but a less unjust one, I think the odds in its ­favor are maybe 60 to 40. Indeed, if we take the mea­sure of our world in generations and not year to year, I think the odds even improve on t­ hose. Recognizing that as e­ very investment fund warns you, “past results are not indicative of f­ uture per­for­mance,” the history of ­human rights change is one of steady, if not uninterrupted, pro­gress. In 1948, when the Universal Declaration of H ­ uman Rights (UDHR) was ­adopted, more than 50 ­percent of the world lived in extreme poverty. ­Today that number is less than 10 ­percent.25 In 1948 the death penalty was in widespread use around the world. ­Today almost three-­quarters of the world’s nations have abolished the practice.26 Freedom House has noted that the number of countries it considers “not f­ ree” has grown by nine in the past fifteen years, which is indeed worrisome; but in 1948 t­here w ­ ere only about twenty democracies in the world, and t­oday ­t here are close to a hundred.27 In the 1940s, 60 ­percent of African American ­women worked as domestic servants. ­Today that percentage is 2.2 ­percent, with 60 ­percent in white-­collar jobs.28 In 1948 no w ­ oman had ever headed a government; t­ here w ­ ere no international conventions prohibiting genocide, torture, racial discrimination, or any number of other grievous wrongs; apartheid South Africa was thriving; Eastern Eu­rope was smothering; and even Eleanor Roo­se­velt, who chaired the committee that authored the UDHR and was herself purportedly involved in a lesbian relationship, could not have fathomed that marriage might not be reserved for a man and a w ­ oman.29 Perhaps no other h ­ uman rights arena better illustrates the advances that have been made since 1948 than that of international justice. Two years e­ arlier the Nuremburg T ­ rials had established the princi­ple that war crimes and

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crimes against humanity could be prosecuted even if a country’s own laws did not impose a penalty for t­hose crimes, but t­here was no established, ongoing mechanism for d ­ oing that. As of 2020, the two War Crimes Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugo­slavia as well as the International Criminal Court had indicted 289 ­people and convicted 159 of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—159 ­people who other­wise would likely have never been punished.30 Obviously that is far fewer than the number of ­t hose who actually have committed such crimes, but, as the historian Adam Hochschild, has said, “International tribunals . . . ​can only be selective and symbolic. . . . ​Such was the case . . . ​in Nuremberg, which brought charges against only twenty-­four top Nazis,” and yet no one would call Nuremberg insignificant.31 Just as impor­tant, the princi­ple of universal jurisdiction—­the notion that any national court may try a suspect for serious breaches of international law even if that suspect is not a national of that state—is being applied more and more frequently. In 2016 Senegal and the African Union, for example, convicted the former dictator of Chad, Hissène Habré, of war crimes and sentenced him to life in prison, where he died.32 As of 2020, Belgium had tried five cases related to the Rwandan genocide and continues to take alleged gé­ nocidaires into custody more than twenty-­five years ­after the carnage.33 In the summer of 2022 a Swedish court convicted an Ira­nian judiciary official of war crimes and murder in connection with the massacre of five thousand prisoners in Iran.34 And ­earlier that year a German court had convicted a former Syrian security officer of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life in prison.35 Even when offenders have not been pursued legally, their crimes have often come to light. The successes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Chile, which issued its report in 1991 on ­human rights crimes committed during the Pinochet regime, and in South Africa, which operated from 1995 to 2002 and brought to account crimes committed ­under apartheid, provided models of restorative justice that have been emulated in some forty other countries.36 Such efforts have not always resulted in full accountability, but, as the renowned Chilean h ­ uman rights l­awyer Pepe Zalaquett, who served on his country’s commission, once told me, “Our philosophy was all the truth and as much justice as the society can stand,” and surely that is a lot better than none.37



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One of the achievements of which I am most proud was that in 1998, at the initiative of the revered h ­ uman rights attorney Paul Hoffman and a remarkable psychologist named Jerry Gray who worked with survivors of torture, Amnesty USA helped establish and provide seed funding for an organ­ization called the Center for Justice and Accountability, which was designed initially to bring l­egal action against torturers from other countries who ­were resident in the United States, of which we estimated ­t here could be hundreds.38 ­Today the center has extended its pursuit of h ­ uman rights offend39 ers through l­egal mechanisms around the world. The point of all this is not to sow satisfaction, for I know as well as anyone how many hideous injustices remain, but I also know two ­t hings about history. First, history is not determined by ­either the whims of an angry God or the prophecies of an economic fate; it is s­ haped by a thousand t­ hings but among ­those are ­human hands. It has rarely taken a majority to make a revolution; revolutions are made by a devoted, well-­placed, and strategic few. I saw Slobodan Milošević’s government fall in October 2000, thanks in no small part to the perseverance of the largely student-­led organ­ization known as Otpor. And second, I know that history is not “just one damn t­ hing ­after another.” 40 History builds upon itself, one generation’s experience influencing another, for good or ill. The fact that ­human beings had the imagination to envision the h ­ uman rights ideal in the first place means we know where we want to go even if we stumble in the pro­cess. We know through long centuries of trial and error what it means to act with honor. Barbarism is not inevitable, benevolence is not impossible, and hope is not a pipe dream if we build on the wisdom of our ancestors and try to make the world not perfect but just a bit more kind.

* * * All this is good reason to hope, but I’m not sure that in the last analy­sis hope is primarily a product of reason. I think it is also something ineluctable, an intimation of possibilities, a passion, a way of living, a gift, and in at least one re­spect a choice. Many survivors of abuse, w ­ hether that be po­liti­cal or personal, are deeply scarred. They have lost faith in other ­human beings and trust in the world.

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For them all my arguments for hope may feel like straw. Instead, they may look to religious faith, the love of f­ amily and friends, solidarity with their communities, a commitment to a larger cause, and, in the case of t­ hose prey to ­human rights crimes, the kind of therapy offered at torture treatment centers around the world. But it is not always easy to predict ahead of time who ­will ultimately thrive and who ­will falter. As in any recovery pro­cess, ­t here is often an unknown variable—­call it the resilience f­ actor—­t hat plays a critical role. During the course of my life, I have been privileged to engage with many ­people who ­were facing situations that called upon them to be resilient. I noticed that t­ hose who most frequently found that quality within themselves had two ­t hings in common. The first was not something they could control: good parents—­parents who filled them with self-­esteem and set appropriate bound­a ries. Or, if they w ­ ere not fortunate in the quality of their parents, someone in their childhood orbit—­a grandparent, aunt, u ­ ncle, teacher, mentor—­who offered them the re­spect and nurture we all deserve from ­those who bring us into the world. That is a gift. The second common characteristic of the resilient, however, is something more within our power: hearts open to blessings; a willingness, in the words of the 60th Psalm, to “drink of the wine of astonishment.” To r­ eally appreciate what I’m saying, we need to put that in context. The ­whole of Psalm 60, verse 3, reads, “Thou has showed thy ­people hard t­hings; thou has made us to drink of the wine of astonishment.” When all’s right with the world, that wine flows freely. Only when we face hard ­t hings does its appearance astonish. For the remarkable Cambodian ­human rights ­lawyer Theary Seng, that astonishment was triggered by calligraphy: “Living through genocide was catching up with me,” she says. “I was chronically suicidal in high school. What saved me was calligraphy. I calligraphied the w ­ hole Book of Psalms.” 41 Call it blessings, good fortune, or life’s unfolding; religious p ­ eople might call it grace. Frankly, I d ­ on’t care what you call it, and I know it’s not guaranteed to make an appearance—­sometimes hard t­ hings are just damn hard—­but I also know that a generous spirit increases the odds that w ­ e’ll respond to its summons. In her magnificent book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris gives a perfect example of what I mean. The scene is a small, rough cemetery on the North Dakota plains. It is December, cold and stark. The occasion is an interment. “As ­people gathered [by] the graveside . . . ,” Norris writes,



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“the men, some kneeling, began studying the open grave.” What w ­ ere they ­doing? Praying? Fi­nally, someone explained: “They w ­ ere checking the frost and moisture levels in the ground. They ­were farmers and ranchers worried about a drought. They w ­ ere mourners giving a good friend back to the earth. They w ­ ere p ­ eople of the earth, looking for a sign of hope.” 42 The resilient know that if you never look, you never find. That is a choice. What does this have to do with ­human rights? Exactly this: justice and blessings exist in paradoxical codependence. If you ­don’t first love the world and its blessings, what reason do you have for ­doing justice and saving it? On the other hand, an unjust world constrains t­ hose blessings and makes them so much harder to see. If you ­don’t first love the world, what reason do you have for saving it? Several years ago I was told this story. I ­can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it has the ring of a parable. A few months ­a fter the horrendous genocide in Rwanda, a team of so-­called reconciliation experts went to that tattered country to help the Tutsis, eight hundred thousand of whom had just been slaughtered by members of the Hutu tribe, to begin the pro­cess of healing and forgiveness. For several hours the experts conducted their training, inviting members of the village from dif­fer­ent tribes to share their feelings with one another. Fi­nally, one of the village elders said, “You know, all this is good, but what we r­ eally need in this village is a bus.” The reconciliation experts ­were taken aback. “Yes,” they said, “perhaps the village does need a bus, but ­we’re ­here to talk about far more serious ­things than that.” But the elder persisted, “We need a bus,” he said, and soon all the villa­gers ­were chanting, “A bus! A bus!” Fi­nally, one of the w ­ omen in the group explained. “We need a bus,” she said, “that ­will start its route in the Hutu part of the region and then drive to the Pygmy part and then to the Tutsi part and then back again, and we want to design the seats of the bus so that all seats face one another, and we want to have a rule that no one may sit beside a person from their own tribe, and we want to have conductors who one day are Hutu and the next day are Pygmy and the next day are Tutsi. And by the way, we want all the conductors to be ­women.” 43 Despite all they had been through—­t heir homes destroyed, their loved ones butchered—­t hose folks still loved the world and its gifts enough to try to devise a plan to make it better. But an unjust world constrains t­ hose blessings that make it worth saving in the first place. Life on earth would not exist without the sun. The sun is a

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blessing. But if I have inadequate shelter from its rays, that same sun is transformed from a blessing into a curse. No m ­ atter how much I rejoice in the gift of my c­ hildren, I ­tremble for their ­f utures if I expect they may be in danger by dint of their race. The poorest person can trea­sure the refulgence of Nature, but that generosity is far harder to appreciate if brutality lurks in the forest or sewage flows in the streets. I worked for Amnesty b ­ ecause I loved the world in all its shine and all its tawdriness. And I took hope from that work b ­ ecause I had faith that with each small step t­ oward justice, we put another crack in the cauldron of grace, its bounty soon for someone to see, even if it ­wasn’t me. Is that a reason to hope or is it something ineluctable, an intimation of possibilities, a passion, a way of living, a gift? Seventy p ­ ercent of ­those ­people whose first suicide attempt is unsuccessful never try to kill themselves again.44 Nobody argued them into living. O ­ thers may have listened to them, loved them, helped solve some of their practical prob­lems, but ultimately each person had to find their own reason for hope, however minute. That’s true of ­human rights work as well. ­We’ll never succeed in reversing the river, but we can help make that river a ­little cleaner, its course a ­little wider, and its ­waters a common f­ avor for us all.

* * * In 2015 I was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Most ­people can live a long time with CLL, and so far my disease has not progressed much. But ­because this kind of blood cancer compromises the immune system, I must be very careful when it comes to ­t hings like pneumonia or Covid-19, and eventually I w ­ ill die if not from one of t­ hose, then from a more virulent form of cancer to which CLL predisposes me. I am just as unsettled by that thought as anyone e­ lse would be, and when I am waiting for results of vari­ous medical tests, I get just as anxious as if I had never read a word of theology, engaged in a moment’s spiritual practice, or considered ultimate religious questions for even an instant. I know the comedian Stan Freberg was right when he said that “­we’re all just penciled in,” but that ­doesn’t mean I have to like it.45 On the other hand, since I have no choice about mortality, particularly as it closes in on me, I might as well let it serve me. It does so first of course,



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as it does for so many contemplating death, by making ever keener my love for t­ hose who are close to me, especially my precious Beth, and for all the pleasures of life that call out for noticing. I like to think, though, that I ­didn’t require a cancer diagnosis to feel that love or take that notice. Nonetheless, I ­will miss all that passionately, though I know that thought is absurd for t­ here ­will be no “me” to do the missing. I do not believe in a traditional afterlife. But what I do believe—­and of this I am certain—is that, though I am but a brief upsurge of or­ga­nized consciousness flitting through the cosmos for a milli-­fraction of a second, I am nonetheless an indelible part of that cosmos, and w ­ hether I be body or w ­ hether I be dust, I w ­ ill be held in its embrace. Nothing can obliterate the atoms that w ­ ere me. Change their form, to be sure, but not do away with them entirely. Not a chance. When I am calm, this thought comforts me. I’d rather retain my consciousness, I think, but I’ll ­settle for what I can get ­because, ­after all, it’s so unlikely that I landed ­here in the first place. It appears that it was just a m ­ atter of luck that more m ­ atter than anti-­matter appeared at the Big Bang or nothing would be ­here at all!46 And then ­t here are two other ways such an acquaintance with finitude serves me: as a conjurer of perspective and a tonic of gratitude. When Barack Obama and his staff ­were ­going through tough po­liti­cal times, the president would remind his colleagues that “­t here are more stars in the known universe than ­t here are grains of sand on the planet Earth.” 47 I met or heard of so many “tough guys” in my h ­ uman rights work, some of whom I’ve described in t­ hese pages, who seemed to have no conception of life’s fragility—­not of other p ­ eople’s fragility (of that they ­were often only too aware) but of their own. No ­matter how tough they think they are, however, none of them ­will win in the end; all of them ­will go down to dust, if they ­haven’t already, and by exploiting the vulnerability of their neighbors, they have soiled the precious moment they ­were given on the earth and guaranteed that their memories, not ­t hose of their victims, ­will be cursed. It is part of the job of the h ­ uman rights movement to ensure that that fate awaits them. For, as Elie Wiesel observed, to remember “is to rescue lost beings, to cast . . . ​ light on ­faces and events, to drive back the sands that cover the surface of ­t hings, to combat oblivion and to reject death.” 48 Which brings me fi­nally to gratitude: that I was given the opportunity to do this impor­tant work, side by side with so many ­people of generous heart. ­After I left Amnesty, I carried on my ­human rights commitments at the Center

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for American Pro­gress and the Unitarian Universalist Ser­v ice Committee and taught ­human rights at New York University and elsewhere. Through all ­t hose years I never forgot a question posed by the novelist Willa Cather that, when I first read it, s­ topped me in my tracks. “What [is] any art,” she asked, “but . . . ​a sheath . . . ​in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive ele­ment which is life itself—­ . . . ​hurrying past . . . ​, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?” 49 For me h ­ uman rights was that sheath, insisting that no ­matter how hard the tyrants tried, life was just too strong to stop, its shining, elusive virtues just too sweet—­too sweet to lose. How lucky I have been.

COMMON QUESTIONS ABOUT H ­ UMAN RIGHTS

­ ese are some of the most common questions I have received along with the answers I ­either Th gave then or would now.

How do you decide what’s a ­human right or not? The simplest way to explain what h ­ uman rights are is to say that they provide a prescription for the “good society.” A good society makes sure all its p ­ eople have enough to eat, and hence ­t here is a right to food. It makes sure they are not arbitrarily detained by the authorities, and hence t­ here is a right to due pro­cess and a fair trial. The conception of that good society is based on notions of dignity and h ­ uman flourishing. What conditions w ­ ill lend themselves to lives of dignity and fulfillment? What­ever they be, they are candidates to become h ­ uman rights. But who decides? This is an impor­tant question. When South Carolina outlawed video poker, one man said, “This is like the state telling me I have no rights. . . . ​It’s pretty close to being Communist.”1 Is he right? No, I’m afraid he’s not ­because international ­human rights are defined by international treaties, covenants, and conventions, beginning with the Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights (UDHR) from 1948, and so far at least, ­t here is no ­human right to play video poker. In other words, the answer to the question, “Who decides what’s a ­human right?” (or, more broadly, “Who decides what a good society looks like?”) is “the ­whole world” via the adoption of international ­human rights treaties. If it’s not in one of ­those treaties, it’s not (yet) a ­human right.

But where do rights come from? What’s the basis for deciding what gets included in ­t hose treaties? Some p ­ eople think they come from God. O ­ thers think they come from some inherent quality in h ­ uman beings, like our capacity to reason or to exercise f­ ree agency. This notion of “natu­ ral rights” is why we so often hear p ­ eople say, “I have a right” to X, Y, or Z as if rights w ­ ere something we possessed inside us, like a liver or a tendency to put on weight. I hold a dif­fer­ent view. While it would sure be nice if every­one in the world agreed on what God wanted us to do (­a fter every­body agrees ­t here is a God, I suppose) or agreed on what our ­human nature entitled us to, I ­don’t think that’s very likely ever to happen. I think rights are transactional, that is, they reflect global consensus (or as close to global consensus as we can get in such a fractured world) as to what our relationship should be with one another and the world around us if we are to have a good society. ­Those treaties reflect that consensus, and, just like any other consensus-­seeking pro­cess, their formulation requires a lot of horse-­trading and compromise. They ­a ren’t set in stone like the Ten Commandments. Most of them can be revised and expanded and changed.

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Rights can change? ­Isn’t that dangerous? The answers to t­ hose questions are “yes” and “sometimes.” B ­ ecause rights reflect our current global consensus about what makes up a good society and ­because our notion of the good society changes from one generation to another, so rights ­w ill change. Just look at LGBTQ+ rights. The right to same-­sex marriage was not ­adopted in law by any country ­until the Netherlands did it in 2001. But if rights ­a ren’t set in stone, then theoretically current rights could be rescinded or weakened. That’s why it’s so impor­tant that ­human rights advocates remain vigilant in the protection of every­body’s rights.

­ verybody’s. But you said before that rights define our relationship E not just with each other but with “the world around us.” Can other entities than h ­ umans be assigned rights? Absolutely . . . ​at least theoretically. Rights are a description of the good society. To achieve that good society, we h ­ umans may decide that the dignity and flourishing of other entities is required, and, if that’s the case, we may want to assign them rights. Animals are the easiest example to understand, but Nature itself is another candidate, and so, believe it or not, are social robots. But this is a complicated topic about which a colleague, Sushma Raman, and I have written a ­whole book, so I’ll just refer you to The Coming Good Society: Why New Reali­ ties Demand New Rights.2

Ok, but are ­human rights r­ eally universal? ­Aren’t rights just a product of a Western mindset? ­ ere’s no question that the notion of “rights” emerged primarily out of the Eu­ro­pean EnlightTh enment, though Amartya Sen has argued strenuously that values consistent with h ­ uman rights have been part of the Asian tradition for millennia, citing the Indian emperor Ashoka, for one, who ruled in the third c­ entury BCE and who took the object of his government to be “non-­injury, restraint, impartiality, and mild be­hav­ior” t­ oward “all creatures.”3 Even Confucius, often cited as a defender of rulers, instructed his disciple Zilu to tell the prince the truth even if it offended him—an injunction that dictators all over the world would resist heartily. Regardless of the cultural source of rights, however, the impor­tant point is that they have been ­adopted by countries in ­every corner of the globe. The Universal Declaration of H ­ uman Rights is considered customary international law, and ­every nation that joins the United Nations agrees implicitly to abide by it. In order to come into effect, h ­ uman rights treaties need to be ratified by a significant number of countries. Many regional declarations, such as the African Charter on H ­ uman and P ­ eoples’ Rights, and the vast majority of national constitutions mirror ele­ments of ­t hese international treaties. Overwhelming numbers of the world’s states participate in one or more of the United Nations’ h ­ uman rights mechanisms. One hundred twenty-­t hree countries, for example, are states party to the International Criminal Court, including thirty-­t hree from Africa, twenty-­eight from Latin Amer­i­ca and the Ca­rib­bean, and nineteen from the Asia Pacific region.4 So while in practice not all rights are understood in exactly the same way everywhere—­ Americans and Eu­ro­pe­a ns, to cite one instance, disagree on the breadth of freedom of speech, with many Eu­ro­pean countries making hate speech or Holocaust denial illegal—­nonetheless



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the most fundamental rights are agreed on by large numbers of governments. The Convention against Torture has been ratified by 171 states; the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against W ­ omen by 189; and the Convention on the Rights of the Child by every­one except Somalia . . . ​a nd the United States.

But what about cultural differences? S­ houldn’t we re­spect ­t hose too? This is one of the most common objections to the universality of h ­ uman rights, famously articulated by Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian prime minister of Singapore, who claimed that “Asian values” gave primacy to community interests over individual rights. ­Others have argued that such cultural practices as female genital-­cutting need to be respected lest we be guilty of imposing “colonial” values on Indigenous populations. Since liberals pride themselves on their re­spect for differences, t­ hese arguments are sometimes particularly puzzling to them. I responded to ­t hese objections in two ways. First, I quoted Wei Jingsheng, the “­father of Chinese democracy,” who, when I asked him to comment on the notion that Asian values trumped re­spect for ­human rights, replied very simply, “Am I not Asian?” In other words, who is to say what “Asian” values are? I suspect that the thousands of Chinese subjected to “reeducation through l­ abor camps,” unfair t­ rials, and torture would hardly agree that “Asian values” justified their subjugation. And are they not Asian? And second, extending this line of reasoning, I asked, “Who de­cided that female genital-­ cutting was a required cultural practice? Was it that six-­year-­old girl subjected to it? No, it was tribal elders, mostly men, who feared female sexuality and wanted to control it.” (I also pointed out that female genital mutilation was illegal in most countries where it is practiced.) Whenever we consider w ­ hether national or cultural practices take pre­ce­dence over h ­ uman rights, we need to ask ourselves who has the power to decide that. If it is the ones inflicting the abuse, their motives are highly suspect. And if it is the ones on the receiving end? Well, then, my response would echo that of Frederick Douglass who, faced with John Calhoun’s claim that the enslaved preferred slavery to freedom, replied, in effect, “If that is so, then give them their freedom and see if they ever try to give it back.”

Given all the times the United States has v­ iolated h ­ uman rights itself over the years, how can we tell other countries what to do? Let’s remember at the outset that ­human rights are established at the international level, not the national. While the United States, mired in its self-­image as an exceptional nation, thinks the US Constitution is the final arbiter of law, it’s not—at least as far as h ­ uman rights are concerned. The US Supreme Court can declare the death penalty constitutional as repeatedly and as fiercely as it likes, but that w ­ on’t prevent the United States from being labeled a violator of the h ­ uman right to life. In this and many other re­spects the United States’ h ­ uman rights rec­ord is tarnished. But so are the rec­ords of virtually e­ very other country in the world. If we only allowed the utterly pure to speak out against ­human rights abuses, it would be a pretty short conversation. That’s why we have international bodies and international ­human rights organ­izations leading the critiques of national states—so that h ­ uman rights are not dependent on any one country, flawed as it is likely to be, to sound the alarm. Is the United States’ voice impor­tant? You bet it is . . . ​simply b ­ ecause the United States has so much power and influence, even ­today. But that’s also one of the reasons it’s so critical

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Common Questions About ­Human Rights

that we Americans fight for the rights of p ­ eople h ­ ere at home: so that the United States’ voice can be credible and resonant when it does choose to speak out on violations around the world.

­ e’re told that rights are “indivisible,” but ­aren’t some rights W more impor­tant than o ­ thers? How, for instance, do we balance safety with freedom? ­ ere are more than thirty rights articulated in the Universal Declaration and dozens more Th in other treaties. One of them is the right to leisure. It’s Article 24 in the UDHR, but I d ­ on’t recall Amnesty ever working on the right to leisure. So of course some rights are more fundamental to a good society than o ­ thers. I can live without leisure, I guess, but I c­ ouldn’t live without food. Four rights are so impor­tant that they can never be suspended, no ­matter what the circumstances. The technical term is “nonderogable.” You c­ an’t ever derogate or deviate from the rights to life, to freedom from torture, to freedom from slavery, or to freedom from being prosecuted for an act that w ­ asn’t a crime when you committed it. Other rights may be suspended or modulated only ­under extreme conditions and for a l­ imited time. Sometimes it’s true that one right may appear to conflict with another. That’s the case with any set of rules. Take the Ten Commandments. How do I “honor my f­ ather and my m ­ other” if they instruct me to kill or steal? When I was a young teenager, I became enamored of a group called Moral Rearmament, which taught four absolute virtues: honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. I managed to follow t­ hose precepts fairly closely for about a week u ­ ntil my g­ reat aunt, who was notorious for her bad breath, asked me to give her a big kiss on the lips. Was I to practice absolute unselfishness or absolute honesty? (I held my breath and opted for the former.) So how do we reconcile rights that may appear to conflict with one another, like safety and freedom appeared to do a­ fter 9/11? Well, many times the conflicts are less robust than they appear to be at first, and we can work out compromises that protect both rights, but at the end of the day that’s why we have ­human rights courts: to sort out t­ hese complexities. Back to “indivisibility,” however. When h ­ uman rights advocates say that rights are “indivisible,” they ­don’t mean that e­ very right is as impor­tant as ­every other. They mean that the set of rights called “economic, social, and cultural rights,” such as the right to w ­ ater or to an education, are just as impor­tant as t­ hose called “civil and po­liti­cal rights,” such as the right to ­free elections or a f­ ree press (media). Indeed, the two sets are interdependent, though the United States has always regarded the latter as primary while China takes just the opposite view. If you doubt the indivisibility or interdependence of the two sets of rights, just ask yourself: “What good is a fair trial if I die of thirst on the way to the court­house?” “What good is a ­f ree press (media) to me if I am illiterate?” And, conversely, “How may I access clean ­water if I lack the right to pursue a ­legal claim for it at a fair trial?” “How can I expand literacy if I lack the right to make my case in the press (media)?”

We hear a lot about rights but how about responsibilities? ­Aren’t ­t hose valuable too? “Responsibility” is a tricky word. If it refers to who is responsible for seeing that rights are protected and implemented, that is an impor­tant question and in fact t­ here is a UN Declaration on that very topic.5 But sometimes opponents of h ­ uman rights use the word in the same fashion a parent might use it to chastise a truculent teenager: “You need to act more responsibly,”



Common Questions About H ­ uman Rights 235

meaning “You need to put some checks on your be­hav­ior to conform to my expectations of you.” This can be far more problematic as far as rights are concerned (I w ­ on’t offer an opinion about parenting!) b ­ ecause it usually is designed to set limits to rights. Sometimes limits are appropriate (we ­can’t claim that our right to ­f ree speech validates libeling another), and sometimes rights imply a responsibility (a right to ­f ree elections implies the responsibility to vote, though it ­doesn’t require it), but we need to be cautious in invoking responsibility as a counterweight to rights. Certainly the UDHR recognizes that “every­one has duties to [their] community” and that one person’s rights may be ­limited if they infringe on another’s.6 This is very dif­fer­ent, however, from circumscribing rights b ­ ecause they violate a power figure’s conception of “responsible be­hav­ior.” My colleague at Harvard, Kathryn Sikkink, has written an in­ter­est­ing book called The Hidden Face of Rights: ­Toward a Politics of Responsibilities that explores this complex topic thoughtfully.7

You just referred to “one person’s rights infringing on another’s.” Do communities have rights or only individuals? When the UDHR was written in 1948, it was framed almost entirely in terms of individuals. Almost ­every article begins with words like “Every­one has the right to . . . ,” but subsequently the ­human rights community recognized that ­t hose individuals belonged to communities and that ­t hose ­whole groups or communities might be subject to repression of their rights. The Convention Against Genocide, for example, took effect three years a­ fter the UDHR and sought to protect “national, ethnical, racial, or religious groups,” and many subsequent treaties on such ­t hings as racial discrimination (1969) or the rights of w ­ omen (1981) have focused on the rights of vari­ous communities of p ­ eople.

All well and good. But if systemic prob­lems like racism or economic exploitation exist, does it ­really ­matter what our rights are? ­ ecause of their origin in the Eu­ro­pean Enlightenment and the promotion of civil and po­liti­ B cal rights to the detriment of economic and social by Western powers, rights have been subject to critique from the left as vestiges of a cap­i­tal­ist system that utilizes them to place procedural checks on marginalized groups, insisting, for example, that t­ hose groups restrict their protests to rules-­based tactics. Amnesty’s refusal to designate anyone a prisoner of conscience who had resorted to vio­lence, no m ­ atter in what cause, played into that ste­reo­t ype. ­Others have argued that rights may provide admirable ideals, but in the face of pervasive racism and vast global in­equality, they have been an ineffectual tool with which to remedy the world’s most per­sis­tent prob­lems.8 The truth is I have some sympathy for ­t hese perspectives, the second, though, far more than the first. Rights are predicated on a rules-­based system; they do depend on treaties and laws and courts and enforcement by some kind of authority. But treaties, laws, courts, and goodness knows, “authority” are never infallible; indeed, they are often vehicles of repression. ­There may be occasions and situations that call for more direct action. And, yes, the existence of a ­human rights regimen has not vanquished ­either racism or economic in­equality and, by itself, never w ­ ill.

236

Common Questions About H ­ uman Rights

I would just make two points, though, in ­human rights’ defense. First, ­t hose who challenge the rights’ framework do so through the exercise of ­those very rights to f­ ree speech, press, association, and so on of which they are so skeptical. Without ­t hose rights, their critique of repression would be highly circumscribed. And in fact, almost ­every revolution takes place in the name of rights! When was the last time a revolutionary leader took control with the slogan “Let me impose my w ­ ill on all of you”? No, they take over in the name of “power to the ­people.” (Maybe Charles Taylor was an exception—­see Chapter 4.) And when ­t hose revolutionaries have succeeded in wresting power, they have a critical decision to make: w ­ ill they themselves become like the hated strongmen before them and marginalize the opposition, or ­w ill they introduce democracy and . . . ​­human rights? The second point is this: it is certainly true that ­until systems of racial and economic oppression are dismantled, we w ­ ill never live in the “good society” that h ­ uman rights envision any more than we ­w ill ­unless climate change is mitigated. To require that ­human rights do every­t hing, however, is to condemn it to do very ­little. And while we are waiting and working for the perfect world, we may not mind living in a better one. Many critics try to disparage h ­ uman rights on the grounds that they are so widely abused as to be meaningless.9 (Interestingly enough, it is usually comfortably placed academic aristocrats of the Global North who advance this claim far more than activists in the developing world who have seen firsthand how helpful ­human rights can be.) But domestic laws are constantly being broken, and we ­don’t conclude from that unhappy fact that we would be better off without them. Oh, yes, it’s an unfortunate fact that international h ­ uman rights d ­ on’t possess the kind of consistent enforcement mechanisms that most domestic statutes do—no ­human rights sheriff swooping in to handcuff e­ very torturer or consign e­ very enslaver to the slammer. If you doubt that ­human rights make for a better world, however, just imagine where we ­humans would be without them. We tried living in a world without any such international standards for hundreds of years prior to 1948. How did that serve us?

NOTES

Introduction 1. I never met Benenson, who was no longer active in Amnesty when I came along, but apparently he was a driven, difficult man. Born into a wealthy f­amily of Rus­sian Jews, though ­later a convert to Chris­tian­ity, Benenson lost his ­father a day before his ninth birthday. His ­mother, the mistress of Alexander Kerensky, the Rus­sian revolutionary leader whose government was overthrown by Lenin, was by her own account a poor parent. Peter involved himself in po­liti­cal c­ auses from an early age, so his founding of Amnesty was congruent with his life and values. But he broke with the organ­ization a­ fter becoming convinced it had been infiltrated by British intelligence and only sporadically maintained contact in his l­ater years. See Hugh O’Shaughnessy, “Peter Benenson: Founder of Amnesty International,” In­de­pen­dent, February 28, 2005, https://­w ww​.­i ndependent​.­co​.­u k​/­news​/­obituaries​/­peter​-­benenson​-­1 3233​.­html. 2. Robert D. McFadden, “Peter Benenson, Founder of Amnesty Group, Dies at 83,” New York Times, February 28, 2005, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2005​/­02​/­2 8​/­world​/­europe​/­p eter​ -­benenson​-­founder​-­of​-­a mnesty​-­group​-­dies​-­at​-­83​.­html. 3. First Annual Report, 1961–62 (London: Amnesty, 1962), 12–13. In 1996 I received a letter that read, “Your Lordship: Shortly before he died, Mohandas K. Gandhi confessed to me that he was a member of Amnesty International. Unfortunately the documentation of this claim was lost in a g­ reat Calcutta fire. However, I am pleased to inform you that I w ­ ill send you ­legal corroboration of Gandhi’s Amnesty membership in exchange for one million American dollars.” The fact that Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, thirteen years before Amnesty was conceived, was only one reason I was not tempted by this offer. 4. The initial board included the distinguished Irish politician and eventual Nobel Peace Prize winner Sean MacBride and the less distinguished leader of Britain’s Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, who would be tried for and acquitted of murder in 1979. First Annual Report, 4. 5. It may also have reflected the fact that at least three of the eight members of the inaugural board w ­ ere members of their respective religious hierarchies and hence used to centralized command—­the Anglican bishop of Birmingham; the Catholic archbishop Thomas Roberts (“Thomas Roberts [bishop],” Wikipedia, last modified July  23, 2021, https://­en​ .­w ikipedia​.­org ​/­w iki​/­Thomas ​_ ­Roberts ​_­( bishop)); and the rabbinical judge Isidor Grunfeld (“Isidor Grunfeld,” Wikipedia, last modified September 8, 2021, https://­en​.­w ikipedia​.­org​/­w iki​ /­Isidor​_­Grunfeld). First Annual Report, 4. 6. First Annual Report, 6. 7. Initially Amnesty worked only on articles 18 and 19 of the UDHR guaranteeing freedom of thought, religion, and expression, what Amnesty called “freedom of the mind.” First Annual Report, 1.

238

Notes to Pages 4–14

8. This strategy was symbolized by Amnesty’s logo: a burning candle surrounded by barbed wire. 9. Two overviews of Amnesty are Jonathan Power, Amnesty International: The ­Human Rights Story (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981); and Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Under­ standing Amnesty International (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 10. Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 6.

Chapter 1 1. The patrons ­were all white, and I doubt if the restaurant served anyone but white ­ eople; so the fact that they had a “colored rest­room” at all must have been designed solely to p propagandize segregation. 2. Emboldened by this victory, we coeditors tried next to expose what was rumored to be a quota on the admission of Jewish students to the school, but that was apparently a bridge too far and the newspaper’s faculty adviser shut down our sleuthing. 3. See “Torturer’s Apprentice: The Creation of Cruelty,” in The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary, ed. William F. Schulz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 124–126. 4. John Conroy, who interviewed torturers for his book Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary ­People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), reported a conversation with a sergeant in the Rhodesian army who had administered torture to prisoners: “He thinks his training as a torturer began at . . . ​boarding school, which he says was modeled on the British system. . . . ​ He . . . ​pointed to the hazing rites, upperclassmen mistreating ­t hose who had to serve them, as instrumental in his l­ ater transformation into a torturer.” Conroy, “Precis—­a Profile of Two Torturers,” University of Chicago, June 2, 2004, 3. Document in author’s possession. 5. Timothy Garton Ash, “Central Eu­rope: The Pre­sent Past,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 1995. 6. Larry Rohter, “The H ­ uman Rights Crowd Gives Realpolitik the Jitters,” New York Times, December  28, 2003, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2003​/­1 2​/­2 8​/­weekinreview​/­word​-­for​ -­word​-­k issinger​-­pinochet​-­human​-­rights​-­crowd​-­g ives​-­realpolitik​-­jitters​.­html. 7. Clyde Haberman, “Another Dove Takes Flight in the Dark Sky,” New York Times, October  10, 2003, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2003​/­10​/­10​/­nyregion​/­nyc​-­a nother​-­dove​-­t akes​ -­fl ight​-­in​-­a​-­dark​-­sky​.­html. 8. William Branigin, “American Teenager Awaits Caning in Orderly, Unbending Singapore,” Washington Post, April 13, 1994, https://­w ww​.­washingtonpost​.­com​/­archive​/­politics​/­1994​ /­0 4​/­1 3​/­a merican​-­teenager​-­awaits​-­c aning​-­i n​-­orderly​-­u nbending​-­singapore​/­9 f4d542f​-­0 0ac​ -­452e​-­be4f​-­2d3352ba41fa​/­. 9. Lee Kuan Yew, the “­father” of modern Singapore, argued that “Asian values,” with their emphasis on the needs of the community, ­were incompatible with h ­ uman rights, with its emphasis on the individual, a regimen he regarded as Western and imperialistic. We ­w ill look at this question in more detail in the section “Common Questions About ­Human Rights” at the back of this book. Michael D. Barr, “Lee Kuan Yew and the ‘Asian Values’ Debate,” Asian Studies Review 24, no. 3 (September 2000): 310–334, http://­w ww​.­cafefle​.­org​/­texteskkkmg​-­icc​ _­a rticles​/­13​_ ­Singapore​_ ­26p​-­Pol%20copie​.­pdf. 10. “Michael Fay Interview,” interview by Larry King, Larry King Live, CNN, June 29, 1994, audio, https://­w ww​.­corpun​.­com​/­sgju9406​.­htm.



Notes to Pages 15–22

239

11. See, for example, Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 12. The Tutsis made up 15 ­percent of the population, and a third ethnic group, the Twa (often called “pygmies”), constituted the final 1 ­percent. 13. V ­ irginia Hamilton and Koula Papanicolas, “Genocide in Rwanda: Documentation of Two Massacres During April  1994,” David Rawson Collection on the Rwandan Genocide, November 1994, 14. 14. Samantha Power, “A Prob­lem from Hell”: Amer­i­ca and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 366. 15. In his insightful article “The UN Security Council, Indifference, and Genocide in Rwanda,” Michael Barnett, a po­liti­cal science professor who in 1994 was serving as a po­liti­cal officer at the US Mission to the United Nations with responsibility for Rwanda, details the reasons for the United Nations’ inaction, including the fear that if it intervened and failed to stop the genocide, it would be discredited when it tried to deal with ­f uture interventions. Annan and UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-­Ghali apparently failed to consider that if they refused to intervene, the United Nations would be equally discredited. See Cultural Anthro­ pology 12, no. 4: 551–578. I met Barnett many years ­a fter the genocide at an Amnesty gathering in Madison, Wisconsin, where he taught. He was obviously still deeply troubled by the passivity of the United Nations and United States. 16. “One, Two, Many Rwandas,” Washington Post, April 17, 1994, https://­w ww​.­washington​ post​.­com​/­a rchive​/­opinions​/­1994​/­0 4​/­17​/­one​-­t wo​-­many​-­r wandas​/­aeee86e7​-­2b87​-­4 5e9​-­ae0d​ -­7a3b4c118ce9​/­. 17. “Cold Choices in Rwanda,” New York Times, April 23, 1994, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​ /­1994​/­04​/­23​/­opinion​/­cold​-­choices​-­in​-­r wanda​.­html. 18. “Rwanda: A Crisis Long in the Making,” Amnesty International News Ser­vice 75/94, April 14, 1994, https://­w ww​.­amnesty​.­org​/­es​/­w p​-­content​/­uploads​/­2021​/­06​/­nws110751994en​.­pdf. 19. “Rwanda’s Military and Governmental Authorities Complicit in Atrocities,” Amnesty International News Ser­vice 86/94, April  26, 1994, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org ​/­es​/­w p​-­content​ /­uploads​/­2021​/­06​/­nws110861994en​.­pdf. 20. “Oral Statement by Amnesty to the UN Commission on ­Human Rights,” Amnesty International News Ser­vice 107/94, May 24, 1994. 21. Power, “A Prob­lem from Hell,” 377. 22. Power, “A Prob­lem from Hell,” 352. 23. William F. Schulz, “US Leadership in Rwanda Crisis,” Washington Post, May 1, 1994. 24. AIUSA Rwanda/Burundi Crisis Response Team, “Current AI Approach to Rwanda,” memo to Mike Dotteridge and Godfrey B, December 22, 1994. In author’s possession. 25. I appeared regularly on Fox News programs, for example, and wrote for National Inter­ est magazine, as well as taking e­ very opportunity to be a guest on radio programs with predominantly Black or Latinx audiences. 26. At least according to the “Best Seller List” published in the June 10, 2001, edition of the Los Angeles Times. William F. Schulz, In Our Own Best Interests: How Defending ­Human Rights Benefits Us All (Boston: Beacon, 2001). 27. For a more detailed analy­sis of the circumstances u ­ nder which humanitarian military intervention is justified, see Rachel Kleinfeld, “The United States and the ­Future of Humanitarian Intervention,” in The ­Future of H ­ uman Rights: US Policy for a New Era, ed. William F. Schulz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 52–71.

240

Notes to Pages 22–29

28. I guess Bill Clinton eventually came to agree since he issued a semi-­apology for his inaction on Rwanda when he visited that country in 1998. See Bill Clinton, “Text of Clinton’s Rwanda Speech” (speech, Kigali, Rwanda, March 25, 1998), CBS News, https://­w ww​.­cbsnews​ .­com​/­news​/­text​-­of​-­clintons​-­r wanda​-­speech​/­. 29. See Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Dev­il: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003); and Samantha Power, “A Hero for Our Time,” New York Review of Books, November 18, 2004. 30. See Joshua Hammer, “He Was the Hero of ‘­Hotel Rwanda’: Now He’s Accused of Terrorism,” New York Times Magazine, March  7, 2021, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2021​/­03​/­02​ /­magazine​/­he​-­was​-­t he​-­hero​-­of​-­hotel​-­r wanda​-­now​-­hes​-­accused​-­of​-­terrorism​.­html. 31. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We W ­ ill Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998), 352–353.

Chapter 2 1. Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: HarperCollins, 2016). 2. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 192. 3. Margaret MacMillan, History’s ­People (London: Profile Books, 2015), 128. 4. This is one reason it was sometimes so frustrating to read descriptions from the International Secretariat of ­human rights crimes and their victims written in turgid, unemotional, or legalistic prose. The Secretariat claimed such a style was necessary to preserve its credibility. We in AIUSA would often reply, in effect, “What’s the use of credibility if you c­ an’t motivate p ­ eople to do anything?” 5. Lynn Hunt, Inventing H ­ uman Rights: A History (New York: WW Norton, 2007). 6. David Oshinsky, “The View from Inside,” New York Times Book Review, June 12, 2010. 7. Jean-­Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 317ff. 8. Lizette Alvarez, “Giuliani? He ­Wouldn’t Get Castro’s Vote,” New York Times, October 26, 1995, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1995​/­10​/­26​/­world​/­giuliani​-­he​-­wouldn​-­t​-­get​-­castro​-­s​-­vote​.­html. 9. The internalization of ­those norms keeps some countries in line even when Sartre’s jealous peeping tom is not caught in the act. As I wrote in 2015, “­Human rights organ­izations can see a lot—­more and more, in fact, thanks to our extensively wired world—­but they c­ an’t be everywhere. Yet ­human rights violations are sometimes stemmed merely by the possibility that they may become widely known. Why is that? ­Because, says Sartre, having experienced the power of another’s look, we know we are beings who can be seen. We have, in more psychological terms, internalized the Other’s Look so thoroughly that we adjust our be­hav­ior, even when we are not in danger of being found out . . . ​to conform to the norms that Look has instilled in us. ­Human rights organ­ izations and, indeed, the h ­ uman rights regimen itself (treaties, laws, courts, e­ tc.), rely heavi­ly on just this dynamic.” H. Richard Friman, The Politics of Leverage in International Relations: Name, Shame and Sanction, ed. William F. Schulz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 34. 10. Peter Benenson, “The Forgotten Prisoners,” London Observer, May 28, 1961. 11. “Detention and Imprisonment,” Amnesty International, accessed March  16, 2022, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org ​/­en​/­what​-­we​-­do​/­detention​/­. 12. “Statement on Alexei Navalny’s Status as Prisoner of Conscience,” Amnesty International, accessed March 22, 2022, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org ​/­en​/­latest​/­news​/­2021​/­05​/­statement​



Notes to Pages 30–35

241

-­on​-­a lexei​-­navalnys​-­status​-­a s​-­prisoner​-­of​-­conscience​/­ . See also Masha Gessen, “Why ­Won’t Amnesty International Call Alexey Navalny a Prisoner of Conscience?” New Yorker, February  24, 2021, https://­w ww​.­newyorker​.­com​/­news​/­our​-­columnists​/­why​-­wont​-­a mnesty​ -­international​-­call​-­a lexey​-­navalny​-­a​-­prisoner​-­of​-­conscience. 13. In 2011 Berenson acknowledged that she had, at least unintentionally, collaborated with the MRTA, though she denied ever having committed acts of vio­lence herself. Jennifer Egan, “The Liberation of Lori Berenson,” New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2011, https://­ www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2011​/­03​/­06​/­magazine​/­06berenson​-­t​.­html. 14. Her website noted that Amnesty had called her a “po­liti­cal prisoner,” which it had done by implication in a press release protesting her treatment in prison. “Po­liti­cal prisoners who refuse to renounce their beliefs,” Amnesty said, “are often denied rewards for ‘good behaviour’ and the organ­i zation [AI] suspected the Peruvian authorities singled her [Berenson] out for punishment [solitary confinement].” “Peru: Further Information on Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment: Lori Helen Berenson (f),” Amnesty International, last modified February 8, 1999, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org ​/­download​/­Documents​ /­144000​/­a mr460021999en​.­pdf. 15. John  F. Burns, “House of Graft,” New York Times, January  9, 1998, https://­w ww​ .­nytimes​.­com​/­1998​/­01​/­09​/­world​/­house​-­g raft​-­t racing​-­bhutto​-­millions​-­special​-­report​-­bhutto​ -­clan​-­leaves​-­t rail​.­html. 16. Executive Director’s Report to the Annual General Meeting, Amnesty International USA, 1989 (speech transcription). In author’s possession. 17. “Egypt: Imprisonment of H ­ uman Rights Defenders,” Amnesty International, last modified June  19, 2001, MDE 12/016/2001, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org ​/­download​/­Documents​ /­128000​/­mde120162001en​.­pdf. 18. “The Color of Their Clothes,” Amnesty International, last modified December 1, 1997, EUR 44/085/1997, https://­w ww​.­amnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​/­160000​/­eur440851997en​.­pdf. 19. “Mexico: Silencing Dissent,” Amnesty International, last modified April 30, 1997, AMR 41/031/1997, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​/­160000​/­a mr410311997en​.­pdf. 20. “China: ­Women’s Rights Action 2000,” Amnesty International, last modified February  2, 2000, ASA 17/004/2000, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org ​/­download​/­Documents​/­136000​ /­asa170042000en​.­pdf. 21. Monthly Mailing, Amnesty International USA, February 1996. In author’s possession. 22. Monthly Mailing, Amnesty International USA, February 1998. In author’s possession. 23. See, for example, “­Kenya: Ill-­Treatment/Fear for Safety: Wangari Maathai,” Amnesty International, last modified January 11, 1999, AFR 32/002/1999, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org ​/­en​ /­documents​/­a fr32​/­002​/­1999​/­en​/­. 24. Monthly Mailing, Amnesty International USA, June 1998. In author’s possession. 25. J Kile, “Iqbal Masih,” Moral Heroes, April  20, 2011, http://­moralheroes​.­org ​/­iqbal​ -­masih​/­. 26. This was also the occasion on which I first met one of the most delightful h ­ uman rights advocates it was ever my plea­sure to know. Li Lu was a leader of the student demonstrations in 1989 that resulted in the Tian­a nmen Square massacre. He subsequently was spirited out of China through Hong Kong to the United States, where in 1996 he became one of the few students to receive a BA, MBA, and JD si­mul­ta­neously from Columbia University. He now heads Himalayan Capital Management, a highly successful investment firm, and has been rumored to be a successor to Warren Buffett in managing Berkshire Hathaway’s investment portfolio.

242

Notes to Pages 35–43

27. “Mexico: Digna Ochoa,” On the Front Line 7, no.  1 (August  2003), https://­w ww​ .­a mnesty​.­org​/­en​/­w p​-­content​/­uploads​/­2021​/­06​/­a mr010072003en​.­pdf. 28. Monthly Mailing, Amnesty International USA, June 1998. In author’s possession. 29. “­Women Who Fight for H ­ uman Rights,” Parade, January 19, 1997.

Chapter 3 1. Niall McCarthy, “The Share of Americans Holding a Passport Has Increased Dramatically in Recent Years,” Forbes, January 11, 2018, https://­w ww​.­forbes​.­com​/­sites​/­niallmccarthy​ /­2 018​/­01​/­1 1​/­t he​-­s hare​-­of​-­a mericans​-­holding​-­a​-­p assport​-­h as​-­i ncreased​-­d ramatically​-­i n​ -­recent​-­years​-­infographic​/­#4458afd83c16. 2. “Amer­i­ca’s Place in the World II,” Pew Research Center, last modified October 10, 1997, https://­w ww​.­pewresearch​.­org​/­politics​/­1997​/­10​/­10​/­a mericas​-­place​-­in​-­t he​-­world​-­ii​/­. 3. “American Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy 1995,” Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, ed. John  E. Rielly, https://­w ww​.­worldcat​.­org ​/­t itle​/­a merican​-­public​-­opinion​-­a nd​ -­us​-­foreign​-­policy​-­1995​/­oclc​/­32365348. 4. Jim Defede, “War Is Hell—­and Boring as Hell, Too,” Miami New Times, August 17, 1995, https://­w ww​.­miaminewtimes​.­com​/­news​/­war​-­is​-­hell​-­a nd​-­boring​-­as​-­hell​-­too​-­6363616. 5. I reached out to Aryeh Neier shortly a­ fter I arrived at Amnesty. He was then heading George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. A ­ fter keeping me waiting for about thirty minutes, he called me into his office, told me he had ten minutes to talk, and then proceeded to spend ­t hose ten minutes explaining how awful Amnesty was. It was the first and last time I ever spoke with him. With Ken Roth, on the other hand, I had a more constructive, though occasionally combative, relationship. Nonetheless, I liked and respected him, and, since I could be combative too, we usually managed to fight each other to a draw and then go on from t­ here. 6. It is notoriously difficult to give an exact count of the number of sovereign states in the world at any one time. Though ­today something like 140 countries recognize Palestine as a sovereign state, for example, many major ones do not. The Cook Islands are in “­free association” with New Zealand. Are they a separate country? What about Northern Cyprus, which is recognized only by Turkey but is certainly a separate entity from the Republic of Cyprus in the south? 7. “Disappearances” refer to cases in which ­people, usually ­human rights defenders or their ­family members, are literally removed from their homes or communities, often by representatives of the state, and never heard from again. 8. It is very difficult to get an op-ed printed in the Washington Post or the New York Times, but two of mine about China made it in, reflecting the interest US relations with that country can garner: “Mr. Clinton, Meet Mr. Wu,” Washington Post, September 24, 1995, https://­ www​.­washingtonpost​.­com​/­a rchive​/­opinions​/­1995​/­09​/­24​/­mr​-­clinton​-­meet​-­mr​-­w u​/­434f9cd3​ -­956c​-­4948​-­8848​-­5b4cf7dce46f​/­; and “Jiang’s Awakening,” New York Times, November 5, 1997, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1997​/­11​/­05​/­opinion​/­jiangs​-­awakening​.­html. I also placed an op-ed in the Times in 2002 about the treatment of terrorist prisoners: “The Fate of Qaeda Prisoners,” New York Times, January 19, 2002, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2002​/­01​/­19​/­opinion​/­t he​-­fate​-­of​ -­qaeda​-­prisoners​.­html. 9. “China: No One Is Safe—­Political Repression and Abuse of Power in the 1990s—­ includes correction,” Amnesty International, last modified March 1, 1996, ASA 17/001/1996, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​/­168000​/­asa170011996en​.­pdf. 10. Monthly Mailing, Amnesty International USA, October 1997. In author’s possession.



Notes to Pages 43–44

243

11. Catherine S. Manegold, “China Is Said to Sell Executed Inmates’ Organs,” New York Times, May 5, 1995, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1995​/­05​/­05​/­world​/­china​-­is​-­said​-­to​-­sell​-­executed​ -­inmates​-­organs​.­html. 12. During my years with Amnesty I entered China proper twice. On the Hong Kong trip, my wife and I joined a tour group for a day trip to Guangzhou, and in 2006 former US congressman Chester Atkins and I s­ topped overnight in Beijing on our way to and from Mongolia. The latter trip was a bit touch and go b ­ ecause I had applied for and received a visa that permitted only one entry to China, forgetting that I would need to enter a second time on our return from Ulan Bator. At first China Air would not let me board in Ulan Bator for the return trip, but Chet pulled some strings with the American embassy and I was allowed on, not certain what would happen when we got to customs in Beijing. When we arrived at Chinese customs, Chet saw the line labeled “Diplomatic Passports”; hauled out his congressional ID card, which was only thirteen years out of date; and flashed it at the customs officer. Apparently it did the trick. On both ­t hese occasions I was not too impressed with China’s surveillance system since it had not spotted a dreaded Amnesty official entering the country, but I was delighted (and relieved) by its inadequacy. 13. ­Great Britain had acquired the three main sections of Hong Kong—­Kowloon, Hong Kong Island, and the New Territories—in the First (1839–1842) and Second (1956–1960) Opium Wars. By treaty the New Territories ­were to revert to China on July 1, 1997. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was convinced that without the New Territories the other two parts of the city could not survive, and she was certainly not willing to risk a breach or even war with a power­house like China. A ­ fter all, China was a bit more heavi­ly armed than Argentina, with which she had waged war in 1982 over the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands. Becky ­Little, “How Hong Kong Came ­Under ‘One Country, Two Systems’ Rule,” History, September 3, 2019, https://­w ww​.­history​.­com​/­news​/­hong​-­kong​-­china​-­great​-­britain. 14. China had agreed to maintain the fundamental rights guaranteed by British law for fifty years (“two systems”) while integrating the territory back into China (“one nation”). 15. This approach continued into the Obama administration as evidenced by a press “readout” (or briefing) from a November 2010 meeting between President Obama and President Hu Jintao. ­A fter a long description of the economic and security issues covered in the meeting, the readout concludes, “POTUS also brought up ­human rights with Hu.” See “Pool Report #8,” White House Press Office, November 11, 2010. In author’s possession. 16. He was not quite as receptive to my wife, Beth, when we met him at a Re­nais­sance Weekend in Hilton Head, South Carolina, in late 1998, shortly ­a fter his acquittal on impeachment charges connected to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Bill and Hillary spoke ­every year at ­t hese gatherings of movers and shakers to which we had been invited ­because of my Amnesty credentials; given the impeachment, every­one was quite curious to see how the Clintons would ­handle that year’s conversation. At a hugely crowded reception for the president before their eve­ning program, I said to Beth, who had never shaken hands with a US president, “Let’s see if we can introduce you to the president”; so we pushed our way through the crowd, fi­nally reaching him. “Mr.  President,” I said, “Bill Schulz of Amnesty International.” “Of course, Bill,” Clinton said. “No need to introduce yourself. It’s good to see you again.” “Thank you, Mr. President,” I said, “and I’d like to introduce you to my wife, Beth.” “Reverend Beth Graham,” Beth said, putting out her hand along with her title, and then, just to make conversation, she added, “And where are Hillary and Chelsea?” Well, apparently the combination of a clerical title with an inquiry that might even remotely imply that he had ditched

244

Notes to Pages 44–52

his wife and ­daughter was enough at that particularly sensitive moment to spark the famous Clinton temper. His face reddened, the veins in his neck swelled and turned purple: “­They’ll be ­here any minute!” he sputtered and quickly turned away from his inquisitor. 17. It is notable that he signed the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court shortly before he left office, though it was never ratified by the Senate and his signing was “revoked” by his successor, George W. Bush. 18. John M. Brody and Jim Mann, “Clinton Reverses His Policy, Renews China Trade Status,” Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1994, https://­w ww​.­latimes​.­com​/­a rchives​/­la​-­x pm​-­1994​-­05​-­27​ -­mn​-­62877​-­story​.­html. 19. R.  W. Apple  Jr., “Clinton Concedes China Policy ­Hasn’t Helped Much on ­Human Rights,” New York Times, January 29, 1997, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1997​/­01​/­29​/­world​/­clinton​ -­concedes​-­china​-­policy​-­hasn​-­t​-­helped​-­much​-­on​-­rights​.­html. 20. See “Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, Before the United States Senate,” 104th Congress, 1st Session, May 4, 1995, testimony of William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International. 21. Alison Mitchell, “Clinton Visits Dalai Lama, Informally,” New York Times, April 24, 1997, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­c om​/­1 997​/­0 4​/­2 4​/­world​/­c linton​-­v isits​-­d alai​-­l ama​-­i nformally​ .­html. 22. Ma­ya Oppenheim, “Richard Gere Says He’s Been Dropped from Big Hollywood Movies B ­ ecause China D ­ oesn’t Like Him,” In­de­pen­dent, April 20, 2017, https://­w ww​.­independent​ .­c o​.­u k ​/­a rts​-­e ntertainment​/­f ilms​/­news​/­r ichard​-­gere​-­big​-­hollywood​-­movies​-­c hina​-­t ibet​ -­buddhist​-­dalia​-­lama​-­chinese​-­audience​-­blockbusters​-­a7693256​.­html. 23. For a description of actions a determined US government could have taken to pressure China on h ­ uman rights, see William F. Schulz, Strategic Per­sis­tence: How the United States Can Help Improve H ­ uman Rights in China (Washington, DC: Center for American Pro­gress, 2009). 24. “Mission to Bosnia,” Amnesty Action, Fall 1995. 25. “Bosnia-­Herzegovina: The Missing of Srebrenica,” Amnesty International, last modified August  31, 1995, EUR 63/022/1995, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​ /­176000​/­eur630221995en​.­pdf. 26. “Srebrenica,” NIOD, 2002, https://­w ww​.­niod​.­n l​/­en​/­srebrenica​-­report​/­report. 27. George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American C ­ entury (New York: Penguin, 2019). 28. Lang also owned the famous Gundel restaurant in Budapest, which, despite stunning décor, served surprisingly mediocre food on the two occasions I dined t­ here. 29. “Dayton Peace Agreement,” University of Minnesota H ­ uman Rights Library, accessed May 18, 2022, http://­hrlibrary​.­u mn​.­edu​/­icty​/­dayton​/­daytonannex6​.­html. 30. “Arrest Now!” ­Human Rights Watch, accessed March 17, 2022, https://­w ww​.­hrw​.­org​ /­legacy​/­press​/­factsht​.­htm. 31. Lester Kurtz, “Otpor and the Strug­g le for Democracy in Serbia (1998–2000),” International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, February  2010, https://­w ww​.­nonviolent​-­conflict​.­org​ /­otpor​-­struggle​-­democracy​-­serbia​-­1998​-­2000​/­. See also the film Bringing Down a Dictator, directed by Steve York (PBS International, 2002). 32. “Landmark Cases,” United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugo­slavia, accessed March 17, 2022, https://­w ww​.­icty​.­org ​/­sid​/­10314.



Notes to Pages 53–59

245

33. Bill Meyer, “Amnesty International Calls NATO’s Bombing of Serbian TV Station a ‘War Crime,’ ” Cleveland, March 28, 2019, https://­w ww​.­cleveland​.­com​/­world​/­2009​/­04​/­a mnesty​ _­international​_­calls​_­na​.­html. 34. “The Kosovo Report,” Relief Web, accessed July 12, 2022 https://­reliefweb​.­i nt​/­report​ /­a lbania​/­kosovo​-­report. 35. “Continued Public Support for Kosovo but Worries Grow,” Pew Research Center, April 21, 1999, https://­w ww​.­pewresearch​.­org​/­politics​/­1999​/­04​/­21​/­continued​-­public​-­support​-­for​ -­kosovo​-­but​-­worries​-­grow​/­. 36. “Remembering the Gulf War: Key Facts and Figures About the Conflict,” Forces/Net, February 28, 2021, https://­w ww​.­forces​.­net​/­news​/­remembering​-­g ulf​-­war​-­key​-­facts​-­figures. 37. General Wesley Clark, conversation with author, December 31, 2000. 38. Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, “­Those Incubator Babies, Once More,” Coun­ terpunch, June  15, 1999, https://­w ww​.­counterpunch​.­org​/­1999​/­06​/­15​/­those​-­incubator​-­babies​ -­once​-­more​/­. 39. “British Report Accuses Saddam of H ­ uman Rights Abuses,” PBS NewsHour, Nation section, December  2, 2002, https://­w ww​.­pbs​.­org ​/­newshour​/­nation​/­middle ​_­east​-­july​-­dec02​ -­iraq​_ ­12​-­02. 40. Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, December 2, 2002. 41. John Pilger, “American Terrorist,” New Statesman, January 12, 2004. For a more balanced critique of ­human rights organ­izations’ failure to criticize the Iraq War, see David Bosco, “A Con­spic­u­ous Silence on Iraq,” Boston Globe, May 13, 2007, http://­archive​.­boston​.­com​ /­news​/­g lobe​/­editorial ​_­opinion​/­oped​/­a rticles​/­2007​/­05​/­13​/­a ​_­conspicuous ​_ ­silence ​_­on ​_ ­iraq​/­. 42. Mark Follman, “The Coming Trial of Saddam Hussein,” Salon, December 15, 2003. 43. William  F. Schulz, “Executive Director’s Report to the Annual General Meeting,” Amnesty International USA, 1999. 44. Aryn Baker, “Blood Diamonds,” Time, n.d., accessed March  17, 2022, https://­t ime​ .­com​/ ­blood​-­diamonds​/­. 45. For some particularly suspicious ­people it did not help that my name was Schulz and that AIUSA’s se­nior deputy executive director’s was Goering! 46. Robert L. Bern­stein, “Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast,” New York Times, October 19, 2000, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2009​/­10​/­20​/­opinion​/­20bernstein​.­html. 47. B’Tselem website (Israeli Information Center for H ­ uman Rights in the Occupied Territories), https://­w ww​.­btselem​.­org ​/­. 48. Bern­stein, “Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast.” 49. Personal conversation with author, 1993. 50. This experience of overweening authority in the name of a meretricious sense of security was reminiscent of that 1993 trip with Congressman Tom Andrews of Maine. When we departed Israel from Ben Gurion Airport, border control agents quizzed us on what we had been ­doing in the country. When they learned that Tom was a US member of Congress who had met with Foreign Minister Peres, they demanded to know what had been discussed. Tom refused to tell them, regarding the conversation as privileged. “Ask Minister Peres if you want to know,” he said. For over an hour t­ here was a standoff, with the agents threatening not to let us leave. This was reckless intransigence on their part ­because Tom was a member of the House Armed Ser­v ices Committee who voted on the $3 billion of military support the United States provided Israel each year. Eventually the agents gave up, and we boarded our plane.

246

Notes to Pages 60–64

51. Carlos Strenger, “Talking-­Cure Diplomacy,” New York Times, February  26, 2010, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2010​/­02​/­26​/­opinion​/­26strenger​.­html. 52. Alan A. Lachica, “Humanitarian Intervention in East Timor: An Analy­sis of Australia’s Leadership Role,” Peace and Conflict Review, http://­w ww​.­review​.­upeace​.­org ​/­index​ .­cfm​?­opcion​=­0&ejemplar​=2­ 2&entrada​=­113. 53. “Accountability for Crimes Against Humanity in East Timor,” H ­ uman Rights Watch, last modified September 20, 1999, https://­w ww​.­hrw​.­org​/­news​/­1999​/­09​/­20​/­accountability​-­crimes​ -­against​-­humanity​-­east​-­t imor#. 54. An unfortunate long-­term consequence of the East Timor controversy was that Mary Robinson’s successor as high commissioner, the Brazilian diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello, was killed in the 2003 bombing by al-­Qaeda of the Canal ­Hotel in Baghdad allegedly in part for his role in the East Timor Transitional Government, which was perceived to have separated East Timor from the majority-­Muslim Indonesia. Natasha Ishak, “Sérgio Vieiro de Mello’s Inspiring Story of Fostering Peace Around the World,” All That’s In­ter­est­ing, February 5, 2020, https://­a llthatsinteresting​.­com​/­sergio​-­v ieira​-­de​-­mello. I lost a friend in that bombing, a refugee specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations named Arthur Helton, who at my request had evaluated AIUSA’s Refugee Program the year before his death and made recommendations for its restructuring. 55. Edward Wong and Michael LaForgia, “Watchdog Says State Dept. Failed to Limit Civilian Deaths From Saudi Arms Sale,” https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2020​/­08​/­11​/­us​/­politics​/­pompeo​ -­state​-­inspector​-­general​-­saudi​-­weapons​-­civilian​-­casualties​.­html. 56. Daniel R. Mahanty, “The ‘Leahy Law’ Prohibiting US Assistance to ­Human Rights Abusers: Pulling Back the Curtain,” Just Security, June 27, 2017, https://­w ww​.­justsecurity​.­org​ /­42578​/­leahy​-­law​-­prohibiting​-­assistance​-­human​-­rights​-­abusers​-­pulling​-­curtain​/­. 57. See Jeri Laber, “The Hidden War in Turkey,” New York Review of Books, June 23, 1994; and William F. Schulz, letter to the editor, New York Review of Books, June 8, 1995. 58. CBSNews​.­com staff, “Amer­i­ca’s Link to Turkey’s War,” CBS Eve­ning News, February 16, 1999, https://­w ww​.­cbsnews​.­com​/­news​/­a mericas​-­link​-­to​-­turkeys​-­war​/­. 59. “An American Dilemma,” 60 Minutes, CBS, January 14, 1996. 60. See “Press Conference: United States Funded H ­ uman Rights Violations in Colombia,” Amnesty International, October 29, 1996; and “The Columbia Papers,” Amnesty Action, Winter 1997. We ­were still carry­ing on this fight six years ­later when the George W. Bush administration cleared $2 million in aid to Colombia’s armed forces, claiming they w ­ ere improving their h ­ uman rights rec­ord, a claim I labeled a “farce.” Todd Purdum, “US, Citing Better ­Human Rights, Allows Aid to Colombia Military,” New York Times, September 10, 2002, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​ /­2002​/­09​/­10​/­world​/­us​-­citing​-­better​-­human​-­rights​-­allows​-­aid​-­to​-­colombia​-­military​.­html. 61. Reuben Abati, “Ken Saro-­Wiwa, Jerry Usemi and a Forgetful Nation,” Afro Beat, November  9, 2008, http://­theafrobeat​.­blogspot​.­com​/­2008​/­11​/­ken​-­saro​-­wiwa​-­jerry​-­useni​-­and​-­forgetful​ .­html. 62. “Nigeria Defies the World,” Amnesty Action, Winter 1996. 63. Monthly Mailing, Amnesty International USA, July 8, 1997. In author’s possession. 64. “Wiwa v. Royal Dutch Shell,” Earth Rights International, accessed March 18, 2022, https://­earthrights​.­org ​/­case​/­w iwa​-­v​-­royal​-­dutch​-­shell​/­. 65. “The Stolen Victory and Mysterious Death of Moshood Abiola,” Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, accessed March  18, 2022, https://­adst​.­org​/­2015​/­12​/­t he​-­stolen​ -­v ictory​-­a nd​-­mysterious​-­death​-­of​-­moshood​-­abiola​/­.



Notes to Pages 65–78

247

66. Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Rage over Christian Persecution,” New York Times Magazine, December 21, 1997. 67. Steven Holmes, “GOP Leaders Back Bill on Religious Persecution,” New York Times, September  11, 1997, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1997​/­09​/­11​/­world​/­gop​-­leaders​-­back​-­bill​-­on​ -­religious​-­persecution​.­html. 68. Holmes, “GOP Leaders.” 69. Transcript #8358, World News To­night, ABC News, October 6, 1998. 70. “Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights,” US Department of State, July 2020, https://­w ww​.­state​.­gov​/­w p​-­content​/­uploads​/­2020​/­07​/­Draft​-­Report​-­of​-­t he​-­C ommission​-­on​ -­Unalienable​-­R ights​.­pdf. 71. See William  F. Schulz and Mark  P. Lagon, “Conservatives, Liberals and ­Human Rights,” Policy Review, February  1, 2012, https://­w ww​.­hoover​.­org ​/­research​/­conservatives​ -­liberals​-­a nd​-­human​-­rights.

Chapter 4 1. Robert Gillette, “Ceausescu Getting Rid of Inefficient Small Villages,” Los Angeles Times, December  17, 1985, https://­w ww​.­latimes​.­com​/­archives​/­la​-­xpm​-­1985​-­12​-­17​-­mn​-­30002​ -­story​.­html. 2. Ethnic Hungarians made up about 6.5 ­percent of the population of Romania but almost 20 ­percent of the population in Transylvania. In fact, some villages w ­ ere overwhelmingly Hungarian, and, of ­t hese, a few ­were made up almost entirely of Unitarians. 3. See, for example, Nick S, “Flooded Village of Bezidu Nou,” Atlas Obscura, August 8, 2014, https://­w ww​.­atlasobscura​.­com​/­places​/­flooded​-­v illage​-­of​-­bezidu​-­nou. 4. “Nicolae Ceaușescu Last Speech,” August 28, 2011, YouTube, https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​ /­watch​?­v ​=T ­ cRWiz1PhKU. 5. See William  F. Schulz, Finding Time and Other Delicacies (Boston: Skinner House, 1992), 166. 6. Schulz, Finding Time, 166. 7. Ion Companescu, the Ceaușescu regime’s minister of cults, with whom UUA presidents had had many unpleasant dealings over the years, had dis­appeared or, as we ­were told by his newly appointed successor, “pensioned into retirement.” 8. I also made an unofficial visit in 2004 to Cuba. Having regularly criticized Fidel Castro’s government for holding po­liti­cal prisoners, Amnesty was not welcome in the country, and it was Amnesty practice not to enter countries without the government’s knowledge and permission. When I was invited, as chair of the board of the Unitarian Universalist Ser­v ice Committee (UUSC), to accompany a del­e­ga­tion from Southwest Voter, a nonpartisan Latinx voter participation proj­ect that was traveling to Cuba u ­ nder UUSC’s travel license, I knew I would need to disclose my Amnesty affiliation to Cuban officials and get clearance from Amnesty’s International Secretariat. The latter was more resistant to my making the trip than the former, even though I made clear to both that I was traveling with my UUSC board chair hat on and not as an Amnesty official. The Cuban government seemed to have no worries about my proposed presence, but the Secretariat was afraid I would make some commitment to the Cubans that would be at odds with Amnesty policy. Fi­nally, the Secretariat agreed I could go and even explore unofficially the possibility of a formal visit by Amnesty. T ­ oward that end, I met privately with several top government leaders, but ultimately we could strike no deal. ­Because we had two members of Congress with us, t­ here was a possibility that we might have

248

Notes to Pages 79–89

an “audience” with Fidel Castro. Such meetings usually took place when one was summoned in the m ­ iddle of the night to meet El Comandante and often consisted of Fidel talking at his visitors for hours on end. I was relieved when the summons never came. 9. A video of his torture, including the severing of his ears, can still be accessed on YouTube: “The Execution of Former Liberian President Sanuel K. Doe,” June 14 2015, YouTube, https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­c5xJpj7EmQM. 10. “Liberia,” Center for Justice and Accountability, accessed March 18, 2022, https://­cja​.­org​ /­where​-­we​-­work ​/­l iberia​/­#:~:text​=­Between%201989%20and%202003%2C%20civil,over%20 half%20the%20country’s%20population. 11. “Liberia: Time to Take ­Human Rights Seriously—­Placing ­Human Rights on the National Agenda,” Amnesty International, last modified September 30, 1997, AFR 34/005/1997, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​/­156000​/­a fr340051997en​.­pdf. 12. Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps (New York: Penguin, 1978). 13. This story is told in similar language in William F. Schulz, In Our Own Best Interest: Why Defending H ­ uman Rights Benefits Us All (Boston: Beacon, 2002), 22. 14. The Star Wars–­like acronym ECOMOG stands for Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group. When UN officials had confronted ECOMOG officials about abuses, ­t hose officials merely threatened to withdraw protection from UN compounds, a threat sufficient to quell the objections. 15. This story is told in similar language in Schulz, In Our Own Best Interest, 22. 16. Associated Press, “US Embassy in Liberia Is Fired On,” New York Times, September 22, 1998, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1998​/­09​/­22​/­world​/­us​-­embassy​-­i n​-­l iberia​-­is​-­fi red​-­on​ .­html. 17. Unfortunately, Ken Noble died of heart failure at the tragically young age of sixty. See Paul Vitello, “Kenneth Noble, Ex-­Times Reporter, Is Dead at 60,” New York Times, July 22, 2014, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2014​/­07​/­23​/­business​/­kenneth​-­b​-­noble​-­former​-­times​-­reporter​ -­dies​-­at​-­60​.­html. 18. Kerry Kennedy, Speak Truth to Power (New York: Umbrage Editions, 2000), 124. 19. Their story is told in the inspiring movie Pray the Devil Back to Hell (directed by Gini Reticker, Fork Films, 2008). At the peace conference in Ghana, the w ­ omen surrounded the negotiating ­table and literally would not let the participants leave u ­ ntil a resolution to the fighting had been agreed on. 20. “Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations,” Bartleby, last modified 1989, https://­w ww​.­bartleby​.­com​/­73​/­369​.­html. 21. This story is told in similar language in Schulz, In Our Own Best Interest, 42–43. 22. “Statistical Breakdown of Deaths in ‘the Trou­bles,’ ” Wesley Johnston, accessed March 18, 2022, https://­w ww​.­wesleyjohnston​.­com​/­users​/­ireland​/­past​/­t roubles​/­t roubles​_­stats​ .­html. 23. “Q&A: The Murder of Pat Finucane,” BBC News, October 7, 2019, https://­w ww​.­bbc​ .­com​/­news​/­u k​-­northern​-­ireland​-­20683378. 24. “UK/Northern Ireland: The Killing of Patrick Finucane,” Amnesty International, last modified February  1, 2000, EUR 45/026/2000, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org ​/­download​ /­Documents​/­136000​/­eur450262000en​.­pdf. 25. “Pat Finucane Report: David Cameron Apologises over Killing,” Guardian, December 12, 2012, https://­w ww​.­theguardian​.­com​/­uk​/­2012​/­dec​/­12​/­pat​-­finucane​-­report​-­david​-­cameron​ -­apologises. The ­family continues to seek a fully in­de­pen­dent public investigation.



Notes to Pages 90–101

249

26. “UK (Northern Ireland): The Killing of H ­ uman Rights Defender Rosemary Nelson,” Amnesty International, last modified March 31, 1999, EUR 45/022/1999, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​ .­org​/­download​/­Documents​/­148000​/­eur450221999en​.­pdf. 27. See a detailed chronology of events surrounding the murder in Rosemary Nelson: The Life and Death of a H ­ uman Rights Defender (Derry, Ireland: Pat Finucane Center, 1999). 28. Steven McCaffery, “State Failure over Murdered L ­ awyer Rosemary Nelson,” In­de­pen­ dent, May 23, 2011, https://­w ww​.­independent​.­co​.­uk​/­news​/­uk​/­crime​/­state​-­failure​-­over​-­murdered​ -­lawyer​-­rosemary​-­nelson​-­2287979​.­html. 29. The Fenians ­were the nineteenth-­century pre­de­ces­sors of the IRA. “Fenians” was a common epithet used to refer to Catholics. 30. “UK (Northern Ireland): The Sectarian Killing of Robert Hamill,” Amnesty International, September 30, 1999, EUR 45/031/1999, https://­w ww​.­amnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​ /­148000​/­eur450311999en​.­pdf. 31. “Getting to the Truth B ­ ehind Hamill Death,” Irish Times, December 28, 2002, https://­ www​.­irishtimes​.­com​/­news​/­getting​-­to​-­t he​-­t ruth​-­behind​-­hamill​-­death​-­1​.­1110167. 32. Marina Caparini and Juneseo Hwang, “Police Reform in Northern Ireland: Achievements and ­Future Challenges,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, last modified October 28, 2019, https://­w ww​.­sipri​.­org ​/­commentary​/­topical​-­backgrounder​/­2019​ /­police​-­reform​-­northern​-­ireland​-­achievements​-­a nd​-­f uture​-­challenges. 33. Samantha Anne Caesar, “Captive or Criminal? Reappraising the ­Legal Status of IRA Prisoners at the Height of the Trou­bles U ­ nder International Law,” Duke Journal of Compara­ tive and International Law 27, no. 323 (2017): 323–348, https://­scholarship​.­law​.­duke​.­edu​/­cgi​ /­v iewcontent​.­cgi​?­a rticle ​=­1503&context​=­djcil. 34. This story is told in similar language in Schulz, In Our Own Best Interest, 177–79. See also Clare Murphy, “Trimble Urged to ‘Reach Out’ to Hamill F ­ amily,” Irish Times, May 15, 1999, https://­w ww​.­irishtimes​.­com​/­news​/­trimble​-­urged​-­to​-­reach​-­out​-­to​-­hamill​-­family​-­1​.­185031. 35. The government referred to the rebel groups collectively as “Tora Bora,” presumably a reference to the mountains of Af­ghan­i­stan from which the Taliban launched assaults and in which Osama bin Laden hid for a time. 36. Eric Reeves, “Sudan’s Reign of Terror,” Amnesty Now, Summer 2004. 37. “Sudan: At the Mercy of Killers,” Amnesty International, July  1, 2004, AFR 54/072/2004, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​/­92000​/­a fr540722004en​.­pdf. 38. International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia-­Herzegovina vs. Serbia and Montenegro),” July 11, 1996, https://­w ww​.­icj​-­cij​.­org ​/­en​/­case​/­91. 39. Rebecca Hamilton, “Inside Colin Powell’s Decision to Declare Genocide in Darfur,” Atlantic, August  17, 2011, https://­w ww​.­t heatlantic​.­com​/­international​/­a rchive​/­2011​/­08​/­inside​ -­colin​-­powells​-­decision​-­to​-­declare​-­genocide​-­in​-­darfur​/­243560​/­. 40. The “fog of war” complicated the African Union’s task further, its commanding officer telling us that he had never seen so many dif­fer­ent uniforms, c­ ouldn’t tell one from another, and sometimes had no idea who was fighting on which side or with what authority. He quoted an internally displaced person as having told him that you could always tell who was Janjaweed b ­ ecause a Janjaweed “walked like a camel.” 41. We also met with Jan Pronk, the UN secretary general’s representative to Sudan, and Andrew Natsios, head of the US Agency for International Development, both of whom ­were in Khartoum during our visit.

250

Notes to Pages 103–107

42. “Sudan Is Inching Closer to Handing over Its Former Dictator for a Genocide Trial,” New York Times, August 13, 2021. 43. Abdi Latif Dahir, “Sudan Signs Peace Deal with Alliance of Rebel Groups,” New York Times, September 1, 2020, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2020​/­08​/­31​/­world​/­a frica​/­sudan​-­peace​ -­agreement​-­darfur​.­html. 44. Abdi Latif Dahir, “ ‘They Keep Killing Us’: Vio­lence Rages in Sudan’s Darfur Two De­ cades On,” New York Times, March  19, 2002, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2022​/­03​/­19​/­world​ /­a frica​/­sudan​-­darfur​.­html. 45. Amnesty and ­Human Rights Watch w ­ ere reticent to label what was happening in Darfur “genocide” for fear that the UN Commission of Inquiry, authorized in September 2004, would not find sufficient l­egal grounds for using that word, as indeed they did not. Irene also believed that the words Amnesty International was using—­“ethnic cleansing,” “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity”—­were strong enough and that calling Darfur “genocide” would make the Sudanese government even more recalcitrant than it already was. Furthermore, when Powell had used the word “genocide,” which has a very specific l­ egal meaning and requires intent to eliminate an identifiable group in w ­ hole or in part, the rebels had withdrawn from incipient peace talks ­because they allegedly thought the international community would now do their work for them. 46. One of the speeches I gave shortly a­ fter the mission was at the US Holocaust Museum where the Save Darfur Co­ali­tion, on whose board I ­later sat, was launched in July 2004.

Chapter 5 1. See “The INS v. Juvenile Justice,” Amnesty Now, Fall 2002; and “­Women, Vio­lence and Health,” Amnesty International, last modified February 18, 2005, ACT 77/001/2005, https://­w ww​ .­amnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​/­80000​/­act770012005en​.­pdf. Thanks to the efforts of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Demo­crat from New York, among o ­ thers, far more attention has been paid to assaults on ­women serving in the military. See, for example, Melinda Wenner Moyer, “ ‘A Poison in the System’: The Epidemic of Military Sexual Assault,” New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2021, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2021​/­08​/­03​/­magazine​/­military​-­sexual​-­assault​.­html. 2. “Maze of Injustice,” Amnesty International, last modified 2007, AMR 51/035/2007, https://­w ww​.­a mnestyusa​.­org ​/­pdfs​/­mazeofinjustice​.­pdf. 3. “Vio­lence Against W ­ omen Act (VAWA) Reauthorization,” US Department of Justice, accessed March 12, 2022, https://­www​.­justice​.­gov​/­tribal​/­violence​-­against​-­women​-­act​-­vawa​-­reau​t hor​ization​ -­2013​-­0#:~:text​=­On%20March%207%2C%202013%2C%20President,non%2​D​Indian%20status​ %2C%20who%20commit. 4. “United States of Amer­i­ca: Police Brutality and Excessive Force in New York City Police Department,” Amnesty International, last modified June  26, 1996, AMR 51/036/1996, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​/­168000​/­a mr510361996en​.­pdf. 5. Clifford Krauss, “Rights Group Finds Abuse of Suspects by City Police,” New York Times, June 26, 1996. 6. Ali Watkins, “NYPD Disbands Plainclothes Units Involved in Many Shootings,” New York Times, June 15, 2020, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2020​/­06​/­15​/­nyregion​/­nypd​-­plainclothes​ -­cops​.­html. 7. “Fatal Police Vio­lence by Race and State in the United States of Amer­i­ca: 1998–2019,” Lancet 398, no. 10307 (October 2021): 1239–1255, https://­w ww​.­sciencedirect​.­com​/­science​/­article​ /­pii​/­S0140673621016093.



Notes to Pages 107–112

251

8. Executive Director’s Report to the Annual General Meeting, Amnesty International USA, 2000. In author’s possession. 9. Jeffrey Goldberg, “Sore Winner,” New York Times Magazine, August 16, 1998, https://­ www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1998​/­08​/­16​/­magazine​/­sore​-­w inner​.­html. 10. William F. Schulz, “Sore Winner,” New York Times Magazine, September 6, 1998. Safir’s pre­de­ces­sor as commissioner, William Bratton, who had been fired by Giuliani, admitted that the NYPD had a prob­lem with brutality when he appeared with defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, George Kelling (coauthor of the infamous “broken win­ dows” approach to policing—­ see George  L. Kelling and James  Q. Wilson, “Broken Win­ dows,” Atlantic, March 1982, https://­w ww​.­theatlantic​.­com​/­magazine​/­archive​/­1982​/­03​/­broken​-­windows​/­304465​/­), and me at a forum a short time ­a fter our report was issued. “­There are hundreds of cops who simply s­ houldn’t be on the force,” Bratton said, an observation he had made before. (See Nat Hentoff, “Giuliani’s Con,” Village Voice, September 16, 1997.) That begged the question of why he ­hadn’t done something about them when he was their boss, though to be fair the police ­union wields enormous power in New York and protects its officers relentlessly from the consequences of their dirty deeds. 11. “USA: Stonewalled,” Amnesty International, last modified September  21, 2005, AMR 51/122/2005, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org ​/­download​/­Documents​/­84000​/­a mr511222005en​ .­pdf. 12. “USA: New York City: Abuse of Transgender ­Women by New York City Police Officers,” Amnesty International, last modified October  24, 2006, AMR 51/104/2006, https://­ www​.­a mnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​/­72000​/­a mr511642006en​.­pdf. 13. Conversation between author and Ron Hampton, Washington, DC, March 17, 2000. 14. “Welcome,” National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers, Inc., accessed March 19, 2022, https://­nableo​.­org​/­. 15. “A Cop Shatters the Code of Blue,” ­Legal Times, January 18, 1993. 16. Conversation between author and Leslie Seymore, Philadelphia, May 2, 2000. 17. Serpico blew the whistle on corruption in the NYPD and was the hero of an eponymous 1973 movie starring Al Pacino. He was a small, wiry, ner­vous man—­nervous for good reason perhaps—­who joined us for a 1999 press conference on stun technology. Another white officer I got to know who had called out police rape and assault was an internal affairs officer on the Edison, New Jersey, force named Joe Stenukinis, the subject of a December 3, 2000, 60 Min­ utes segment with my friend Ed Bradley. Joe and his ­family had suffered a variety of forms of retaliation for his honesty. Conversation between author and Joe Stenukinis, Edison, New Jersey, February 9, 2001. 18. “High-­Tech Tools (and Toys),” US News and World Report, December 15, 1997. 19. “Training/R-­E-­A-­C-­T ­Belt Requirements,” Stun Tech, 14. In author’s possession. 20. “Cruelty in Control? The Stun B ­ elt and Other Electro-­shock Equipment in Law Enforcement,” Amnesty International, last modified June  7, 1999, AMR 51/054/1999, https://­ www​.­a mnesty​.­org​/­en​/­documents​/­a mr51​/­054​/­1999​/­en​/­. 21. “The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners,” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, accessed March 19, 2022, https://­w ww​.­unodc​.­org​ /­documents​/­justice​-­a nd​-­prison​-­reform​/­Nelson​_­Mandela​_­Rules​-­E​-­ebook​.­pdf. 22. Bob Egelko, “50,000-­Volt Penalty for Talking Is Ruled Illegal,” SF Gate, May 31, 2001, https://­w ww​.­sfgate​.­c om​/ ­bayarea​/­a rticle​/­5 0​-­0 00​-­volt​-­p enalty​-­for​-­t alking​-­i s​-­r uled​-­i llegal​ -­2913656​.­php.

252

Notes to Pages 113–121

23. “Poster Made by Amnesty International with Muhammad Ali Photo,” Smithsonian (website), accessed March 19, 2022, https://­w ww​.­si​.­edu​/­object​/­nmaahc ​_ ­2011​.­38​.­2. 24. Statement of Frank Serpico (retired New York City detective), Amnesty International Press Conference, Washington, DC, June 8, 1999. 25. William  F. Schulz, “Cruel & Unusual Punishment,” New York Review of Books, April 24, 1997, https://­w ww​.­nybooks​.­com​/­a rticles​/­1997​/­04​/­24​/­cruel​-­unusual​-­punishment​/­. 26. “Stopping the Torture Trade,” Amnesty International, February  26, 2001, ACT 40/002/2001, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​/­120000​/­act400022001en​.­pdf. 27. “90 Cases of Death Following Stun-­Gun Use,” Arizona Republic, January 26, 2004. 28. Joseph P. Friend, “Deaf Peddlers ­Were Tortured with Stun Guns, Enforcer Says,” New York Times, October 24, 1997, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1997​/­10​/­24​/­nyregion​/­deaf​-­peddlers​ -­were​-­tortured​-­w ith​-­stun​-­g uns​-­enforcer​-­says​.­html. 29. Text of “Taser International/Amnesty International Debate,” moderated by Edward P. Haley, March 9, 2005, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA. Unpublished document in author’s possession. 30. Paul A. Haskins, “Conducted Energy Devices: Policies on Use Evolve to Reflect Research and Field Deployment Experience,” National Institute of Justice, last modified May 1, 2019, https://­nij​.­ojp​.­gov​/­topics​/­a rticles​/­conducted​-­energy​-­devices​-­policies​-­use​-­evolve​-­reflect​ -­research​-­a nd​-­field​-­deployment. 31. “USA: Ill-­Treatment of Inmates in Maricopa County Jails—­Arizona,” Amnesty International, July  31, 1997, AMR 51/051/1997, https://­w ww​.­amnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​ /­160000​/­a mr510511997en​.­pdf. 32. William Finnegan, “Sheriff Joe,” New Yorker, July 20, 2009, https://­w ww​.­newyorker​ .­com​/­magazine​/­2009​/­07​/­20​/­sheriff​-­joe. 33. Walter Kirn, “The End of the Affair,” New York Times, May 26, 2002, https://­w ww​ .­nytimes​.­c om​/­2 002​/­05​/­2 6​/­magazine​/­t he​-­w ay​-­we​-­l ive​-­now​-­5​-­2 6​-­02​-­t he​-­end​-­of​-­t he​-­a ffair​ .­html. 34. “Po­liti­cally Incorrect Transcript from May  1, 2020,” Cannabis News, May  3, 2000, http://­cannabisnews​.­com​/­news​/­5​/­t hread5589​.­shtml. Most of the prisoners in the county jail ­were not hard-­core criminals, many in for misdemeanors and some simply being held in pretrial detention. 35. Bookended by ­Women in the Front Line: H ­ uman Rights Violations Against W ­ omen (Amnesty International, 1991), last modified March 1991, ACT 77/01/91; and “Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds: Torture and Ill-­Treatment of W ­ omen,” Amnesty International, March 6, 2001, ACT 40/001/2001, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org​/­en​/­documents​/­act40​/­001​/­2001​/­en​/­. 36. “UA304/193 Bangladesh: Death Threats—­Taslima Nasrim,” Amnesty International, last modified October 10, 1993, ASA 13/014/1993, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org ​/­en​/­documents​ /­a sa13​/­014​/­1993​/­en ​/­; and Mary Anne Weaver, “A Fugitive from Injustice,” New Yorker, September  12, 1994, https://­w ww​.­newyorker​.­com​/­magazine​/­1994​/­09​/­12​/­a​-­fugitive​-­from​-­injustice. The book was Taslima Nasrin, Shame (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1993). 37. “1997: Zoleykhah Kadkhoda Survives Stoning,” Executed T ­ oday, accessed March 19, 2022, http://­w ww​.­executedtoday​.­com​/­tag ​/­zoleykhah​-­kadkhoda​/­. 38. “Female Genital Mutilation,” World Health Organ­i zation, January 21, 2022, https://­ www​.­who​.­int​/­news​-­room​/­fact​-­sheets​/­detail​/­female​-­genital​-­mutilation. 39. Alice Walker, “You Have All Seen,” Ms. Magazine, March/April 1997.



Notes to Pages 121–126

253

40. Mary M. Sheridan, “In re Fauziya Kasinga: The United States Has Opened Its Doors to Victims of Female Genital Mutilation,” St. John’s Law Review 7, no. 2 (Spring 1997), 433–463. 41. “Female Genital Mutilation in the United States,” Equality Now, accessed March 19, 2022, https://­w ww​.­equalitynow​.­org ​/­fgm ​_­in ​_­t he ​_­us ​_ ­learn ​_ ­more. See also Barbara Crosette, “Female Genital Mutilation by Immigrants Is Becoming Cause for Concern in the US,” New York Times, December  10, 1995, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1995​/­12​/­10​/­world​/­female​-­genital​ -­mutilation​-­by​-­immigrants​-­is​-­becoming​-­cause​-­for​-­concern​-­in​-­t he​-­us​.­html. 42. “Not Part of My Sentence: Violations of the ­Human Rights of ­Women in Custody,” Amnesty International, last modified March  26, 1999, AMR 51/01/1999, https://­w ww​ .­a mnestyusa​.­org​/­reports​/­u sa​-­not​-­part​-­of​-­my​-­sentence​-­v iolations​-­of​-­t he​-­human​-­r ights​-­of​ -­women​-­in​-­custody​/­. 43. “Pregnant Inmates Often Shackled During ­Labor,” New York Times, March 2, 2006. 44. “Clinton ­Pardons McDougal, Hearst, ­O thers,” ABC News, January 6, 2006, https://­ abcnews​.­go​.­com​/­Politics​/­story​?­id​=­122001&page ​=­1. 45. Edmund S. Morgan and Marie Morgan, “A Very Popu­lar Penalty,” New York Review of Books, April 10, 2003, https://­w ww​.­nybooks​.­com​/­articles​/­2003​/­04​/­10​/­a​-­very​-­popular​-­penalty​/­. 46. “Top 10 Most Memorable Debate Moments, Time, March 19, 2022, http://­content​.­t ime​ .­com​/­t ime​/­specials​/­packages​/­a rticle​/­0,28804,1844704​_­1844706​_ ­1844712,00​.­html. 47. ­There is a difference between innocence and full moral culpability. We would argue that as a seventeen-­year-­old, Malvo was not as culpable for his crimes as Muhammad, an adult. 48. “Innocence,” Death Penalty Information Center, accessed March 19, 2022, https://­ deathpenaltyinfo​.­org ​/­policy​-­issues​/­innocence; and Yusaf Salaam, Kevin Richardson, and Raymond Santana, “We Are the Exonerated 5: What Happened to Us I­ sn’t Past, It’s Pre­sent,” New York Times, June 4, 2021, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2021​/­01​/­04​/­opinion​/­exonerated​-­five​ -­false​-­confessions​.­html. The number is now more than 170. 49. Sharon Waxman, “For the Wrongly Convicted, New ­Trials Once the Cell Opens,” New York Times, January 25, 2005, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2005​/­01​/­25​/­movies​/­for​-­t he​-­w rongly​ -­convicted​-­new​-­t rials​-­once​-­t he​-­cell​-­opens​.­html. 50. “Executed but Possibly Innocent,” Death Penalty Information Center, accessed March 19, 2022, https://­deathpenaltyinfo​.­org​/­policy​-­issues​/­innocence​/­executed​-­but​-­possibly​-­innocent. 51. See, for example, “Killing with Prejudice: Race and the Death Penalty,” Amnesty International, last modified May  1999, AMR 51/52/99, https://­w ww​.­amnesty​.­org​/­en​/­w p​-­content​ /­uploads​/­2021​/­06​/­a mr510521999en​.­pdf. 52. Death Penalty,” Equal Justice Initiative, accessed March 19, 2022, https://­eji​.­org​/­issues​ /­death​-­penalty​/­​?­gclid​=­CjwKCAiAudD​_­BRBXEiwAudakX4zNngJcZH6vxwkt ​_­bb78u4uiAw oJDLbrlkAqtDErZBSsnLZIG1WhhoCHRAQAvD​_ ­BwE. 53. Adam Liptak, “A Vast Racial Gap in Death Penalty Cases, New Study Finds,” New York Times, August 3, 2020, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2020​/­08​/­03​/­us​/­racial​-­gap​-­death​-­penalty​.­html. 54. Garrett Epps, “The Machinery of Death Is Back on the Docket,” Atlantic, September 2018, https://­w ww​.­t heatlantic​.­com​/­ideas​/­a rchive​/­2018​/­09​/­t inkering​-­w ith​-­t he​-­machinery​ -­of​-­death​/­570421​/­. 55. See, for example, Raymond Bonner and Ford Fessenden, “States with No Death Penalty Share Lower Hom­i­cide Rates,” New York Times, September  22, 2000, https://­w ww​ .­nytimes​ .­c om​ /­2 000​/­0 9​/­2 2​ /­u s​ /­a bsence​ -­e xecutions​ -­s pecial​ -­r eport​ -­s tates​-­w ith​ -­n o​ -­d eath​ -­penalty​-­share​-­lower​.­html.

254

Notes to Pages 126–133

56. “Deterrence,” Death Penalty Information Center, accessed March 19, 2022, https://­ deathpenaltyinfo​.­org​/­policy​-­issues​/­deterrence. 57. Robert has visited death rows in seven states and recorded hundreds of hours of interviews of both death-­row prisoners and prison officials. I was only on one death row, in Louisiana’s notorious Angola State Penitentiary, but the conditions t­ here ­were far from luxurious. 58. “Q&A: Death Penalty Proponent Robert Blecker,” Dallas Morning News, April 11, 2014, https://­w ww​.­dallasnews​.­com​/­opinion​/­commentary​/­2014​/­04​/­11​/­qa​-­death​-­penalty​-­proponent​ -­robert​-­blecker​/­. 59. “Q&A: Death Penalty Proponent.” For a more complete description of Becker’s views, see his book The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice Among the Worst of the Worst (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 60. “Pakistan: Eye for an Eye, Judge Rules,” New York Times, December 13, 2003. 61. Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 76–77. 62. Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs, 91. 63. Monthly Mailing, Amnesty International USA, March 1998. In author’s possession. 64. Monthly Mailing, Amnesty International USA, March 1996. In author’s possession. 65. Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, “Not in Our Name: Murder Victims’ Families Speak Out Against the Death Penalty,” 4th ed. (booklet), 2003, 63. 66. See “Petition Signers Oppose Death Penalty If Th ­ ey’re Victims,” Long Island Catho­ lic, August 14, 1994. 67. Dennis Mack Smith, Mussolini (New York: Vintage, 1983), 145. 68. Zoe Rosenberg, “David Copperfield’s Gigantic Pent­house Is Full of Oddities,” Curbed NY, October 7, 2016, https://­ny​.­curbed​.­com​/­2016​/­10​/­7​/­13203732​/­david​-­copperfield​-­manhattan​ -­penthouse​-­nyc. 69. “David Copperfield Assistant Rushed to Hospital During Las Vegas Show,” US Magazine, December  18, 2008, https://­web​.­a rchive​.­org ​/­web​/­2 0081230231055​/­http://­w ww​ .­u smagazine​.­c om​/­news​/­d avid​-­c opperfield​-­a ssistant​-­r ushed​-­to​-­hospital​-­during​-­l as​-­vegas​ -­show. 70. Gustav Niebuhr, “Catholic Bishops Seek End to Death Penalty,” New York Times, April 3, 1999, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1999​/­04​/­03​/­us​/­catholic​-­bishops​-­seek​-­end​-­to​-­death​ -­penalty​.­html. 71. George F. ­Will, “Innocent on Death Row,” Washington Post, April 6, 2000, https://­w ww​ .­washingtonpost​.­com​/­a rchive​/­opinions​/­2000​/­04​/­06​/­i nnocent​-­on​-­death​-­row​/­09ee3835​-­fd4a​ -­415c​-­95fd​-­9af735384e3c​/­. 72. Sam Howe Verhovek, “Dead ­Women Waiting: Who’s Who on Death Row,” New York Times, February  8, 1998, https://­a rchive​.­nytimes​.­com​/­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­library​/­review​ /­020898women​-­deathrow​-­review​.­html. 73. Letter from Pat Robertson to George W. Bush, May 30, 2000. Felix Rohatyn, a well-­ known investment banker and US ambassador to France u ­ nder President Clinton, called for a moratorium on the death penalty, saying, “During my nearly four years in France, no single issue evoked as much passion and as much protest as executions in the United States,” which Rohatyn believed was badly damaging Amer­i­ca’s image in the rest of the world. “Amer­i­ca’s Deadly Image,” Washington Post, February 20, 2001. In author’s possession. 74. “George Ryan Fast Facts,” CNN, February 14, 2022, https://­w ww​.­cnn​.­com​/­2013​/­09​/­26​ /­us​/­george​-­r yan​-­fast​-­facts​/­index​.­html.



Notes to Pages 134–140

255

75. Bud Welch, “The Forgiveness Proj­ect,” Forgiveness Proj­ect, accessed March 19, 2022, https://­w ww​.­t heforgivenessproject​.­com​/­stories​-­library​/ ­bud​-­welch​/­. 76. Jeanne E. Bishop, “Immoral Justice,” New Yorker, February 24, 1997. 77. Pattie Mihalik, “How Could She Forgive a Sadistic Killer?,” News Times, February 27; Marietta, Jaeger, “The Power and Real­ity of Forgiveness: Forgiving the Murderer of One’s Child,” in Robert Enright and Joanna North, Exploring Forgiveness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), https://­w ww​.­csmedia1​.­com​/­paseodelrey​.­org​/­power​-­of​-­forgiveness​-­jaeger​.­pdf. 78. “Executed Florida Murderer Catches on Fire,” ­Reuters, March 25, 1997. 79. Monivette Cordeiro, “6 of Florida’s Most Botched Executions in Modern History,” Orlando Weekly, July 8, 2016, https://­w ww​.­orlandoweekly​.­com​/­orlando​/­6​-­of​-­floridas​-­most​ -­notorious​-­botched​-­executions​-­in​-­modern​-­history​/­Content​?­oid​=2­ 409944. 80. Sam Roberts, “Arthur Zitrin, Bioethicist, Dies at 101; Opposed Lethal Injection by Doctors,” New York Times, May 13, 2019, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2019​/­05​/­12​/­obituaries​/­dr​ -­a rthur​-­zitrin​-­dies​-­at​-­101​.­html. 81. “Gallup Poll: For the First Time, Majority of Americans Prefer Life Sentence to Capital Punishment,” Death Penalty Information Center, November 25, 2019, https://­deathpenaltyinfo​ .­org ​/­news​/­gallup​-­poll​-­for​-­fi rst​-­t ime​-­majority​-­of​-­a mericans​-­prefer​-­l ife​-­sentence​-­to​-­c apital​ -­punishment. 82. “Executions Overview,” Death Penalty Information Center, accessed March 19, 2022, https://­deathpenaltyinfo​.­org​/­executions​/­executions​-­overview. 83. Atkins v. V ­ irginia, ­L egal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed March 19, 2022, https://­w ww​.­law​.­cornell​.­edu​/­supremecourt​/­text​/­536​/­304. 84. For a more comprehensive analy­sis of the role grassroots organ­izing has played in restricting the death penalty, see Maurice Chammah, Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty (New York: Crown, 2021). 85. Letter from Ronald Earle, district attorney of Travis County, Texas, to William  F. Schulz, January 28, 1999. 86. Bob Herbert, “A Child’s ‘Confession,’ ” New York Times, November 15, 1998, https://­ www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1998​/­11​/­15​/­opinion​/­in​-­a merica​-­a​-­child​-­s​-­confession​.­html. 87. In addition to the November 15, 1998, column, Herbert wrote “How Did Jayla Die?” New York Times, November  19, 1998, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1998​/­11​/­19​/­opinion​/­in​ -­a merica​-­how​-­did​-­jayla​-­die​.­html; “Without Evidence,” New York Times, November 22, 1998, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1998​/­11​/­22​/­opinion​/­in​-­america​-­w ithout​-­evidence​.­html; “Texas Justice,” New York Times, November 26, 1998; and “Truth in Travis County,” New York Times, December 3, 1998. See also “Juvenile Justice?” 60 Minutes, CBS, January 17, 1999. 88. “Lacresha Murray,” National Registry of Exonerations, accessed March  19, 2022, https://­w ww​.­law​.­u mich​.­edu​/­special​/­exoneration​/­Pages​/­casedetail​.­aspx​?­caseid​=3­ 499. 89. Dana Canedy, “A Sentence of Life Without Parole for Boy, 14, in Murder of Girl, 6,” New York Times, March  10, 2001, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2001​/­03​/­10​/­us​/­sentence​-­of​-­life​ -­w ithout​-­parole​-­for​-­boy​-­14​-­in​-­murder​-­of​-­g irl​-­6​.­html. 90. The UN International Covenant on Civil and Po­liti­cal Rights explic­itly stipulates that “sentence of death s­ hall not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below eigh­teen years of age.” See paragraph 5, Article VI, https://­w ww​.­ohchr​.­org ​/­EN​/­ProfessionalInterest​/­Pages​ /­CCPR​.­aspx. 91. Elkonon Goldberg, The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

256

Notes to Pages 140–145

92. See, for example, Nicholas Lange et al., “Variability of H ­ uman Brain Structure Size: Ages 4–20 Years,” Psychiatric Research: Neuroimaging, Section 74 (1997). It describes postpubescent adolescent brains as looking dissimilar to adults’ brains in that the prefrontal cortexes have not yet been adequately “pruned” of neurons sprouting new connections with the rest of the brain sufficient to allow adolescents to make good judgments. While Robert Silvers, storied editor of the New York Review of Books, was often receptive to articles I submitted to him, he and his staff turned down an essay I wrote in late 2002 making the case for diminished adolescent capabilities on the grounds of brain development. ­Those arguments, they wrote, “leave us thinking about the reflective, controlled, intelligent seventeen-­year-­olds we know, ­whether or not their frontal lobe connections are fully formed, and the violent sadistic bullies, aged twenty-­one, whose frontal lobes . . . ​would have fully formed connections.” Letter from Robert Silvers to William F. Schulz, December 30, 2002. This was an astonishing objection, unworthy of the generally thoughtful Silvers. Of course not ­every adolescent ­will commit crimes any more than e­ very person with intellectual disabilities w ­ ill, nor w ­ ill e­ very person with a ge­ne­tic predisposition to Alzheimer’s develop that disease, nor e­ very abused child grow up to be an abusive parent. But in each case the physiological or social ­factors are worth weighing in determining how to respond to a case, how to “treat” it, especially when punishment is involved. This is part of what mitigation is all about. 93. “In Trail of Red Flags, an Ex-­Friend’s Warning to Authorities Stands Out,” New York Times, October 28, 2002. 94. Roper, Superintendent, Potosi Correctional Center, v. Simmons, ­Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed March 19, 2022, https://­w ww​.­law​.­cornell​.­edu​/­supct​/­html​ /­03​-­633​.­Z S​.­html. 95. “Cite Foreign Law and Risk Death,” OpinioJuris, March 16, 2006, http://­opiniojuris​ .­org​/­2006​/­03​/­16​/­cite​-­foreign​-­law​-­a nd​-­risk​-­death​/­. 96. See “USA: Betraying the Young,” Amnesty International, last modified November 28, 1998, AMR 51/057/1998, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org ​/­download​/­Documents​/­1 52000​/­a mr51057​ 1998en​.­pdf; and “USA: Maine Youth Center Report Leaves ­Childrens’ Voices Still Unheard,” Amnesty International, last modified November  24, 1998, AMR 51/096/1998, https://­w ww​ .­a mnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​/­152000​/­a mr510961998en​.­pdf. 97. William F. Schulz, Report to the Annual General Meeting, Amnesty International USA, 1999. In author’s possession.

Chapter 6 1. Kevin Baker, “Gotham Revival,” New York Times Book Review, March 21, 2021. 2. “USA: Amnesty International’s Concerns About Post September 11 Detentions in the United States,” Amnesty International, last modified March  14, 2002, AMR 51/044/2002, https://­w ww​.­a mnesty​.­org​/­download​/­Documents​/­116000​/­a mr510442002en​.­pdf. 3. Eric Lichtblau, “US Report Faults the Roundup of Illegal Immigrants ­After 9/11,” New York Times, June  3, 2003, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2003​/­06​/­03​/­us​/­threats​-­responses​-­government​ -­report​-­us​-­report​-­faults​-­roundup​-­illegal​-­immigrants​.­html. I issued a press release on October 23, 2001, just six weeks a­ fter 9/11, expressing concern about “statements . . . ​from an FBI agent . . . ​that law enforcement may resort to stronger interrogation methods” while investigating the 9/11 attack. 4. “Settlement Reached in NYPD Muslim Surveillance Lawsuit,” Center for Constitutional Rights, accessed March  20, 2022, https://­ccrjustice​.­org​/­home​/­press​-­center​/­press​ -­releases​/­settlement​-­reached​-­nypd​-­muslim​-­surveillance​-­lawsuit.



Notes to Pages 145–149

257

5. Rachel Swarns, “Special Registration for Arab Immigrants ­Will Reportedly Stop,” New York Times, November 22, 2003, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2003​/­11​/­22​/­us​/­special​-­registration​ -­for​-­a rab​-­immigrants​-­w ill​-­reportedly​-­stop​.­html. 6. Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, ­ Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed March 20, 2022, https://­w ww​.­law​.­cornell​.­edu​/­supct​/­html​/­03​-­6696​.­ZO​.­html. 7. Kuang Keig Kuek Ser, “Data: Hate Crimes Against Muslims Increased A ­ fter 9/11,” World, September 12, 2016, https://­w ww​.­pri​.­org​/­stories​/­2016​-­09​-­12​/­data​-­hate​-­crimes​-­against​ -­muslims​-­increased​-­a fter​-­911. See also Michael Reja, “Trump’s ‘Chinese Virus’ Tweet Helped Lead to Rise in Racist Anti-­Asian Twitter Content: Study,” ABC News, March 18, 2021, https://­ abcnews​ .­g o​ .­c om​ /­Health​ /­t rumps​ -­c hinese​ -­v irus​ -­t weet​ -­h elped​ -­l ead​ -­r ise​ -­r acist​ /­s tory​ ?­i d​ =­76530148. 8. “Amer­i­ca’s Image in the World,” Pew Research Center, last modified March 14, 2007, https://­w ww​.­p ewresearch​.­org ​/­g lobal​/­2 007​/­03​/­14​/­a mericas​-­i mage​-­i n​-­t he​-­world​-­f indings​ -­f rom​-­t he​-­pew​-­g lobal​-­attitudes​-­project​/­. 9. “Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War,” United Nations, last modified August  12, 1949, https://­w ww​.­u n​.­org ​/­en​/­genocideprevention​/­documents​ /­atrocity​-­crimes​/­Doc​.­32​_­GC​-­III​-­EN​.­pdf. 10. Jason Leopold, “Ten Years of Guantanamo: What Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld Knew,” Truthout, January  9, 2012, https://­truthout​.­org​/­articles​/­ten​-­years​-­of​-­guantanamo​-­what​-­bush​ -­cheney​-­a nd​-­r umsfeld​-­k new​/­. 11. Andrew Cohen, “No Won­der Congress Wants to Hide the GITMO Detainees,” Atlan­ tic, April 26, 2011, https://­w ww​.­t heatlantic​.­com​/­politics​/­a rchive​/­2011​/­04​/­no​-­wonder​-­congress​ -­wants​-­to​-­hide​-­t he​-­g itmo​-­detainees​/­237841​/­. 12. “The Guantánamo Docket,” New York Times, March 11, 2022, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​ .­com​/­interactive​/­projects​/­g uantanamo​/­detainees​/­by​-­country. 13. “Ex Parte Quirin,” Oyez, accessed March 20, 2022, https://­w ww​.­oyez​.­org ​/­cases​/­1940​ -­1955​/­317us1. 14. Katharine Q. Seelye, “Pentagon Says Acquittals May Not F ­ ree Detainees,” New York Times, March  22, 2002, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2002​/­03​/­22​/­us​/­a​-­nation​-­challenged​-­the​ -­t rials​-­pentagon​-­says​-­acquittals​-­may​-­not​-­f ree​-­detainees​.­html. 15. Katharine Q. Seelye, “An Uneasy Routine at Cuban Prison Camp,” New York Times, March 16, 2002, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2002​/­03​/­16​/­world​/­a​-­nation​-­challenged​-­captives​ -­a n​-­uneasy​-­routine​-­at​-­cuba​-­prison​-­camp​.­html. 16. “Guantanamo Litigation—­History,” Lawfare, accessed March 20, 2022, https://­w ww​ .­lawfareblog​.­com​/­g uantanamo​-­litigation​-­history; and Neil Lewis, “Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo,” New York Times, November 30, 2004, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2004​ /­11​/­30​/­politics​/­red​-­cross​-­fi nds​-­detainee​-­abuse​-­in​-­g uantanamo​.­html. 17. “USA: One Year On—­the ­Legal Limbo of the Guantanamo Detainees Continues,” Amnesty International, last modified January  10, 2003, AMR 51/002/2003, https://­w ww​ .­a mnesty​.­org​/­en​/­documents​/­a mr51​/­002​/­2003​/­en​/­. 18. Michelle Faul, “US Urged to Release Guantanamo Minors,” MRT News, April 22, 2003. 19. Richard Norton-­Taylor, “Guantánamo Is Gulag of Our Times, Says Amnesty,” Guard­ ian, May 25, 2005, https://­w ww​.­t heguardian​.­com​/­world​/­2005​/­may​/­26​/­usa​.­g uantanamo. 20. E. J. Dionne, “Hyperbole and H ­ uman Rights,” Washington Post, June 3, 2005, https://­ www​.­w ashingtonpost​.­c om​/­a rchive​/­opinions​/­2 005​/­0 6​/­03​/­hyperbole​-­a nd​-­human​-­r ights​ /­849f517a​-­18f8​-­4bfa​-­922c​-­1ad33073b487​/­.

258

Notes to Pages 149–155

21. “ ‘Gulag’ Charge Absurd,” Baltimore Sun, June 1, 2005, https://­w ww​.­baltimoresun​.­com​ /­bal​-­te​.­bush01jun01​-­story​.­html. 22. “Rumsfeld Rejects Amnesty’s ‘Gulag’ Label,” CNN, June 1, 2005, http://­edition​.­cnn​ .­com​/­2005​/­US​/­06​/­01​/­us​.­g itmo​/­index​.­html. 23. Mary Curtis, “Top General Rebuts Abuse Claims,” Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2005, https://­w ww​.­latimes​.­com​/­a rchives​/­la​-­x pm​-­2005​-­may​-­30​-­na​-­g itmo30​-­story​.­html. 24. “American Gulag,” Washington Post, May 26, 2005, https://­w ww​.­washingtonpost​.­com​ /­a rchive​/­opinions​/­2005​/­05​/­26​/­a merican​-­g ulag​/­0ef94f50​-­b60d​-­4fde​-­a 5eb​-­a 52fca99a85c​/­. 25. Dionne, “Hyperbole and H ­ uman Rights.” 26. Anne Appelbaum, “Amnesty’s Amnesia,” Washington Post, June 8, 2005, https://­w ww​ .­a nneapplebaum​.­com​/­2005​/­06​/­08​/­a mnestys​-­a mnesia​/­. 27. Statement of Dr. William F. Schulz, press conference, May 25, 2005. 28. See, for example, transcript of News Hour, PBS, June 3, 2005. In author’s possession. 29. This referred to quotes such as t­ hese from Donald Rumsfeld (Department of Defense transcript, March 28, 2003): “It seems to me a careful reading of Amnesty International or the rec­ord of Saddam Hussein, having used chemical weapons on his own p ­ eople as well as his neighbors, and the viciousness of that regime, which is well known and documented by ­human rights organ­izations, o ­ ught not to be surprised,” https://­w ww​.­pbs​.­org​/­newshour​/­nation​ /­middle​_­east​-­jan​-­june03​-­resistance​_­03​-­28. 30. “Transcript: Amnesty International USA’s William Schulz,” Fox News, June 5, 2005, https://­w ww​.­foxnews​.­com​/­story​/­t ranscript​-­a mnesty​-­intl​-­usas​-­w illiam​-­schulz. 31. “Un-­A merican by Any Name,” New York Times, June 5, 2005, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​ .­com​/­2005​/­06​/­05​/­opinion​/­unamerican​-­by​-­a ny​-­name​.­html. 32. H.  D.  S. Greenway, “Protesting Too Much on ‘Gulag,’ ” Boston Globe, June  10, 2005, http://­archive​.­boston​.­com​/­news​/­globe​/­editorial​_­opinion​/­oped​/­articles​/­2005​/­06​/­10​/­protesting​ _­too​_­much​_­on​_ ­g ulag​/­. 33. George, “Amnesty USA Backs Off Gitmo as ‘Gulag,’ ” Narkive, June 6, 2005, https://­uk​ .­current​-­events​.­terrorism​.­narkive​.­com​/­bgOu75NJ​/­amnesty​-­usa​-­backs​-­off​-­gitmo​-­as​-­gulag. 34. Associated Press, “Republican Urges Closing of Guantánamo Fa­cil­i­ty,” New York Times, June 12, 2005, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2005​/­06​/­12​/­politics​/­republican​-­urges​-­closing​ -­g uantanamo​-­facility​.­html. 35. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “­A fter Iraq Visit, Upbeat Bush Urges Patience for His Course,” New York Times, June 15, 2006, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2006​/­06​/­15​/­world​/­15prexy​.­html. 36. Carol Rosenberg, “2 More Detainees Are Approved for Transfer out of Guantánamo,” New York Times, October  13, 2021, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2021​/­10​/­1 3​/­u s​/­politics​ /­g uantanamo​-­detainees​-­t ransfer​.­html. 37. Sandy Hausman, “Guantanamo Bay: Conclusions from the Gulag of Our Time,” WVTF and Radio IQ, January  16, 2015, https://­w ww​.­w vtf​.­org ​/­post​/­g uantanamo​-­bay​-­conclusions​ -­g ulag​-­our​-­t ime#stream​/­0. 38. Maureen Dowd, “Tears on My Pillow,” New York Times, July  1, 2007, https://­w ww​ .­nytimes​.­com​/­2007​/­07​/­01​/­opinion​/­01dowd​.­html. 39. Eliza Griswold, “American Gulag,” Harper’s, September  2006, https://­harpers​.­org​ /­a rchive​/­2006​/­09​/­a merican​-­g ulag​/­. 40. Andrew Cohen, “An American Gulag: Descending into Madness at Supermax,” At­ lantic, June  18, 2012, https://­w ww​.­t heatlantic​.­com​/­national​/­a rchive​/­2012​/­06​/­a n​-­a merican​ -­g ulag​-­descending​-­into​-­madness​-­at​-­supermax​/­258323​/­.



Notes to Pages 156–158

259

41. Carol Rosenberg, “They W ­ ere Guantánamo’s First Detainees: ­Here’s Where They Are Now,” New York Times, March  27, 2021, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2021​/­03​/­27​/­us​/­politics​ /­g uantanamo​-­first​-­prisoners​.­html. 42. See, for example, Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth: Amer­i­ca, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review Books, 2004); Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault, How the Gloves Came Off: L ­ awyers, Policy Makers and Norms in the Debate on Torture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); and William Schulz, Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of ­Human Rights (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003). 43. “Getting Away with Torture,” H ­ uman Rights Watch, last modified July  12, 2011, https://­w ww​.­h rw​.­org ​/­report​/­2 011​/­0 7​/­1 2​/­getting​-­away​-­torture​/ ­bush​-­a dministration​-­a nd​ -­mistreatment​-­detainees#​_­ft n29. 44. “White House Memorandum,” February 7, 2002, http://­w ww​.­pegc​.­u s​/­a rchive​ /­W hite​_­House​/­bush​_­memo​_­20020207​_­ed​.­pdf. 45. Jonathan Horo­w itz and Stacy Cammarano, “20 Extraordinary Facts About CIA Extraordinary Rendition and Secret Detentions,” Open Society Justice Initiative, last modified February  5, 2003, https://­w ww​.­justiceinitiative​.­org​/­voices​/­20​-­extraordinary​-­facts​-­about​-­cia​ -­extraordinary​-­rendition​-­a nd​-­secret​-­detention. See also Faye Bauer and Philip Smucker, “US Ships Al Qaeda Suspects to Arab States,” Christian Science Monitor, July 7, 2002, https://­w ww​ .­csmonitor​.­com​/­2002​/­0726​/­p01s03​-­usju​.­html; and “USA/Yemen, Secret Detention in CIA ‘Black Sites,’ ” Amnesty International, last modified November 8, 2005, AMR 51/177/2005, https://­w ww​.­t herenditionproject​.­org​.­u k ​/­documents​/­R DI​/­051108​-­A mnesty​-­CIA​-­Black​-­Sites​ .­pdf. 46. “Quiet Shipping of Terror Suspects to Mideast Raising Query on Torture,” Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 2002. 47. “Killing and Torture by US Predate Abu Ghraib,” ­Human Rights Watch, last modified March 20, 2005, https://­w ww​.­hrw​.­org​/­news​/­2005​/­05​/­20​/­a fghanistan​-­k illing​-­a nd​-­torture​ -­us​-­predate​-­abu​-­ghraib#. 48. “Detainees Describe Abuse; Men Held 10 Days in Airport Fa­cil­i­ty,” Boston Globe, May 5, 2004. Amnesty had also issued a public expression of alarm on March 5, 2003, regarding abuse of prisoners by the United States. 49. “Iraq Prison Abuse Scandal Fast Facts,” CNN, March 11, 2022, https://­w ww​.­cnn​.­com​ /­2013​/­10​/­30​/­world​/­meast​/­iraq​-­prison​-­abuse​-­scandal​-­fast​-­facts​/­index​.­html. I appeared on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation on May 3, 2004, discussing t­ hese reports of abuse. 50. Mark Danner, “Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story,” New York Review of Books, October 7, 2004, https://­w ww​.­nybooks​.­com​/­a rticles​/­2004​/­10​/­07​/­abu​-­ghraib​-­t he​-­hidden​-­story​/­. 51. “Bush Assures UN Rights Boss U. S. Not Using Torture,” ­Reuters, March 7, 2003. 52. “Bush ‘Sorry’ for Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners,” CNN, May 7, 2004, https://­w ww​.­cnn​.­com​ /­2004​/­A LLPOLITICS​/­05​/­07​/­bush​.­apology​/­index​.­html. 53. Brian Knowlton, “Bush, on Arab TV, Condemns Abuse but Does Not Apologize,” New York Times, May  7, 2004, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2004​/­05​/­07​/­news​/­bush​-­on​-­arab​-­t v​ -­condemns​-­abuse​-­but​-­does​-­not​-­apologize​.­html. 54. Letter to President George W. Bush from William Schulz et al., May 7, 2004. Representatives of nine h ­ uman rights organ­izations had met with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wol­fo­w itz in December 2002, at which meeting he disavowed all use of torture by the United States, but, ­a fter subsequent reports in the Washington Post, we wrote him on January 14, 2003, asking for “unequivocal statements by the President and his cabinet officers” that

260

Notes to Pages 158–163

torture would not be tolerated (letter to Paul Wol­fo­w itz from William Schulz et al., January 14, 2003). Individually, I had written Bush on January 28, 2003, expressing grave concern about reports of torture and asking for a similar statement. Six representatives of ­human rights NGOs met with William Haynes, general counsel at the Department of Defense, on February 5, 2003, but Haynes denied the accuracy of the Post story (see memo to HR Directors@LCHR​.­org from Stephen Rickard, February 5, 2003). H ­ uman rights organ­izations had taken our appeals for presidential action to Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, in a June 11, 2003, meeting at the White House in which we asked the president to “issue a strong and unequivocal statement” against torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. (See letter to Condoleezza Rice from William Schulz et al., June 20, 2003, summarizing discussion points from the meeting.) More disturbingly, in a meeting with National Security Council officials in April 2003, Amnesty staff ­were assured that interrogations ­were being closely monitored by doctors and l­awyers to prevent any mistreatment and that the rendition issue was a red herring. Both t­ hose statements w ­ ere untrue. (Memo to H ­ uman Rights Executive Directors Working Group from Stephen Richard, April 22, 2003. In author’s possession.) 55. Pat Buchanan, “The Case for Torture,” Townhall, March 10, 2003; and Charles Krauthammer, “The Truth About Torture: It’s Time to Be Honest About ­Doing Terrible ­Th ings,” Weekly Standard, December 5, 2005. 56. Jonathan Alter, “Time to Think About Torture,” Newsweek, November  4, 2001, https://­w ww​.­newsweek​.­com​/­t ime​-­t hink​-­about​-­torture​-­149445. 57. Adam Green, “Normalizing Torture on ’24,’ ” New York Times, May 22, 2005, https://­ www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2005​/­05​/­22​/­a rts​/­television​/­normalizing​-­torture​-­on​-­24​.­html. 58. Bill Car­ter, “Fire, Alligators, Maybe 500 Flies: Stay Tuned,” New York Times, January 21, 2002, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2002​/­01​/­21​/­business​/­fi re​-­a lligators​-­maybe​-­500​-­fl ies​-­stay​ -­tuned​.­html. 59. Personal correspondence from Edward I. Koch to William F. Schulz, February 1, 2002. 60. Alan Dershowitz, “Tortured Reasoning,” accessed March  20, 2022, https://­w ww​-­tc​ .­pbs​.­org​/­inthebalance​/­pdf​/­dershowitz​-­tortured​-­reasoning​.­pdf. 61. Alan Dershowitz, Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age (Boston: L ­ ittle Brown, 2002); and Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 62. “Torture,” 60 Minutes, CBS, January 20, 2003. 63. William F. Schulz, “The Torturer’s Apprentice,” Nation, May 13, 2002, https://­w ww​ .­t henation​.­com​/­a rticle​/­a rchive​/­torturers​-­apprentice​/­. 64. “A Public Divided: Americans’ Attitudes About Torture,” Roper Center, accessed March  20, 2022, https://­ropercenter​.­cornell​.­edu​/­public​-­d ivided​-­a mericans​-­attitudes​-­about​ -­torture. 65. Schulz, “Torturer’s Apprentice.” 66. “Torture ‘Off the Books’?” Nation, June  10, 2002, https://­w ww​.­t henation​.­com​ /­a rticle​/­a rchive​/­letters​-­314​/­. 67. Military Leaders Against Torture,” ­Human Rights First, accessed March 20, 2022, https://­w ww​.­humanrightsfirst​.­org​/­torture​/­retired​-­military​-­leaders​-­against​-­torture. 68. William F. Buckley Jr., “Tortured Thought,” National Review Online, January 29, 2002, 350. 69. In the April 2003 meeting with National Security Council staff, the administration had refused to disavow cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees. 70. The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary, ed. William F. Schulz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).



Notes to Pages 164–182

261

71. This is exactly what happened in a German case in which a Frankfurt policeman, Wolfgang Daschner, threatened a presumed kidnapper with severe pain if he did not reveal the location of his victim. L ­ ater Daschner was condemned by the court for a violation of the penal code but, considering the understandable motivation for his crime, received only a fine as a penalty. See Michael Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 104–105. 72. William  F. Schulz, “Security Is a ­Human Right, Too,” New York Times Magazine, April  18, 2004, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2004​/­04​/­18​/­magazine​/­t he​-­way​-­we​-­live​-­now​-­4​-­18​ -­04​-­essay​-­security​-­is​-­a​-­human​-­right​-­too​.­html. 73. “Presidential Approval Ratings—­George W. Bush,” Gallup, accessed March 20, 2022, https://­news​.­gallup​.­com​/­poll​/­116500​/­presidential​-­approval​-­ratings​-­george​-­bush​.­aspx. 74. Ryan Stuyk, “George W. Bush’s Favorable Rating Has Pulled a Complete 180,” CNN Politics, January 22, 2018, https://­w ww​.­cnn​.­com​/­2018​/­01​/­22​/­politics​/­george​-­w​-­bush​-­favorable​ -­poll​/­index​.­html. 75. “President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address,” NPR, January 20, 2005, https://­w ww​ .­npr​.­org​/­templates​/­story​/­story​.­php​?­storyId​=­4460172.

Chapter 7 1. Edward M. Kennedy, True Compass (New York: Twelve, 2009), 478–479. 2. I learned this from my friend Rev. Forrester Church, Frank Church’s son. 3. “The Patriarch,” CBS News, May 2, 2000, https://­w ww​.­cbsnews​.­com​/­news​/­the​-­patriarch​/­. 4. Brian McGrory, “Dry Your Eyes, Ted Kennedy,” Boston Globe, May 9, 2000. 5. Lindy Conroe, “­Don’t Pick on Kennedy for Being ­Human,” Boston Globe, May 10, 2000. 6. Victoria Reggie Kennedy to William F. Schulz, June 19, 2008, personal correspondence. 7. As Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright began meeting two or three times a year with the heads of the major American h ­ uman rights organ­izations to address anything that was on our minds, a practice that was continued ­under Bush’s secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. 8. Torricelli ­later dropped his bid for reelection following the revelation of campaign finance violations. 9. “Bianca Jagger: ‘I Did Not Ride the Horse into Studio 54: I Just Got on It,’ ” Guardian, April  25, 2015, https://­w ww​.­t heguardian​.­com​/­music​/­2015​/­apr​/­25​/ ­bianca​-­jagger​-­i​-­did​-­not​ -­ride​-­t he​-­horse​-­into​-­studio​-­54​-­i​-­just​-­got​-­on​-­it. 10. Kate Storey, “The Inside Story of John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s George Magazine,” Esquire, April  22, 2019, https://­w ww​.­esquire​.­com​/­news​-­politics​/­a 27031243​/­john​-­kennedy​-­jr​-­george​ -­magazine​-­t rue​-­story​/­. 11. Monthly Mailing, Amnesty International USA, October 1997. In author’s possession. 12. Heather Skye, “Patrick Stewart Gives Passionate Response to Question at ComicPalooza 2013,” YouTube, https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v ​=T ­ qFaiVNuy1k. 13. Letter from Ed Bradley to William F. Schulz, October 15, 1999, personal correspondence. 14. Stephanie Hlywak, “In Loving Memory of Jerry Lewis,” MDA, August  20, 2017, https://­strongly​.­mda​.­org​/­in​-­loving​-­memory​-­of​-­jerry​-­lewis​/­. 15. “Help Stop an Arms Trafficker Education Guide,” Amnesty International USA, accessed March 20, 2022, https://­w ww​.­a mnestyusa​.­org​/­pdfs​/­lordofwar​_­edguide​.­pdf. 16. Sam Roberts, “Yuri Orlov, Bold Champion of Soviet Dissidents, Dies at 96,” New York Times, October 1, 2020, https://­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2020​/­10​/­01​/­world​/­europe​/­yuri​-­orlov​-­dead​.­html.

262

Notes to Pages 183–204

17. All quotes are from a conversation between Don Cheadle and William F. Schulz and Karen Schneider, March 28, 2005, Los Angeles. 18. All quotes following, u ­ nless other­w ise indicated, are from a conversation between Salma Hayek and William F. Schulz and Karen Schneider, March 23, 2005, Los Angeles. 19. Salma Hayek, “Harvey Weinstein Was My Monster, Too,” New York Times, December 12, 2017, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­interactive​/­2017​/­12​/­13​/­opinion​/­contributors​/­salma​-­hayek​ -­harvey​-­weinstein​.­html. 20. Mia Kirshner et al., “I Live H ­ ere,” Kirkus, October 14, 2008, https://­w ww​.­k irkusreviews​ .­com​/­book​-­reviews​/­mia​-­k irshner​/­i​-­live​-­here​/­. 21. Mia Kirshner et al., I Live ­Here (New York: Pantheon Graphic Library, 2008). 22. All quotes are from a conversation between Mia Kirshner and William F. Schulz and Karen Schneider, August 8, 2005, Los Angeles. 23. Loung Ung, First They Killed My ­Father: A ­Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 105–106. 24. Paul Fussell, The ­Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Fussell, ­Doing B ­ attle: The Making of a Skeptic (Boston: L ­ ittle, Brown, 1996); and Fussell, Caste: A Guide Through the American Status System (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). 25. Fussell, ­Doing ­Battle, 105. 26. Fussell, ­Doing ­Battle, 112.

Chapter 8 1. Ginetta’s story is told, among other places, in Mary Peace Finley, The Matchbox (Auckland, New Zealand: Shortland, 1995). 2. Ginetta Sagan, letter to Board of Directors of AIUSA and Interested Members, December 7, 1993, supplied to me ­a fter my se­lection as candidate for executive director by one of Ginetta’s acolytes. Among Ginetta’s close friends and admirers was California Republican congressman Dana Rohrbacher, regarded as one of the most right-­w ing members of the party for the twenty years he served in the House. 3. A ­ fter that, I rarely tried to influence the board nominating pro­cess. AIUSA always nominated several more candidates for board positions than ­there ­were open slots. This meant that even if you did make it past the “rigorous” vetting of the nominating committee, you w ­ ere in no way assured of election. Furthermore, since all dues-­paying members—­about 350,000 p ­ eople at the time—­were eligible to vote and based their votes—­t he few who both­ ered to cast a ballot—on brief paragraphs describing the candidates, ­t here was no rhyme or reason to who won. This made standing for election an unattractive proposition for anyone with a public reputation to consider. 4. Among the staff ­were many who went on to impor­tant positions in other organ­ izations, including Ben Jealous, who headed our domestic rights program and subsequently became president of the NAACP and P ­ eople for the American Way. 5. Ian Parker, “Amnesty International—­Victims and Volunteers,” New Yorker, January 26, 2004, https://­w ww​.­newyorker​.­com​/­magazine​/­2004​/­01​/­26​/­v ictims​-­a nd​-­volunteers. 6. Parker, “Amnesty International.” 7. Another perspective on leadership was provided by an Amnesty member who, amid the fracas, sent me one of Gary Larson’s “Far Side” cartoons that depicted a group of sheep milling around in a disorderly manner. One sheep is saying to another, “Henry! Our party’s



Notes to Pages 204–216

263

total chaos! No one knows when to eat, where to stand, what to . . .” Suddenly t­ here is a knock on the door. “Oh, thank God!” says the frazzled sheep. “­Here comes a border collie!” The Amnesty member had written my name on the border collie. 8. Monthly Mailing, Amnesty International USA, April 1999. In author’s possession. 9. “Saul Alinsky’s 13 Tried-­and-­True Rules for Creating Meaningful Social Change,” Open Culture, February 21, 2017, https://­w ww​.­openculture​.­com​/­2017​/­02​/­13​-­r ules​-­for​-­radicals​.­html. 10. “State of Suffering,” Amnesty NOW, Summer 2000. 11. Alinsky, “13 Tried-­a nd-­True Rules.” 12. “In Belarus, Just Being Can Prompt an Arrest,” New York Times, July 30, 2011. 13. Monthly Mailing, Amnesty International USA, April 1999. In author’s possession. 14. Monthly Mailing, Amnesty International USA, July 1996. In author’s possession. 15. “Darfur: New Evidence of Attacks on Villages,” Amnesty International, November 17, 2009, https://­w ww​.­a mnestyusa​.­org ​/­darfur​-­new​-­evidence​-­of​-­attacks​-­on​-­v illages​/­. 16. Bellingcat (home page), https://­w ww​.­bellingcat​.­com​/­. 17. Quoted in George Packer, “The Four Amer­i­c as,” Atlantic, July/August, 2021, https://­ www​.­t heatlantic​.­com​/­magazine​/­a rchive​/­2021​/­07​/­george​-­packer​-­four​-­a mericas​/­619012​/­. 18. “UN Drops Award Sponsored by Equatorial Guinea’s Obiang,” BBC News, October  27, 2010, https://­w ww​.­bbc​.­com​/­news​/­world​-­a frica​-­11595933. Surprisingly, t­here is no internationally recognized right to live in a corruption-­free society, though t­here certainly should be. See William F. Schulz and Sushma Raman, The Coming Good Society: Why New Realities Demand New Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 127–147. 19. “Circumnavigator’s Song,” Circumnavigators’ Club, accessed March  21, 2022, https://­circumnavigators​.­org​/­about​-­us​/­circumnavigators​-­song​/­. 20. William F. Schulz and John Bolton, “What Price ­Human Rights? An Exchange,” Na­ tional Interest 56 (Summer 1999): 112–119. 21. Schulz and Bolton, “What Price H ­ uman Rights?”

Chapter 9 1. Lawrence Weschler, “Inventing Peace,” New Yorker, November 12, 1995, https://­w ww​ .­newyorker​.­com​/­magazine​/­1995​/­11​/­20​/­inventing​-­peace. 2. “Study Guide [to] The Tin Drum,” Schmoop, accessed March 22, 2002, https://­w ww​ .­shmoop​.­com​/­study​-­g uides​/­literature​/­t in​-­drum​/­a nalysis​/­t he​-­onion​-­cellar. 3. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, What Nietz­sche ­Really Said (New York: Schocken, 2000), 51. 4. The only participant in the conversation who agreed with me was Syracuse law professor David Crane who had served as chief prosecutor at the international war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone and who had therefore seen firsthand what enforcement of ­human rights law can accomplish. This story is told in similar words in William F. Schulz and Sushma Raman, The Coming Good Society: Why New Realities Demand New Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 11–12. 5. Quoted in James Gleick, “Endgame,” New York Times Book Review, September 6, 2020. 6. Primo Levi, “Quotable Quote,” Good Reads, accessed March  22, 2022, https://­w ww​ .­goodreads​.­com​/­quotes​/­838720​-­perhaps​-­one​-­cannot​-­what​-­is​-­more​-­one​-­must​-­not​-­understand. 7. Judith Matloff, “Unspeakable Acts,” New York Times Book Review, November 29, 2020. 8. Orlando Figes, “Reconstructing Hell,” New York Review of Books, June 12, 2003.

264

Notes to Pages 216–223

9. Paul Schneider, “Erich Mielke: The E ­ nemy Within,” New York Times Magazine, January  7, 2001, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2001​/­01​/­07​/­magazine​/­t he​-­lives​-­t hey​-­lived​-­01​-­07​-­01​ -­erich​-­mielke​-­b​-­1907​-­t he​-­enemy​-­w ithin​.­html. 10. Victor Nell, “Cruelty’s Rewards: The Gratification of Perpetrators and Spectators,” National Library of Medicine 29, no.  3 (October  2017): 224–257, http://­doi​.­org ​/­10​.­1017​ /­s0140525x06009058. 11. Mika Haritos-­Fatouros, “The Official Torturer: A Learning Model for Obedience to the Authority of Vio­lence,” excerpted in William F. Schulz, The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 120–123. 12. James Dawes, Evil Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 54. 13. Dawes, Evil Men, 120–128. 14. Erica Goode, “Albert Bandura, Groundbreaking Psychologist on Aggression, Dies at 95,” New York Times, July  30, 2021, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2021​/­07​/­29​/­science​/­a lbert​ -­bandura​-­dead​.­html. 15. Scholastic Editors, “Kindness in the Classroom,” Scholastic, September  5, 2018, https://­w ww​.­scholastic​.­com​/­teachers​/­a rticles​/­teaching​-­content​/­ages​-­stages​-­empathy​/­. 16. Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of H ­ uman Rights (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 17. Chris Buckley, “Brushing Off Criticism, China’s Xi Calls Policies in Xinjiang ‘Totally Correct,’ ” New York Times, September 26, 2020, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2020​/­09​/­26​/­world​ /­asia​/­x i​-­jinping​-­china​-­x injiang​.­html. 18. Keith Bradshaw and Steven Lee Myers, “Ahead of Biden’s Democracy Summit, Beijing Says: ­We’re Also a Democracy,” New York Times, December 7, 2021, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​ .­com​/­2021​/­12​/­07​/­world​/­asia​/­china​-­biden​-­democracy​-­summit​.­html. 19. Anton Troinovski and Ivan Nechepurenko, “Belarus Forces Down Plane to Seize Dissident; Eu­rope Sees ‘State Hijacking,’ ” New York Times, March  23, 2021, https://­w ww​ .­nytimes​.­com​/­2021​/­05​/­23​/­world​/­europe​/­r yanair​-­belarus​.­html. 20. “Teresin (Theresienstadt): The ‘Model’ Ghetto,” Jewish Virtual Library, accessed March 22, 2022, https://­www​.­jewishvirtuallibrary​.­org​/­theresienstadt​-­the​-­ldquo​-­model​-­rdquo​-­ghetto. 21. Paul Aussaresses, The ­Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-­Terrorism in Alge­ ria, 1955–57 (New York: Enigma, 2002), excerpted in Schulz, Phenomenon of Torture, 138. 22. Transcript of testimony, Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugo­slavia, February 22, 2007, 7547, https://­w ww​.­icty​.­org ​/­x ​/­cases​/­popovic​/­t rans​/­en​/­070222ED​.­htm. 23. Sontag quoted in Maria Popova, “Buckminster Fuller’s Meta­phor for the Greatest Key to Transformation and Growth,” Marginalian, https://­w ww​.­brainpickings​.­org​/­2015​/­08​/­21​ /­buckminster​-­f uller​-­t rim​-­tab​/­. 24. Ayana Mathis, “Dispatches,” Atlantic, June 2021. 25. Michael Moatsos, “Global Extreme Poverty Since 1820,” OECD iLibrary, accessed March 22, 2022, https://­w ww​.­oecd​-­ilibrary​.­org​/­sites​/­e20f2f1a​-­en​/­index​.­html​?­itemId​=​/­ ­content​ /­component​/­e20f2f1a​-­en. 26. “Abolitionist and Retentionist Countries,” Death Penalty Information Center, accessed March  22, 2022, https://­deathpenaltyinfo​.­org​/­policy​-­issues​/­international​/­abolitionist​ -­a nd​-­retentionist​-­countries. 27. “Democracy ­ Under Siege,” Freedom House, accessed March  22, 2022, https://­ freedomhouse​.­org ​/­report​/­f reedom​-­world​/­2021​/­democracy​-­u nder​-­siege; and Max Roser and



Notes to Pages 223–227

265

Bastian Herre, “Democracy,” Our World in Data, accessed March  22, 2022, https://­ ourworldindata​.­org​/­democracy. 28. Abigail Thernstrom and Stephen Thernstrom, “Black Pro­gress: How Far We’ve Come and How Far We Have to Go,” Brookings, March  1, 1998, https://­w ww​.­brookings​.­edu​ /­a rticles​/­black​-­progress​-­how​-­far​-­weve​-­come​-­a nd​-­how​-­far​-­we​-­have​-­to​-­go​/­. 29. Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That S­ haped a First Lady (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016). 30. “About the Court,” International Criminal Court, accessed March 22, 2022, https://­ www​.­icc​-­cpi​.­i nt​/­about; “Infographic: ICTY Facts & Figures,” International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, accessed March 22, 2022, https://­w ww​.­icty​.­org​/­node​/­9590; and Alastair Leithead, “Rwandan Genocide: International Criminal Tribunal Closes,” BBC News, December 14, 2015, https://­w ww​.­bbc​.­com​/­news​/­world​-­a frica​-­35070220. 31. Adam Hochschild, “The T ­ rials of Thomas Lubanga,” Atlantic Monthly, December 2009. 32. Ruth Maclean and Mady Camara, “Hissène Habré, Ex-­President of Chad Who Was Jailed for War Crimes, Dies at 79,” New York Times, August  28, 2021, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​ .­com​/­2021​/­08​/­24​/­world​/­a frica​/­hissene​-­habre​-­dead​.­html. 33. Elian Peltier and Abdi Latif Dahir, “Belgium Arrests 3 Men Suspected of Involvement in Rwandan Genocide,” New York Times, October 4, 2020, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2020​/­10​ /­03​/­world​/­europe​/­r wanda​-­genocide​-­a rrests​-­belgium​.­html. 34. Cristina Anderson and Farnaz Fassihi, “Sweden Convicts Ex-­Iranian Official in Prisoners’ Deaths,” New York Times, July 15, 2022, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2022​/­07​/­14​/­world​ /­europe​/­iranian​-­official​-­sweden​-­prison​-­executions​.­html. 35. Alia Malek, “How a Syrian War Criminal Was Brought to Justice—in Germany,” New York Times Magazine, January  30, 2022, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2022​/­01​/­25​/­magazine​ /­germany​-­t rial​-­syria​.­html. An ISIS fighter was also convicted in Germany of genocide in the death of a Yazidi girl he had bought as a slave. See Christopher F. Schuetze, “ISIS Fighter Is Convicted in Genocide of Slave Girl,” New York Times, December 1, 2021, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​ .­com​/­2021​/­11​/­30​/­world​/­europe​/­isis​-­t rial​-­yazidi​-­germany​.­html. 36. “Truth Commission Digital Collection,” United States Institute for Peace, March 16, 2011, https://­w ww​.­u sip​.­org ​/­publications​/­2011​/­03​/­t ruth​-­commission​-­d igital​-­collection. 37. For an in­ter­est­ing perspective on reconciliation and transitional justice issues, see Lea David, The Past C ­ an’t Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of ­Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 38. “USA: A Safe Haven for Torturers,” Amnesty International USA, August 31, 2001. 39. “Mission and History,” Center for Justice and Accountability, accessed March 22, 2022, https://­cja​.­org ​/­who​-­we​-­a re​/­mission​-­a nd​-­history​/­. 40. This quote is often attributed, perhaps erroneously, to the historian Arnold Toynbee. See “History Is Just One Damn Th ­ ing A ­ fter Another,” Quote Investigator, accessed March 22, 2022, https://­quoteinvestigator​.­com​/­2015​/­09​/­16​/­history​/­. 41. “Despite Threat of Prison, a Survivor of Cambodia’s Genocide Stands Firm,” New York Times, August 7, 2021. 42. Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993), 176. 43. Story told to William F. Schulz by Atema Eclai, director of programs at the Unitarian Universalist Ser­v ice Committee, 2017.

266

Notes to Pages 228–236

44. “Attempters’ Longterm Survival,” T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, accessed March  22, 2022, https://­w ww​.­hsph​.­harvard​.­edu​/­means​-­matter​/­means​ -­matter​/­survival​/­. 45. Andrew Barbano, “Sands of Time Blast the Milestones of Life,” Sparks Tribune, January 17, 2019, https://­sparkstrib​.­com​/­2019​/­01​/­17​/­sands​-­of​-­t ime​-­blast​-­t he​-­milestones​-­of​-­life​/­. 46. Dennis Overbye, “A New Clue to Explain Existence,” New York Times, May 17, 2010, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2010​/­05​/­18​/­science​/­space​/­18cosmos​.­html​?­hpw. 47. Ezra Klein, “Obama Explains How Amer­i­c a Went from ‘Yes, We Can’ to ‘MAGA,’ ” New York Times, June  1, 2021, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2021​/­06​/­01​/­opinion​/­ezra​-­k lein​ -­podcast​-­barack​-­obama​.­html. 48. Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times: Remembering as a Duty of Th ­ ose Who Survived,” New York Times, December  5, 1995, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1995​/­1 2​/­05​/ ­books​ /­books​-­of​-­t he​-­t imes​-­remembering​-­as​-­a​-­duty​-­of​-­t hose​-­who​-­survived​.­html. 49. Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark, quoted in Quotes of Famous P ­ eople, accessed March 22, 2022, https://­quotepark​.­com​/­quotes​/­1747026​-­w illa​-­cather​-­what​-­was​-­any​-­art​-­but​-­an​ -­effort​-­to​-­make​-­a​-­sheath​-­a​/­.

Appendix 1. David Firestone, “South Carolina High Court Derails Video Poker Games,” New York Times, October 15, 1999, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1999​/­10​/­15​/­us​/­south​-­carolina​-­high​-­court​ -­derails​-­v ideo​-­poker​-­games​.­html. 2. William F. Schulz and Sushma Raman, The Coming Good Society: Why New Realities Demand New Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 3. Amartya Sen, ­Human Rights and Asian Values (New York: Car­ne­g ie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 1997). 4. “The States Parties to the Rome Statues,” International Criminal Court, accessed March  22, 2022, https://­asp​.­icc​-­cpi​.­int​/­en​_­menus​/­asp​/­states%20parties​/­pages​/­t he%20states%​ 20parties%20to%20the%20rome%20statute​.­aspx. 5. General Assembly resolution 53/144, “Declaration on the Right and Responsibility of Individual, Groups and Organs of Society to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized ­Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms,” United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for H ­ uman Rights, December 9, 1998, https://­w ww​.­ohchr​.­org ​/­en​/­professionalinterest​ /­pages​/­rightandresponsibility​.­aspx. 6. Article 29, Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights, https://­w ww​.­un​.­org ​/­en​/­about​-­us​ /­universal​-­declaration​-­of​-­human​-­rights. 7. Kathryn Sikkink, The Hidden Face of Rights: ­Toward a Politics of Responsibilities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 8. See, for instance, Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: H ­ uman Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 9. See, for example, Eric Posner, “The Case Against H ­ uman Rights,” Guardian, December 4, 2014, https://­w ww​.­t heguardian​.­com​/­news​/­2014​/­dec​/­04​/­​-­sp​-­case​-­against​-­human​-­rights.

INDEX

Abacha, Sani, 63–64 Abaunza, Bonnie, 182 Abiola, Hafsat, 64–65 Abiola, Kudirat, 65 Abiola, Moshood, 64–65 Abrams, Stacey, 223 Abu Ghraib, 4, 101, 145, 157–58, 163, 215 Adams, Gerry, 88, 92 Adler, Margot, 179 Af­ghan­i­stan, 14, 145, 154, 157, 189 Afghan Northern Alliance, 188 African Charter on H ­ uman and ­Peoples’ Rights, 232 African Union, 97, 101–2, 224, 249n40 Against Empathy (Bloom), 24 Ahmadiyya Muslims, 67 AI. See Amnesty International (AI) AI Ghana, 120–21 AI Palestinian Groups, Figure 5 AI Tunisia, 77–78 AIUSA. See Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) AIUSA’s Online Action Center, 205 Akologo, Samuel Zan, 120–21 Albright, Madeleine, 261n7 Ali, Ben, 77 Ali, Laila, 113 Ali, Lonnie, 111 Ali, Muhammad, 111–13 Alinsky, Saul, 204–5 al-­Qaeda, 21, 55, 156–57, 164, 246n54 Alter, Jonathan, 158 American Bill of Rights, 13 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 110 American Colonization Society, 78 American History X (1998), 182 American Jewish World Ser­v ice, 66 American Medical Association (AMA), 137

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 206 Amnesty International (AI): blood diamonds sale and, 39, 57; founding of, 2–4; gender-­based issues, 119–20; International Secretariat, 17, 19–20, 29, 77–78, 240n4; Israeli-­Palestinian conflict, 57–59; mission to Darfur, Sudan, 94–103, 250n45; mission to Liberia, 79–86; mission to Northern Ireland, 86–94; Nobel Peace Prize and, 4, 195; organ­ ization of, 3, 194–95; policy against military intervention, 18, 21, 54; po­liti­cal neutrality and, 3, 20; Rwanda genocide response, 17–18; UDHR and, 4, 237n7; “Work on Own Country” restriction, 3 Amnesty International USA (AIUSA): annual reports and, 41–42; Bianca Jagger and, 133, 173–75, Figure 3; board nominating pro­cess and, 199, 262n3; celebrity support for, 22–23, 41, 49, 173–93; Center for Justice and Accountability, 225; criticism of 9/11 response, 144, 148–63, Figure 12; criticism of stun b ­ elts, 112; criticized for Guantánamo Bay condemnation, 149–50; Dalai Lama and, 47–48; death penalty opposition and, 123–40; executive directorship of, 1–6, 203–4, 208–9, 262n7; extractive industries and, 63–64; fund­rais­ing and, 181, 196–97; government attempts to influence, 207–8; grassroots membership of, 18, 20, 40, 57, 66, 195, 198, 200, 204–7, 262n3; ICMs and, 201–2; media outreach and, 21, 239n25; Media Spotlight Awards and, 151, 180, FIgure 11; meetings with secretaries of state, 173, 261n7; movie premieres and, 182; Muhammad Ali and stun b ­ elt campaign, 111–13; m ­ usic concerts in support of, 176–77, 195;

268 Index Amnesty International USA (continued) nature of h ­ uman rights work and, 194, 201–3; obsession with pro­cess in, 201–3; orga­nizational structure of, 194–200; prisoners of conscience (POC) and, 28–36; racial justice alliances and, 141; Refugee Program, 246n54; religious alliances and, 66; Rwandan genocide response, 19; social media and, 205; staff diversity and, 5–6, 21, 199, 262n4; student activists and, 195, 199–200, 204; US domestic h ­ uman rights violations and, 104, 110, 198–200; “Work on Own Country” restriction, 3 Andrews, Tom, 245n50 Annan, Kofi, 16 apartheid, 41 Applebaum, Anne, 149–50 Arpaio, Joe, 116–19 Ashoka, 232 Asian Values argument, 233, 238n9 Assad, Bashar al, 201 Atkins, Chester, 70–71, 73, 243n12 Atkins v. ­Virginia, 138–39 Aung San Suu Kyi, 37 Aussaresses, Paul, 221–22 Austin, Charles, 113 Australia, 60, 182 Bacall, Lauren, 1 Baez, Joan, 195, Figure 2 Bagram Air Base, 145, 154, 157 Baha’i faith, 67 Bailey, Mark, 167–68 Bai Ling, 48 Bandura, Albert, 218 Barnes, Harry, 199 Barnett, Michael, 239n15 Barrett, Ken, 89 Bashir, Omar al, 101, 103 ­Battle of the Casbah, The (Aussaresses), 221 Behringer, Harriette, 192–93 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 27 Belafonte, Harry, Figure 11 Belarus, 205–6, 220 Bell, Theo­philus, 107 Belton, Jayla, 138–39 Benenson, Peter, 2–3, 28–29, 237n1 Berenson, Lori, 29–30, 146, 241n13, 241n14 Berenson, Marisa, 179

Berenson, Mark, 30 Berenson, Rhonda, 30 Bern­stein, Robert, 58 Bessette, Lauren, 168 Bessette-­Kennedy, Carolyn, 168 Bewkes, Jeff, 179 Bhutto, Benazir, 30–31, 172 Biden, Joseph, 154, 184 Bin Laden, Osama, 249n35 Bin Salman, Mohammed, 220 Bishop, Jeanne, 133–35 Black, Cofer, 156 Black, Shirley T ­ emple, Figure 1 Black Dahlia, The (2006), 186 Black Lives M ­ atter, 205 Blackmun, Harry, 126 Blaustein Institute of the American Jewish Committee, 5 Blecker, Robert, 126–28, 254n57 blood diamonds, 39, 56–57, 63, Figure 10 Bloom, Paul, 24–25 Bolton, John, 211 Bonded L ­ abour Liberation Front, 35 Bonner, Yelena, 31 Bono, 181 Borger, Gloria, 171 Bosnian Serbs, 33, 50, 213, 222 Bosnian War: atrocities in, 19, 33, 39, 49–50; bombing of Sarajevo, 50; conviction of war criminals, 51–52; Srebrenica massacre, 4, 50 Boutros-­Ghali, Boutros, 239n15 Boxer, Barbara, 175–76 Bradke, Maria von, 214 Bradley, Ed, 62, 180, 251n17 Bratton, William, 251n10 Breyer, Stephen, 190 Bruggen, Coosje van, 188–90, Figure 9 Buchanan, Pat, 158–59 Buchwald, Art, 188 Buckley, William F., Jr., 162, 196 Burundi, 15 Bush, George H. W., 53, 55, 104 Bush, George W.: on Abu Ghraib torture, 158; aid to Colombian forces, 246n60; approval of waterboarding, 13, 163; disparagement of international institutions, 165; on growth of democracy around the globe, 165; ­human rights requests for disavowal of torture, 158, 163,



Index 269

259n54, 260n69; Iraq War and, 55, 104; Lagon and, 68; Liberia and, 85; order for capture of al-­Qaeda, 156–57; public opinion on, 165; response to 9/11, 144–50, 154–57; revocation of International Criminal Court treaty, 244n17; stays of execution and, 133; war on terror and, 4, 147, 152, 155, 164–65, 216 Cage, Nicolas, 182 Calhoun, John, 233 Cameron, David, 89 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 72 capital punishment. See death penalty Car­ter, Jimmy, 76–77, 199, Figure 6 Carvajal, Patricio, 11 Carville, James, 175–76 Caste (Fussell), 192 Castro, Fidel, 28, 247n8 Cather, Willa, 230 Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, 80, 84 Catholic Relief Ser­v ices, 66 Ceauşescu, Elena, 71 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 70–71, 247n7 celebrities: activism and, 181–86; fear and, 193; fund­rais­ing from, 181, 196; Media Spotlight Awards and, 151, 180, Figure 11; support for h ­ uman rights, 22–23, 41, 48–49, 173–93 Center for American Pro­g ress, 166, 229–30 Center for Justice and Accountability, 225 Central African Republic, 57, 219 Chafee, John, 170 Cheadle, Don, 22–23, 41, 103, 183–84, 186 Chechnya, 33 Cheney, Richard, 144, 149, 163 Chen Guangcheng, 37 Chile, 224 China: authoritarianism and, 220, 234; Covid-19 and, 21; crackdown on Hong Kong, 43–44, 49; delinking of trade and ­human rights in, 45; economic sanctions and, 65; Hong Kong and, 43–44, 243n13; ­human rights violations and, 4, 35–36, 42–49, 220, 242n8; ­labor camps (laogai), 37, 42, 49; prisoners of conscience (POC) and, 32–34, 42; relations with the U.S., 42, 44–45, 242n8, 244n23; sale of organs of executed prisoners, 37, 46; strategic

engagement and, 44–45; suppression of Tibetan culture, 42, 46–48; treatment of Uighur Muslims, 32, 42, 46 Christo, 188 Christopher, Warren, 18 Church, Forrester, 261n2 Church, Frank, 171, 261n2 Clark, Wesley, 53 Clifton, Doug, 38–39 Clinton, Bill: appeal to Singaporean government, 14; Dalai Lama and, 47; delinking of trade and ­human rights in China, 45; economic determinism and, 45–46; ­human rights rec­ord, 44–45, 244n17; impeachment charges and, 243n16; inaction in Rwandan genocide, 16–18, 240n28; Kosovo War and, 53; po­liti­cal abilities of, 44; relations with China, 44–45; Re­nais­sance Weekends and, 190; Whitewater Affair and, 122 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 119, 122, 190, 243n16 Clooney, George, 41, 103, 175–76, 184 Co­a li­t ion Provisional Authority, 56 Cochran, Johnnie, 251n10 Cohen, Ben, 188–89 Cohen, William, 53 Colmes, Alan, 151 Colombia, 62, 246n60 color revolutions, 52, 205 Comden, Betty, 177 Coming Good Society, The (Schulz and Raman), 232 Commission on International Religious Freedom (U.S.), 65 Commission on the Elimination of Abduction of W ­ omen (Sudan), 101 Commission on Unalienable Rights (U.S.), 68 Companescu, Ion, 247n7 Condé, Alpha, 204 conflict resolution, 73–76 Confucius, 232 Congo, 57 Conroy, John, 238n4 Conspiracy of Hope concerts, 176 Convention Against Genocide, 235 Convention Against Torture (CAT), 12, 152, 161, 163, 233 Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against ­Women, 119, 233

270 Index Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 207 Convention on the Rights of the Child, 233 Cook, Sarah, 220 Copperfield, David, 131–32 corporations: Amnesty donations and, 180; corporate responsibility and, 76–77; ­human rights violations and, 63–65, 196, 201, 209; protection of Chinese investments and, 44–45, 65; public images and, 41 cosmopolitanism, 165, 218–19 Covid-19, 21 Crane, David, 263n4 Cuba, 104, 247n8 cultural relativism, 12–14, 120–21, 233, 238n9 Cuomo, Andrew, 167–68 Czecho­slo­va­k ia, 69 Dakota (Norris), 226 Dalai Lama. See Tenzin Gyatso, Dalai Lama Dallaire, Roméo, 16, 18, 22 Daniels, Ross, Figure 1 Darfur, Sudan. See Sudan Darnell, Mike, 159 Daschner, Wolfgang, 261n71 Davis, Allen Lee, 136 Dawes, James, 217–18 Dayton Accord, 50–51 death penalty: AI opposition to, 20, 123–40; botched electrocutions and, 135–36; celebrity opposition to, 131–33; conservatives against, 133; decline in countries using, 42, 223; decline in public support for, 137; electric chair and, 111, 135–36; ­family members of victims and, 133–35; grassroots organ­izing against, 138, 255n84; lethal injection and, 136; mitigating f­ actors in, 130–31, 256n92; physician participation in executions and, 136–37; prohibition on cognitively disabled executions, 4, 138, 215; prohibition on juvenile executions, 4, 138–40, 215, 255n90; racial discrimination in, 125–26; reflection on Amer­i­ca’s image, 254n73; religious leaders and, 65–66, 132–33; retributivism and, 126–31, 134, 254n57; state abolition of, 137–38; United States and, 105; “volunteers” and, 129; wrongful convictions and, 124–26, 133

Death Penalty Information Center, 125 DeGeneres, Ellen, 180 Demo­cratic Unionist Party, 92 Dershowitz, Alan, 160–62 Diallo, Amadou, 106 DiCaprio, Leo, 57 Dinescu, Mircea, 72 Dionne, E. J., 149 disability rights movement, 206–7 disappearances, 42, 208, 214, 242n7 Doe, Samuel, 79, 83, 248n9 ­Doing ­Battle (Fussell), 192 Dolma, Tsultrim, 49 Douglass, Frederick, 233 Dowd, Maureen, 155 Drinan, Robert J., 199 Dukakis, Kitty, 123 Dukakis, Michael, 123–24, 127 Durocher, Leo, 14 East Timor, 60–61, 246n54 Ebadi, Shirin, 33 Eclai, Atema, 265n43 ECOMOG (Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group), 81–82, 248n14 Egypt, 32, 34 Eisenhower, Dwight, 7 Emmet, Linda Louise, 188–89 empathy, 24–25 End of Every­thing, The (Mack), 216 Enduring Spirit Award, 35 Ensler, Eve (V), 104–5 Equality Now, 121 Equal Justice Initiative, 125 Equatorial Guinea, 207–8 evil: ability to confront, 84–85, 211–16; altruistic intervention and, 217–20; deprivation of ­human dignity and, 216–17; hope and, 216, 222–23, 225–28; nature of, 5, 11, 135, 216–17; resilience and, 226–27; self-­ awareness of, 220–22 Evil Men (Dawes), 217 Executive Brain, The (Goldberg), 140 extractive industries, 39, 57, 63–64, 75 Faleh, Abdou Hussain Saad, 158 Fay, Michael, 12, 14 female genital mutilation (FGM), 120–21, 233

Fenians, 91, 249n29 FGM. See female genital mutilation (FGM) Finucane, Geraldine, 89 Finucane, Michael, 89 Finucane, Patrick, 88–89, 248n25 First They Killed My F ­ ather (Ung), 191 Fisher, Roger, 74 Florescu, Radu, 72 Ford, Harrison, 22–23 Foreign Operations Assistance Act, 61 Fox News, 128, 151–52, 154, 159, 239n25 Francis, Michael, 84 Freberg, Stan, 228 Freedom House, 223 freedom of speech, 165–66, 234–36 Freeman, Comfort, 85 Freidan, Betty, 190 French-­A lgerian War, 221 Frida (2002), 185 Fur ­people, 95 Furstenberg, Diane von, 188 Fussell, Paul, 190, 192–93 Gabriel, Peter, 176 Gaer, Felice, 5 Gallardo, José Francisco, 32 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 237n3 Gardner, Herb, 177 Gawding, Crystal Roh, 85 Gehry, Frank, 189 Geneva Conventions, 128, 146–48, 156–57 Genocide Convention, 96 George, 175 George, Terry, 22 Gere, Richard, 48–49, 181 Gillibrand, Kirsten, 250n1 Ginetta Sagan Fund, 197 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 140 Giuliani, Rudy, 106, 160, 251n10 Global Rights, 5 Global Witness, 57 Glover, Danny, 180–81, Figure 11 Goering, Curt, 50 Goldberg, Danny, 177 Goldberg, Elkhonon, 140 Goldman, Marshall, 74 Golston, Joan, 10 Gonzales, Alberto, 152 good society, 13, 135, 231–32, 236 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 46

Index 271 Gore, Al, 47 Gorski, Stan, 105 Gourevitch, Philip, 23 Graham, Beth, 2, 59, 124, 143, 167–68, 189–90, 229, 243n16 Graham, Gary, 133 Gray, Jerry, 225 ­Great Britain, 43, 55, 200, 243n13 ­Great War and Modern Memory, The (Fussell), 192 Green, Adolph, 177 Greene, Graham, 81 Greenway, H. D. S., 154 Grunfeld, Isidor, 237n5 Guantánamo Bay (GITMO): AI comparison to Soviet gulag, 149–53, 155; AIUSA challenges to, 148–55; applicability of Geneva Conventions and, 146–47; damage to US reputation, 148, 151, 153–54; detention of individuals at, 4, 101, 145–47, 154–56; politician calls for closure of, 154–55; torture of prisoners at, 152–53, 158; unlawful combatant status and, 147–49; violation of due pro­cess and, 146–47, 152, 155 Habré, Hissène, 224 Hamburger Hill (1987), 183 Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 145 Hamill, Diane, 91, 93 Hamill, Robert, 89–94 Hammurabi’s Code, 13 Hampton, Ron, 108–10 Hannity, Sean, 151 Hannity and Colmes, 151 Haritos-­Fatouros, Mika, 217 Harries, Owen, 211 Hart, Peter, 204 Harvard Negotiation Proj­ect, 74 Hatch, Orrin, 172 Havel, Václav, 31, Figure 1 Hawkins, Ronnie, 112 Hayek, Salma, 185–86 Haynes, William J., III, 148, 260n54 Healey, Jack, 176–77, 195 Helms, Jesse, 46, 104 Helsinki Accords, 40 Helsinki Watch, 40 Helton, Arthur, 246n54 Hendricks, Barbara, 179

272 Index Herbert, Bob, 139 Herman, Mary, 141 Hidden Face of Rights, The (Sikkink), 235 Hochschild, Adam, 224 Hockney, David, 188 Hoffman, Paul, 64, 225 Holbrooke, Richard, 50–52 Homeland Security Department, 145 Hong Kong, 43–44, 49, 243n13, 243n15 ­Hotel des Mille Collines, 23 ­Hotel Rwanda (2004), 22, 182–84 Hughley, D. L., 117–19 Hu Jintao, 243n15 Humanitarian Law Center, 33 ­human rights: American indifference to international, 38–40; Amnesty International (AI) and, 3–4, 13; blessings and, 226–28; celebrities and, 22–23, 41, 48–49, 173–93; colonialism and, 5; common questions about, 231–36; conservatives on, 198–99, 211; cosmopolitanism and, 218–19; as a cultural ideal, 220–21; cultural relativism and, 12–14, 233, 238n9; cultural sources of, 232; defining, 231–36; diversity of viewpoints in, 66–68; due pro­cess and, 231; economic sanctions and, 65; good society and, 13, 135, 231–32, 236; grassroots support for, 20; international norms and laws in, 13–14, 231–36; interpretation of violations, 13; mobilization for, 18, 20–21, 25–26, 240n4; NGOs and, 3–4; nonderogable rights, 234; po­liti­cal and corporate leader response, 40–41; religious leaders and, 65–67; responsibilities and, 234–35; successes in promoting, 215–16, 223–25, 227–28, 263n4; treaties defining, 231–35; United States law and, 140–41; universality of, 218–20; universal jurisdiction and, 150, 223–24. See also International Criminal Court (ICC) ­human rights dynamic: empathy and, 24–25; evocation of shame and, 26–28, 33; knowledge of violations, 28, 240n9; rational compassion and, 24–26; solidarity and, 25–26 ­Human Rights Now world tour, 176 ­human rights organ­izations: American indifference to h ­ uman rights and, 39–40; challenges to findings, 19; conflict

resolution techniques and, 76; democratic/non-­democratic socie­t ies and, 58–59; displacement of anger in, 201–2; indigenous, 207; institutional alliances and, 40; Iraq War and, 55–56, 245n41; leadership of, 208–9; research reports and, 40; Rwandan genocide response, 18; use of ridicule, 204–5; white activism and, 5, 199–200 ­human rights violations: accountability for, 60–61; activist anger and, 200–201; altruistic intervention and, 218–20; Bosnian War and, 49–51; China and, 4, 35–36, 42–49, 242n8; concealment of, 27–28, 240n9; corporations and, 63–65; emotional defenses and, 211–15; extractive industries and, 63–64; FGM and, 120–21, 233; gender-­based, 119–21; military intervention and, 21–22, 53–54, 60; religious persecution and, 65–66; terrorists and, 164; U.S. arms sales and, 61–62, 246n60; virtuous circle and, 206–7. See also United States h ­ uman rights violations ­Human Rights Watch (HRW): on Bagram Air Base torture, 157; Bosnian War and, 51; Darfur genocide and, 250n45; Israeli-­Palestinian conflict, 58; military leader opposition to torture and, 162; pressure on po­liti­cal and corporate officials, 40; religious alliances and, 65; research reports and, 40; Rwandan genocide and, 18 Hume, John, 92 Hungary, 69, 71 Hunt, Lynn, 26 Hussein, Abdel Rahim Mohammed, 102 Hussein, Saddam, 21, 53, 55–56, 153, 258n29 Hutu tribe: attack on Rukara parish church, 16–17; attacks on girls’ schools, 23; control of Rwandan government, 15; genocide of Tutsis and, 15–16, 19–20, 227; Interahamwe and, 15; reconciliation and, 227. See also Rwanda Ibrahim, Saad Eddin, 32, 34 ICMs (International Council Meetings), 201–2 I Live ­Here (Kirshner), 186 In­de­pen­dent International Commission on Kosovo, 53



Index 273

Indigenous ­human rights organ­i zations, 207 Indonesia, 60–61 Innocence Proj­ect, 125–26 In Our Own Best Interest (Schulz), 21, 50, 239n26 Interahamwe, 15 International Court of Justice, 96 International Criminal Court (ICC), 4, 33, 61, 103, 215, 224, 232, 244n17 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), 215, 224 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugo­slavia (ICTY), 51–53, 60, 215, 222, 224 International Red Cross, 148, 151, 153, 173 International Secretariat, 17, 19–20, 29, 77–78, 240n4. See also Amnesty International (AI) Interparliamentary Union, 166 IRA. See Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) Iran, 58–59, 120, 128–29, 139, 224 Iraq, 55–56, 97. See also Abu Ghraib Iraq War, 55–56, 153, 245n41 ISIS, 265n35 Israel, 57–59 Jaeger, Marietta, 133–35 Jaeger, Susie, 126, 134–35 Jagger, Bianca, 133, 173–75, Figure 3 Jagger, Mick, 173, 175 Janjaweed militias, 96, 101, 249n40 Jealous, Ben, 262n4 Jean Claude, 188 Jennings, Peter, 50–51 Johnson, Barbara Piasecka, 196–97 Johnson, J. Seward, 196–97 Johnson, Roo­se­velt, 82–83 Johnson, Samuel, 85 Jolie, Angelina, 22–23, 181 Journey Without Maps (Greene), 81 Junger, Sebastian, 188 Justice and Equality Movement, 96 juveniles: brain development and, 140, 256n92; detention center abuses and, 141; diminished responsibility and, 139–40, 256n92; moral culpability and, 253n47; prohibition on execution of, 4, 138–40, 215, 255n90

Kadeer, Rebiya, 32, 34 Kadkhoda, Zoleykhah, 120 Kalma refugee camp, 97–99 Kandić, Nataša, 33 Karadžić, Radovan, 50–51, 201 Kasinga, Fauziya, 121 Kearney, Andrew, 88 Kearney, Maureen, 88 Keen, Sam, 188–89 Kelling, George, 251n10 Kelly, Raymond, 106 Kennedy, Anthony, 140 Kennedy, Ethel, 167–68 Kennedy, John F., 8, 171 Kennedy, John F., Jr., 168–69, 175 Kennedy, Kerry, 5, 167–68 Kennedy, Robert, 167 Kennedy, Rory, 167–68 Kennedy, Ted: death of, 173; ­family tragedies and, 171–72; friendship of, 30–31, 167–73; po­liti­cal campaigns and, 153; Senate Prayer Breakfast and, 169–70 Kennedy, Victoria Reggie, 167, 173 Ken­sington Welfare Rights Union, 205 Kerensky, Alexander, 237n1 Kerry, John, 153 Khan, Irene, 95, 102, 149–51, 154–55, 250n45 Khashoggi, Jamal, 220 Kimberley Pro­cess, 57 Kim Dae-­jung, 31 Kim Jong-un, 201, 220 King, Angus, 141 King, Coretta Scott, 170 King, Larry, 14 King, Rodney, 109 kin se­lection theory, 218–19 Kirn, Walter, 117 Kirshner, Mia, 186–88 Kissinger, Henry, 11 Koch, Ed, 142, 160–61 Koh, Harold Hongju, 44, 54 Komi Republic, 74–77 Kony, Joseph, 56 Kosovo Liberation Army, 52 Kosovo War, 49, 52–54 Kovalev, Sergei, 33 Kozinski, Alex, 134 Krahn ­peoples, 82 Krauthammer, Charles, 158–59 Kristof, Nicholas, 184

274 Index Krulwich, Robert, 179 K Street, 175–76 Kurdistan Workers’ Party, 62 Kurds, 21, 32, 55, 62 Kushner, Harold, 190 Kuwait, 21, 53, 55 Lagon, Mark, 68 Lake, Anthony, 18 Lang, George, 50, 244n28 Langert, Nancy Bishop, 134 Lantos, Tom, 67 Lawal, Amina, 34 Lawford, Pat, 171 Lawrence, D. H., 206 Lee, Robert E., 8 Lehnert, Michael, 155–56 Lenin, Vladimir, 237n1 Levi, Primo, 216 Lewis, Jerry, 181 LGBTQ+ ­people, 4, 33, 107, 190, 205, 232 Liberia: Americo-­Liberians in, 78–79; Amnesty mission to, 78–86; Charles Taylor in, 79–80, 82–83, 85; civil war in, 85; coup in, 79–81; diamond trade in, 56; ­human rights violations and, 79–84; religious leaders and, 84–85; Samuel Doe in, 79, 83, 248n9; U.S. support for, 79, 83; ­women leaders and, 84–85, 248n19 Li Lu, 241n26 Lopez, Mariah, 107 Lords of War (2005), 182 Lord’s Re­sis­tance Army, 56, 184 Louima, Abner, 106 Lukashenko, Aleksandr, 220 L Word, The, 186 MacBride, Sean, 237n4 MacDougall, Gay, 5 Mack, Katie, 216 MacMillan, Margaret, 26 Maher, Bill, 117–19 Malvo, Lee, 124, 140, 253n47 Mandela, Nelson, 28 Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 6 Mandelstam, Osip, 6 Mann, Aimee, 177 Maricopa County Jail, 116–18 Maricopa County Tent Fa­cil­i­t y, 117–18

Martinez, Mel, 155 Marton, Kati, 50–51 Marx, Karl, 45 Masih, Iqbal, 34–35 Massoud, Ahmad Shah, 188 Matalin, Mary, 175–76 Mazursky, Betsy, 181 Mazursky, Paul, 181 McCartney, Paul, 180 McDougal, Susan, 122 McGrory, Brian, 171 McVeigh, Bill, 133–34 McVeigh, Jennifer, 133–34 McVeigh, Timothy, 124, 133 Media Spotlight Awards, 151, 180, Figure 11 Medina, Pedro, 135 Meese, Ed, 173 Meirhofer, David, 126, 135 Mello, Sérgio Vieira de, 246n54 Mexico, 32, 34–35 Milam, William, 83–84 military intervention: AI policy against, 18, 21, 54; humanitarian uses of, 21–22, 53–54, 60, 239n27; moral risk and, 52; in Rwanda, 16–18; United States and, 22 Miller, Arthur, 180 Milošević, Slobodan, 50–52, 225 Mitchell, George, 87 Mladić, Ratko, 50–51 Modine, Matthew, 179 Moi, Daniel arap, 34 Moral Man and Immoral Society (­Niebhur), 115 Morris, Dick, 179 Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni ­People, 63 MRTA. See Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) Mubarak, Hosni, 34 Mugisha, Frank, 33 Muhammad, John, 124, 140, 253n47 Mujahideen, 14 Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, 133, 135 Murray, LaCresha, 138–39 Muslims, 4, 50, 144–45, 213, 222 Mussolini, Benito, 130 Myanmar, 103, 219–20 Myers, Richard, 149



Index 275

Nasrin, Taslima, 119 National Black Police Officers Association, 109 National Prayer Breakfast, 30, 144, 172 National Salvation Front, 72 National Security Council, 260n54, 260n69 Native American w ­ omen, 104–5 NATO, 50–54 Natsios, Andrew, 249n41 Navalny, Alexei, 29, 220 Neier, Aryeh, 40, 242n5 Nell, Victor, 217 Nelson, Paul, 90 Nelson, Rosemary, 89–91 Nepal, 36 Neufeld, Peter, 125 New York City, 142–43 New York City Police Department (NYPD), 106, 145, 251n10 NGO. See nongovernmental organ­izations (NGO) Nichols, Terry, 124 Niebhur, Reinhold, 115 Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 214 Nigeria, 63 Night and Fog (1956), 183 Nightline, 183–84 Nimoy, Leonard, 181 9/11 response: AISUA criticism of, 144, 148–63, Figure 12; extraordinary rendition pro­cess and, 145; ­human rights violations and, 4, 65, 145–58, 164; interrogation methods and, 144, 152–53, 256n3; targeting of Iraq ­a fter, 55; targeting of Muslims a­ fter, 144–45; use of torture and, 4, 101, 145, 152–53, 157–58, 163; violation of due pro­cess and, 145–46, 152, 155; war on terror and, 147, 152, 155, 164–65. See also Abu Ghraib; Guantánamo Bay (GITMO) Nixon, Richard, 8 Noble, Ken, 83–84, 248n17 nongovernmental organ­izations (NGO), 3–4, 97, 120–21, 208–9 Norris, Kathleen, 226 Northern Ireland: Amnesty mission to, 86–94; Good Friday Agreement, 86–87, 92; IRA killings and, 88, 93; policing overhaul in, 92–93; po­liti­cal killings in, 87–94; RUC complicity in killings, 89–93; UDA killings and, 88–89

North ­Korea, 58, 153 Nuremburg ­Trials, 223–24 Nyala National Security Prison, 99 Obama, Barack, 166, 229, 243n15 Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, Teodoro, 207–8 Öcalan, Abdullah, 62 Occidental Petroleum, 75 Ochoa, Digna, 34–35, Figure 8 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 140–41 Office of the High Commissioner for ­Human Rights, 13 Ogoni ­people, 63 Oklahoma City bombing, 1995, 124, 133–34 Okonedo, Sophie, 22 Oldenburg, Claes, 188–90, Figure 9 Ono, Yoko, 188 Open Society Foundations, 242n5 Orange Order, 88–90 Orbán, Viktor, 220 O’Reilly, Bill, 128, 151 O’Reilly ­Factor, The, 128, 151 Orton, Beth, 177 Otpor, 51–52, 225 Pacino, Al, 251n17 Paisley, Ian, 92 Pakistan, 139 Palestinian Authority, 57–59, 219 Paulson, Hank, 188 Peres, Shimon, 59, 245n50 Persian Gulf War, 21, 53–55 Peru, 29–30, 241n13 Philadelphia Police Department, 109–10 Pickering, Thomas, 64 Pinochet, Augusto, 11, 199, 215, 224 Pleşu, Andrei, 72 POC. See prisoners of conscience (POC) police: accountability and, 108–10, 251n10; Amnesty reports on misconduct, 106; Darfur genocide and, 98–99; mistreatment of LGBTQ+ ­people, 107; racism and, 107, 110; Romanian Securitate, 71–73; RUC complicity in killings, 87, 89–93; stun technology and, 111–16; use-­of-­force continuum and, 115–16; vio­lence by, 25, 68, 105–13, 251n10, 251n17 Police Ser­v ice of Northern Ireland, 92 Po­liti­cally Incorrect, 117–19

276 Index Pompeo, Mike, 68 Potter, Stephen, 42 Powell, Colin, 96–97, 103, 250n45, 261n7 Power, Samantha, 103, 184 Pray the Devil Back to Hell, 248n19 prisoners of conscience (POC): Amnesty and, 28–36, 104; characteristics of, 31–32; defining, 28–29; due pro­cess and, 146; dynamics of rescue, 36–37; ­human rights ideals and, 29; po­liti­cal prisoners, 42, 241n14; retaliation against, 32–36; use of vio­lence and, 28–29, 235 prisons: AI concern with conditions in, 105, 116–19, 121; conviction of juveniles and, 139; juvenile detention abuses and, 141; sexual assault of w ­ omen in, 121–22; shackling of ­women in ­labor, 121–22; stun ­belts and, 112–13; stun guns in, 116; terrorist suspects and, 157; treatment of ­women in, 119, 121–22. See also Guantánamo Bay (GITMO) Prob­lem from Hell, A (Power), 103 Pronk, Jan, 249n41 Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), 87–88, 93 Putin, Vladimir, 155, 182, 220 Qatar, 207 Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), 182 Rabin, Yitzhak, 59 racial justice, 20, 141, 205, 233, 235–36 racism, 68, 107, 110, 125 Raman, Sushma, 232 Ramos, Celina, 214 Ramos, Elba, 214 Ramos-­Horta, José, 61 rape: Charles Taylor and, 86; Darfur genocide and, 97, 102; denial of Muslim, 102; Janjaweed militias and, 96; as war crime, 52, 119, 215; ­women prisoners and, 122. See also sexual assault rational compassion, 24–26 Rauschenberg, Robert, 188 Red Corner, 48 Red Hand Defenders, 90 religious freedom, 65–68, 72–73 religious leaders: death penalty opposition and, 65–66, 132–33; ­human rights advocacy and, 66–67; in Liberia, 84–85

R.E.M., 177 resilience, 226–27 Revolutionary United Front, 56–57 Rice, Condoleezza, 34, 260n54, 261n7 Rice, Susan, 64 Rickard, Stephen, 260n54 Rideau, Wilbert, 26 Rizzo, Frank, 109 Robert F. Kennedy ­Human Rights, 5, 84 Roberts, Julia, 180 Roberts, Thomas, 237n5 Robertson, Pat, 133 Robinson, Mary, 60, 246n54 Rohatyn, Felix, 254n73 Rohingya ­people, 37, 103 Rohrbacher, Dana, 262n2 Romania: Ceauşescu regime in, 70–71; ethnic Hungarians in, 70, 247n2; execution of Ceauşescus, 71; inter­ national del­e­ga­t ion to, 70–71; religious freedom in, 72–73; revolution in, 71–72; Securitate in, 71–72; systematization program in, 70; Unitarians in, 69–72, 247n2 Roo­se­velt, Eleanor, 223 Roper v. Simmons, 138–39 Rorty, Richard, 25–26 Roth, Kenneth, 40, 58, 65, 242n5 Royal Dutch Shell, 63–64 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), 87–92 Rumsfeld, Donald, 144, 147, 149, 152–53, 163, 258n29 Rusesabagina, Paul, 22–23 Rusk, Dean, 68 Rus­sia, 13, 33, 74–77, 220 Russo, Stephen, 117 Rwanda: AI response, 17–22; downing of presidential plane, 15, 17; French involvement in, 19; genocide in, 4, 15–22, 239n15; heroism and, 22–23; international tribunals and, 215, 224; UN inaction in, 16–18, 21–22, 239n15; US inaction in, 16–19, 239n15, 240n28. See also Hutu tribe; Tutsi tribe Rwandan Patriotic Army, 15, 19–20 Ryan, George H., 133 Safir, Howard, 106–7 Sagan, Ginetta, 195–98, 262n2, Figure 2 Sagan, Leonard, 195, 197



Index 277

Sakharov, Andrei, 31 Salazar, António, 2 Sands, Bobby, 88 Saro-­Wiwa, Ken, 63–64, 146 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 27, 240n9 Saudi Arabia, 58–59, 61, 139, 176, 204–5 Save Darfur Co­a li­t ion, 103, 250n46 Scheck, Barry, 125 Schneider, Karen, 129 Schulz, William F.: as AIUSA executive director, 1–6, 203–4, 208–9, 262n7; ­a ntiexecution sermons and, 123–24; Beth Graham and, 2, 59, 124, 143, 168, 229; Bianca Jagger and, 173–75, Figure 3; Bill Clinton and, 44, 243n16; cancer diagnosis and, 228–29; Center for American Pro­gress and, 166, 229–30; conflict resolution techniques and, 73–76; Cuban visit by, 247n8; Dalai Lama and, Figure 7; Darfur, Sudan mission, 94–103; early life and education, 7–11; Eastern Eu­ro­pean travel, 69–72; entry to China, 43, 243n12; Ginetta Sagan and, 196–97; Jimmy Car­ter and, 76–77, Figure 6; K Street and, 176; Liberian mission and, 78–86; Martin Sheen and, Figure 8; media outreach and, 21, 239n25; New York City and, 142–43; Northern Ireland mission and, 86–94; Oldenburg and van Bruggen, 188–90, Figure 9; In Our Own Best Interest, 21, 239n26; po­liti­cal consciousness of, 7–9; public speaking and, 209–11; Rwandan genocide response, 19–22; Ted Kennedy and, 30–31, 167–73; Tunisian visit and, 77–78; on use of military force, 21–22; UUA presidency, 2, 11, 21, 59, 69, 208; UUSC and, 66, 208, 230, 247n8 Seagal, Steven, 181 Search for Common Ground, 74 Sen, Amartya, 232 Senate Prayer Breakfast, 169–70 Senegal, 224 Seng, Theary, 226 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. See 9/11 response Serbia, 51–52 Serbian Radio Tele­v i­sion, 53 Serpico, Frank, 110, 113, 251n17 sexual assault, 102, 104–5, 121–22, 250n1. See also rape

Seymore, Leslie, 109–10 Shady Side Acad­emy, 7–11, 238n2 shame, 26–28, 33 Sharp, Gene, 52 Shattuck, John, 44 Shaw, Bernard, 123–24 Shea, Nina, 66 Sheen, Martin, 35, 181, Figure 8 Shining Arc, The, 48 Shouting Fire (Dershowitz), 160–61 Sierra Leone: civil war in, 39, 49, 56–57, 80; diamond trade in, 39, 56–57, Figure 10; indictment of Charles Taylor, 85; international war crimes tribunal and, 263n4; Special Court for, 85 Sikkink, Kathryn, 235 Silvers, Robert, 256n92 Singapore, 12, 14, 233, 238n9 Sinn Fein, 88, 92 Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson, 85 60 Minutes, 62, 139, 151, 160, 180, 251n17 60 Minutes II, 157, 171 Smith, Rick, 114–15 Smith, Robert, 129 Social Demo­cratic and ­Labour Party, 92 social media, 34, 201, 205 solidarity, 25–26, 36, 78, 219 solipsism, 27 Somalia, 16, 233 Sontag, Susan, 222 Soros, George, 242n5 South Africa, 41, 57, 202, 223–24 Southwest Voter, 247n8 Soyinka, Wole, 64 Spiegelman, Art, 188 Springsteen, Bruce, 176 Sri Lanka, 200 Stalin, Joseph, 149 Standard Minimum Rules for the ­Treatment of Prisoners, 112 Starr, Ken, 122 Stengel, Casey, 204 Stenukinis, Joe, 251n17 Stevens, John Paul, 138 Stevenson, Bryan, 125 Stewart, Patrick, 49, 177–79 Sting, 176 Stipe, Michael, 177 Stun Tech, 112

278 Index stun technology instruments: AIUSA campaign against, 111–16; deaths due to, 114–15; export of, 113–15; Muhammad Ali campaign against, 111–13; police use of, 111–16; prisoners and stun ­belts, 112–13; private sales of, 114; use-­of-­force continuum and, 115–16; U.S. manufacturers of, 113–14 Styron, Rose, 177 Sudan: Advisory Council on H ­ uman Rights, 101; African tribes in, 95–96, 99–100; Amnesty mission to, 94–103; Arab tribes in, 95–96, 99–100; celebrity attention to genocide in, 41, 103, 183–84; Darfur genocide in, 4, 41, 95–102, 183–84, 250n45; government denial of atrocities, 101–3, 250n45; grassroots movement against Darfur genocide, 103; Janjaweed militias in, 96, 101, 249n40; Kalma refugee camp, 97–99; rape in Darfur, 96–97, 102; satellite monitoring of, 205; tribal tensions in, 95–96, 249n35; U.S. response to genocide, 95–97, 103, 184 Sudan Liberation Army, 96 suffering: emotional defenses and, 211–15; empathy and, 24–25; ­human rights successes and, 215–16, 263n4; rational compassion and, 24–26; religious rationales and, 214; solidarity and, 25–26 Syktyvkar, Rus­sia, 73–76 Syria, 103, 224 Tadić, Duško, 213 Tagore, Rabindrinath, 7 Taguba, Antonio, 157 Taliban, 156, 249n35 Taser International, 114–15 Tate, Lionel, 139 Taylor, Charles: brutal control of Liberia, 79–85, 236; conviction and imprisonment of, 86; escape from U.S. prison, 79; flight from Liberia, 85; religious leader defiance of, 84; threat to Schulz, 86; ­women leader defiance of, 85 Tenzin Gyatso, Dalai Lama, 42, 46–48, Figure 7 Terkel, Studs, 190 Thatcher, Margaret, 243n13 Thorpe, Jeremy, 237n4 Thousand Clowns, A (Gardner), 177

Tian­a nmen Square massacre, 205, 241n26 Tibet, 42, 46–48 Tökés, László, 71, 73, 77 Torricelli, Robert, 173, 261n8 torture: Abu Ghraib and, 4, 101, 145, 157–58, 163; Chinese prisons and, 42; defenders of, 158–63; export licensing and, 113; Guantánamo Bay and, 152–53, 158; increase in, 42; military leader opposition to, 162; in popu­lar culture, 158–59; prisoners and, 238n4; public opinion on, 162; sanctioned by authority, 163; ticking bomb scenario, 159–61, 261n71; understanding of, 163; United States and, 13, 145, 152, 154, 157–58; warrants for, 160–62; waterboarding and, 13, 163, 221 torturers: creation of, 10, 163, 217, 238n4; empathy and, 24; ­legal action against, 225, 265n35; smoking gun argument and, 27 Torture Victims Protection Act, 64 Toynbee, Arnold, 265n40 Transylvania, 70, 73, 247n2 Trimble, David, 92–94 True Compass (Kennedy), 170 Trump, Donald, 37, 68, 119, 145, 151, 165 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 224 Tucker, Karla Faye, 133, 174 Tunisia, 77–78 Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), 29–30, 241n13 Turkey, 62 Tutsi tribe: control of Rwandan government, 15, 20; genocide of, 15–16, 19–20, 227; population in Rwanda, 239n12; reconciliation and, 227; Rukara parish church attack, 16–17; Rwandan Patriotic Army and, 19. See also Rwanda Tuzla, Bosnia-­Herzegovina, 50 U2, 176–77 UDHR. See Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights (UDHR) Uganda, 33 Uighur Muslims, 32, 42, 46 Ukraine, 13, 103, 220 Ulster Defense Association (UDA), 87, 89 Ulster Unionist Party, 92–93 UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda), 15–16



Index 279

UN Commission of Inquiry, 250n45 UN Commission on H ­ uman Rights, 18 UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, 16 Ung, Loung, 190–91 UN International Covenant on Civil and Po­liti­cal Rights, 255n90 Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA): corporate responsibility and, 76–77; Eastern Eu­ro­pean, 69–73, 247n2; presidency of, 2, 11, 21, 59, 69, 208 Unitarian Universalist Ser­v ice Committee (UUSC), 66, 208, 230, 247n8 United Arab Emirates, 61 United Kingdom, 86–88 United Nations: diamond certification pro­cess and, 57; ECOMOG and, 248n14; inaction in Rwandan genocide, 16–18, 21–22, 239n15; inaction in Srebrenica massacre, 50; military intervention and, 54; peacekeeping forces, 16, 102–3; Responsibility to Protect resolution, 103; Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, 112; UDHR and, 4, 13, 223, 231–32; US Mission to, 16, 239n15 United States: arms sales and, 61–62, 246n60; due pro­cess in, 146; freedom of speech and, 165–66, 234–35; inaction in Rwandan genocide, 16–18, 239n15, 240n28; indifference to international ­human rights, 38–40; military intervention and, 22; national interest and, 16–17, 20; non-­ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 233; Persian Gulf War and, 53–55; police vio­lence in, 68; public official efforts for POCs, 34; relations with China, 42, 44–45, 242n8, 244n23; response to Darfur genocide, 95–97, 103; torturers resident in, 225; use of Amnesty reports to justify military force, 46, 55, 104 United States h ­ uman rights violations: Abu Ghraib torture and, 4, 145, 154, 157–58, 163; abuse of detainees, 157, 259n48; AIUSA challenges to, 104, 110, 198–200; assaults on ­women in the military, 104, 250n1; black site prisons and, 157–58; conservative exception to, 198–99, 211;

death penalty and, 105, 123–40, 233; female genital mutilation (FGM) and, 121; Guantánamo Bay imprisonments, 4, 145–56; mistreatment of Muslims, 4, 144–45; police vio­lence and, 25, 68, 105–13, 251n10, 251n17; prison conditions and, 105, 116–19; racial justice and, 20, 141, 205, 233; sexual assaults of Native American ­women, 104–5; stun technology and, 111–16; waterboarding and, 13, 163, 221; ­women prisoners and, 119, 121–22 Universal Declaration of H ­ uman Rights (UDHR), 4, 13, 223, 231–32, 234–35, 237n7 universal jurisdiction, 150, 223–24 UN Security Council, 53, 60 Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary ­People (Conroy), 238n4 UN World Summit of 2005, 54 US Agency for International Development, 249n41 US Holocaust Museum, 250n46 UUA. See Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA) UUSC. See Unitarian Universalist Ser­v ice Committee (UUSC) V (Eve Ensler), 104–5 Vagina Monologues, The (Ensler), 104 Vega, Suzanne, 179 Vio­lence Against ­Women Act, 185 Voice of Amer­i­ca, 42 Walker, Alice, 120–21 Wallace, Chris, 151–54 Wallace, Mike, 151 wars: arms sales and, 61–62; conviction of war criminals, 51–52; failure to act and, 52; ­human rights violations and, 49–51, 54–56; Iraq War and, 55–56, 245n41; military intervention and, 52–54; rapid response and, 50; sexual vio­lence and, 52; Sierra Leone and, 39, 49, 56–57. See also Bosnian War; Iraq War; Kosovo War; Persian Gulf War Washington sniper attacks, 2002, 124, 140, 253n47 waterboarding, 13, 163, 221 wa Wam­were, Koigi, 34, 36

280 Index Wei Jingsheng, 33, 233, Figure 4 Welch, Bud, 133–35 Welch, Julie Marie, 133 Westheimer, Ruth, 190 We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We ­Will Be Killed with Our Families (Gourevitch), 23 Whitewater Affair, 122 Wiesel, Elie, 11, 229 Wiesner, Jerome, 31 ­Will, George, 133 Wilson, August, 8 Winfrey, Oprah, 34 Wol­fo­w itz, Paul, 259n54 ­women: domestic vio­lence and, 119, 185–86; female genital mutilation (FGM) and, 120–21, 233; ­human rights and, 4, 235; leadership in Liberia, 84–85, 248n19; sexual assault by prison guards, 121–22; shackled while in l­ abor, 121–22; treatment in Saudi Arabia, 176; treatment of imprisoned, 119, 121–22; US h ­ uman rights

violations against, 119; vio­lence against, 119–20, 185–87 Woods, Samuel Kofi, 80, 84–85 World Affairs Council, 211 World Conference on W ­ omen, 119 World Health Organ­ization (WHO), 120 Wu, Harry, 37 Xi Jinping, 42, 220 Yarris, Nick, 125 Yazidi, 265n35 Yeltsin, Boris, 33 Yemen, 61, 139 Yew, Lee Kuan, 233, 238n9 Yoo, John, 156 Zalaquett, Pepe, 224 Zana, Layla, 32 Zardari, Asif Ali, 30 Zilu, 232 Zitrin, Arthur, 136–37

ACKNOWL ­E DGMENTS

In one sense I am indebted to all ­t hose souls who participated in the ­human rights movement during the years recounted in this book and especially the members, friends, and colleagues at Amnesty International. Even the villains I encountered contributed to the story. But a few folks went above and beyond the call of duty, reading portions or all of the manuscript and providing their feedback. ­Those included former Amnesty USA staff members Curt Goering, Michael Heflin, Gerald LeMelle, and Karen Schneider; former AIUSA board members Angela Dino and Christianna Nichols Leahy; and my friends Jeff Kaplan, Kerry Kennedy, Stephan Papa, and Ike Williams. None of them share responsibility for my errors, but I hope they enjoyed the recounting of the journey. I have been privileged since 2016 to be associated as a se­nior fellow with the Carr Center for ­Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and I am grateful to its faculty director, Mathias Risse, and its executive director, Sushma Raman, for their friendship and support, as well as to Hannah Moy for assistance with notes and formatting. Bert Lockwood, series editor of Penn Press’s Pennsylvania Studies in ­Human Rights series, and Walter Biggins, editor-­in-­chief of the press, have been consistently encouraging. Fi­nally, I reiterate my love and gratitude to my wife, Beth Graham, who not only lived almost ­every part of this tale in real time, at least vicariously, but also critiqued my version of it out of a memory far more accurate than my own. Thank you for every­t hing, my love.