Ten years after September 11th, human rights flounder in the United States but flourish in the Middle East.

American authors of legal memos justifying torture, such as John Yoo, have escaped prosecution [GALLO/GETTY]

Since September 11th, the United States and the Arab world have
traveled a treacherous road together. Where they have arrived after ten
years sets them apart. In the US, the embrace of human rights as a
defining value and ideal worthy of considerable sacrifice is gradually
fading, while the Arab world is in the midst of a rights revolution.

Throughout
US history, promoting individual rights and civil liberties has been
central to how Americans defined themselves. To be American was to
champion liberty and rights. These were repeatedly billed as inherently
American values. Even when they encountered contradictions such as US
support for brutal dictators, Americans' faith that more often than not
the United States used its power to promote its principles allowed many
Americans to continue to take pride in their "America as leader of the
free world" identity. In this formulation, human rights, ideals, and
morality mattered, at the very least as a bar that should be met.

But
the United States' treatment of human rights after September 11th
proved hard to reconcile with its "purveyor of rights" identity. Abu
Ghraib's gripping images, Guantanamo's indefinite detentions without due
process, the outsourcing of torture to "partner" countries through
renditions, CIA blacksites where Americans themselves took up torture
and disappearances, and countless legal memos and euphemisms justifying
torture so blatantly flew in the face of American claims to championing
human rights that most found it increasingly difficult to invoke a
distinct American identity based on freedom and rights.

At the
same time, while arguing that the spread of democracy and freedom
through military interventions in the Middle East was "America's
calling", the Bush administration embarked on a relentless campaign to
persuade Americans that preserving "national security" could be
justifiably pursued through any means, even what Dick Cheney termed
venturing into "the dark side".

A decade later, the most daunting
legacy of September 11th is that Americans have followed the Bush
administration's lead and gradually abandoned the notion that
morally-based values such as human rights should define their identity
and guide their behaviour.

Rewarding torturer supporters

As a result,
the mainstream debate over whether the United States should torture has
become one almost entirely devoid of questions of morality. Instead, for
most of the post-September 11th era, it has largely been a debate over
whether torture is effective or not, whether it protects American
security or not. Within that debate, the Bush-Cheney argument that
torture (or its euphemism, "enhanced interrogation techniques") is
sometimes necessary seems to have increasingly gained currency. In fact,
once he took office, the Obama administration pledged to prohibit
torture and close Guantanamo, not because of public opinion but in spite
of it.

Today, high-ranking government officials who approved
torture are writing books in comfortable retirement, lawyers who
provided legal cover for them now serve as federal judges and law
professors, and CIA officials and psychologists involved in carrying out
torture have largely retained their jobs, even receiving promotions.
The prospect of these individuals ever being held in any way accountable
for their role in human rights violations is for the time being
unimaginable. Despite the presence of numerous human rights proponents
within its ranks, the Obama administration has read the national
sentiment and squarely refused to pursue prosecutions under the
President's mantra of "looking forward, not backward".

While in
the past, American leaders resorted to presenting interest-driven
policies as essentially meant to further rights and freedom in the world
- a trend the political scientist John Mearsheimer referred to as
"liberal talk, realist thinking" - the opposite dynamic has emerged ten
years after 9/11. American politicians who want to pursue human rights
agendas are compelled to present them as interest-driven. Thus, the
Obama administration is forced to frame its calls for everything from
closing Guantanamo, to the Libyan intervention, to its policy on
genocide in national security terms. The space for invoking human rights
on moral grounds alone has virtually disappeared in the United States.

This
increased American ambivalence towards human rights stands in contrast
to a rise in the human rights ideas' resonance in the Arab world since
September 11th. The denials of human dignity captured in Abu Ghraib
photos and Guantanamo accounts had a profound psychological impact in
much of the Arab region. As they grasped for a response, many Arabs
found the language of human rights gave expression to their immense
sense of indignation. At the same time, activists began drawing
attention to the Arab world's own "Abu Ghraibs" and "Guantanamos".

In
Egypt, bloggers began posting graphic videos of torture and moralsual
abuse by authorities, and the stark before-and-after pictures of 27-year
old Khalid Said, who was beaten to death in Alexandria, spurred a wave
of public protests in 2010. Eventually, public revulsion against the
practice of torture became a major catalyst for the protests that led to
Egypt's historic revolution.

An unprecedented embrace of the
language of human rights has been an unmistakable feature of not just
Egypt's revolutionary moment, but the tide of protest and change that
has swept much of the region. The Arab world is moving towards a
consensus on not only the moral corruption of repressive practices like
torture, wrongful imprisonment and suppression of mindembly, but the
urgency of acting to challenge these practices, sometimes, as in the
case of Syria, in immensely dramatic form. When dictators have been
successfully ousted, significant public pressure demands prosecution and
accountability for rights violations.

Evidence of the new
legitimacy and embrace of the human rights idea is evident almost
everywhere one looks - in protest slogans, in the new prominence of
human rights activists, and in the platforms of aspiring political
actors of almost every persuasion. Even Islamists and religious figures
like the head of Al Azhar University, the seat of Sunni Islamic
learning, proclaim their commitment to upholding rights.

The
picture is not entirely rosy. Even in Egypt, human rights activists told
me in June that they were up against widespread views that terrorists
or "thugs" sometimes needed to be roughed up. Yet these activists were
optimistic that the emerging culture valuing rights provided ample
openings for transforming such views.

American human rights
activists, on the other hand, are much more pessimistic about the
prospects of combating public support or apathy on torture and other
human rights policies of the US government.

The contrasting
American and Middle Eastern dispositions are of course, fraught with
irony, given that it was the United States that would supposedly support
human rights in the Middle East. Perhaps in the most convoluted sense
of the word, it somehow did. In the second decade after 9/11, we can
only hope that when it comes to its commitment to human rights, the
United States will draw some inspiration from the Arab world.
Shadi Mokhtari is mindistant Professor at the School of International Service at American University. She is the author of After Abu Gharib: Exploring Human Rights in America and the Middle East and Editor in Chief of the Muslim World Journal of Human Rights.

[b]The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.[/b]

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