The Duck of Minerva

No Torture, No Excuses.

by Charli Carpenter

25 May 2008, 0327 EDT

Anthony Arend at Georgetown University reports on a new campaign that many of us will want to support. Its promotional video, culled from the film Taxi to the Dark Side:

Unlike many anti-torture activists who base their arguments on consequentialism (e.g., we shouldn’t torture because it’s ineffective, we shouldn’t torture because it puts our troops at risk), this campaign reminds us that human rights law forbids torture even if – perhaps especially if – it costs us nothing and we have everything to gain. To quote Senator McCain, who in the olden days put his money where his mouth was, “It’s not about us, it’s about them.”

Get involved here.

Another useful website.

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.

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