"In 2007 the idea of human rights has come under the most serious attack from the United States of America," Cox said in a talk before about 150 people at the UW-Madison Pyle Center.

Human rights mean that all people, no matter who they are, what they believe, or even what they have done, have certain rights rooted in the inherent dignity of human beings that cannot be violated for any reason, by any power, Cox said.

For 45 years Amnesty International has documented and mobilized public pressure around the world against some of the cruelest abuses human beings can inflict on other human beings, Cox said. The organization has always raised concerns about human rights violations committed by the United States, including cases of unfair trials, racial discrimination and the widespread use of the death penalty. It has also documented and fought against the U.S. role in condoning or even encouraging torture.

"But if we are honest, even in our most pessimistic and discouraged moments, none of us ever expected to live to see precisely the gross violations of human rights associated with dictatorship not just carried out but openly and publicly defended by the highest elected officials in the land, including the president and vice president and then ratified by the U.S. Congress," he said.

The United States has locked up hundreds of people not just for days or months, but for years -- more than four or five years -- in places like Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, without charging or trying them for a crime, Cox said.

Cox quoted an FBI agent on what he witnessed at Guantnamo: "On a couple of occasions I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water."

Most of the time, the agent continued, the detainee had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning was on so high the barefooted detainee was shaking. On another occasion, the air conditioning had been turned off and the temperature in the unventilated room was well over 100 degrees. The detainee was on the floor with a pile of hair next to him.

"He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night," an FBI agent reported.

Cox said that he offered the testimony of the FBI agent because of its source.

"It is not the testimony of another detainee or of a bleeding heart human rights advocate like me," Cox said, adding that the techniques, when used by other countries, are properly considered torture by the U.S. State Department.

After the revelations of Abu Ghraib, conditions at the prison improved. However, a report from Amnesty International this week documents that conditions have become worse with large numbers of people held in extreme isolation and sensory deprivation, Cox said.

Prisoners are confined to almost completely sealed cells, with no natural light and minimal contact with other human beings, conditions that the United Nations has found produces serious mental illness leading to numerous cases of suicide, he added.

Cox gave the annual Mildred Fish-Harnack Human Rights and Democracy Lecture, sponsored by the UW-Madison Division of International Studies and the Global Legal Studies Center of the Law School.

Fish-Harnack was a native of Milwaukee who earned bachelor and master's degrees from the UW-Madison in the mid-1920s. She married German graduate student Arvid Harnack and returned with him to Germany where she taught American literature at the University of Berlin.

The Harnacks organized a resistance group during World War II. Both were executed. Fish-Harnack was the only American civilian to be executed by the Nazis as an underground conspirator.

E-mail: skalk@madison.com

Published: April 18, 2007