McVeigh's Country
by Eric Wittmershaus

As Timothy McVeigh breathed for the last time and had his eyes closed at 7:14 a.m. CDT, America was opening its.

On the TV at home, on the way to work or on the clock radio, depending on where you live, were reports of the execution and — much as there has been in the past week — interviews with people who knew Timothy McVeigh, with bombing survivors, with families of the dead. There was impassioned talk of revenge and closure and equally impassioned talk of whether the death penalty was the right thing to do.

Probably (I am, in fact, beginning writing this hours before McVeigh is scheduled to die.), there was little talk of human rights, either McVeigh's or those of the 168 people whose lives he ended on April 19, 1995. Human rights has generally gotten the short end of the conversational stick in the U.S. media, where the phrase generally isn't mentioned unless it's in connection with China and Most Favored Nation status.

For about three weeks in early May, that changed.

The United States, as you no doubt heard, lost a re-election bid for its seat on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Angry foreign policy cynics and anti-U.N. blowhards were quick to point out the apparent contrast between excluding the United States and including such human-rights friendly countries as Sudan, one of the few countries whose people are still sold into slavery. Less mentioned was that the countries that actually beat out the United States were France, Sweden and Austria.

There was a lot of talk of how chickenshit, profit-minded countries like France and Sweden had conspired to have us thrown off of the panel for our get-tough policies. Outraged columnists like The New York Times' William Safire pointed out how our country repeatedly condemns China's human rights record, and how that must have made everyone else uncomfortable enough to vote us off. Never mind that we "punish" China for its human rights record by racking up a trade deficit with them that hit $84 million in 2000, according to the National Council for Science and the Environment.

Few brought up our own questionable human rights record, like that, since 1990, the United States has executed 14 people for crimes they committed while they were younger than 18, according to Amnesty International's Facts and Figures on the Death Penalty. That's only five fewer children than the 19 Timothy McVeigh would come to call "collateral damage."

But never mind those kids. If America's anything, it's a place where we show we're willing to take the good with the bad. We did, after all, just write a $43 million check (allegedly to fight the narrow-minded War on Drugs) to the Taliban, the modern-day government that seems to be trying most to emulate Nazi Germany.

In our efforts to arrest and give a fair trial to Osama bin Laden, whom our allies the Taliban are so graciously protecting from us, we launched a unilateral bombing attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant, claiming it manufactured chemical weapons. The rest of the world condemned our misguided, egg-on-the-face attempt at revenge, while one of Africa's poorest countries allegedly lost 60 percent of its pharmaceutical-production capacity.

Naturally, any nation with a large military and interests to advance is bound to make some mistakes, and surely we more than recovered our moral ground as the lone crusader when we belonged to the human rights commission.

There was, for instance, the time we voted down a resolution banning torture, saying we "could not support vague calls concerning production of torture equipment" and that it was "inappropriate to single out specific countries in thematic resolutions." The United States, of course, might be pressured to say a thing like that because we harbor 80 companies involved in the manufacture of torture equipment, according to Amnesty International.

As of the filing of Human Rights Watch's annual report on the United States, we were the only internationally recognized government not to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which UNICEF calls "the most universally accepted human rights instrument in history."

In the United States' defense, the treaty remains un-ratified largely because the process of ratifying a treaty in a country with so many lawyers per capita (and so many U.N. conspiracy nuts) is time-consuming and fraught with technicalities. Along with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, for example, we have signed, yet after 19 years not ratified, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Our friends in the Taliban would be pleased.

So now the Human Rights Commission forges on without us. One of the condemnations it may issue could be against the New York City Police Department, for its handling of the Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo cases. Maybe they'll condemn NATO's use of depleted uranium weapons during the Balkan conflict. Or maybe they'll remind us of the predominantly black so-called felons who weren't allowed to vote in last November's presidential election in Florida.

There will be those who will want to make Timothy McVeigh into some kind of martyr. For these people, he will be a hero who railed against all the abuses chronicled above and more. He'll be a prophet who foresaw the increasingly frightening influence non-elected governmental bodies have over our lives. He may very well go down as the man who stepped up and did something about all the bullshit.

For the rest of us — the majority of us — Timothy McVeigh can go down in history one of two ways: simply as an inhuman monster who killed 168 and injured 500 one day in 1995, or as a barometer for how far out-of-whack our moral compass has gone, in perhaps the only country in the world where execution of the mentally retarded is still up for debate.

Timothy McVeigh has not yet breathed his last breath, or closed his eyes forever. But now, a few minutes before 5 a.m. here on the West Coast, we're on the verge of deciding whether our eye-opening today will be figurative or literal. Let's hope it's the former.

E-mail Eric Wittmershaus at ericw at flakmag dot com.