ABSTRACT
The events following September 11 assured me of my failed thesis, but the interviews I conducted in and around Washington, D.C., long before then had already tipped me off that something is seriously awry with the way the United States "does" human rights. Policy makers may talk about human rights now more than ever, but the talk does not lead to consistent human rights abiding behaviors and decisions. The manner in which human rights have been under-- stood and applied threatens to strip human rights ideas of their central content. While many of the government policy makers and military officers I inter-- viewed for this book genuinely identified with being "on the side of human rights," their vision of human rights accommodated double standards: one for the United States, and another for the rest of the world. In other words, human rights are something the United States encourages for other countries, whereas the same international standards do not apply in the same manner in the United States.
