America in the World

Anti-Americanism has declined across the world since Barack Obama's election

Late last month the Pew Global Attitudes Project published its regular polling on global attitudes toward the USA.

The increases in 'US favourability' are particularly substantial in France, Germany, Spain and, outside Europe, in Indonesia.

America led by Obama has maintained support in parts of the world where George W Bush was reasonably popular.  See the graph opposite for resilient or improving numbers in India, Japan, Israel and throughout Africa.

What the Obama administration has yet to prove is that increased favourability translates into concrete gains for American policy goals.  Former UN Ambassador John Bolton is sceptical.

Obama sets up new unit to interrogate high value terrorist detainees

The interrogation techniques used during the Bush years became a major new source of anti-Americanism.  The Bush administration approved techniques such as waterboarding (a simulation is pictured) and sleep deprivation (defended recently by Dick Cheney) but we are also now learning that other unauthorised techniques were used.  These included threatening to kill a detainee's children and revving a power drill near next to the head of a hooded detainee.  The Obama administration is now investigating whether CIA operatives who used unauthorised detainees should be prosecuted. 

Present Obama has said that there need be no conflict between American safety and American ideals and has set up a new unit to ensure ethical and scientific interrogation of suspects who could help provide information about America's enemies.

The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group will be headquartered at the FBI but will include expert operatives from other parts of the security establishment.

The Washington Post reports:

"Members of the new interrogation unit will have the authority to travel around the world to talk to suspects and will be trained to handle certain high-interest people, such as al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Linguists and cultural and interrogation specialists will be assigned to the group and will have "some division of responsibility" regarding types of detainees, a senior administration official said. Most of the group's members will work there full time, although they will have part-time support from the FBI. Interrogators will not necessarily read detainees their rights before questioning, instead making that decision on a case-by-case basis, officials said. That could affect whether some material can be used in a U.S. court of law. The main purpose of the new unit, however, is to glean intelligence, especially about potential terrorist attacks, the officials said."

> Background on the HVDIG from the State Department.

The BBC's outgoing North America Editor writes a fond farewell to the USA

AmericaInTheWorld.com has featured the writings of the BBC's Justin Webb on a number of occasions.  He also addressed a gathering of journalists, politicians and other opinion formers hosted by AITW.

Mr Webb has now left America and will soon become one of the principal presenters of the BBC's flagship currents affairs programmes; Radio 4's Today programme.

Before he left he wrote a goodbye reflection.  You can read it all here but this was his conclusion:

"I deplore the superstition and the eating competitions and the tatty dreariness of so much of America, and I note that the new president is also unimpressed by the infrastructure and not a fan of fat but, after more than seven years living here, I am increasingly convinced that these elements of the nation are not the flip side of the greatness of America, they are part of that greatness.

There is something about the carelessness of America that gives space for greatness.

Out on route 17 in South Carolina, you can do very well or very badly. You can crash and burn, or you can fill up with cheap petrol and ride off into the sunset. If you do not like yourself in South Carolina, you can hire a self-drive hire truck and take it to Seattle. If you do not like your life and you have drive and luck, you can change it because - being American - you believe you can change it.

Sitting in a dingy apartment in New York watching Perry Mason on the TV, you can decide to make it big in law as eight-year-old Sonia Sotomayor once did.  This summer, now in her fifties, she becomes a Supreme Court justice and the latest American story to send shivers down the spines of dreamers of the American dream.  But if Sonia Sotomayor is to make it big, there must be something creating the drive, and part of that something is the poverty of the alternative, the discomfort of the ordinary lives that most Americans endure and the freedom that Americans have to go to hell if that is the decision they take...

More than 300 million people live here now, settlers from all over the world. From Ho Chi Minh City, from Timbuktu, from Vilnius, from Tehran, from every last corner of the earth, they have made America their home and they are still streaming in.  I feel crazy going back to the old world. My five-year-old daughter Clara, who is the proud owner of an American passport, agrees.  She says she intends to leave home, at around 12-years-old, and return to her native land. I do not blame her.

If you are willing to chance your arm, if you back yourself, if you want to live the life, America is still the place to be. Drive out on Route 17 and take a chance!  So that's it from me, I am checking out. But part of me can never leave…"

Obama unhappy at release of Lockerbie bomber

Earlier today Barack Obama - echoing Hillary Clinton's earlier remarks - expressed his unhappiness at the decision of the Scottish government to release the Lockerbie bomber on 'compassionate grounds':

For Janet Daley of The Daily Telegraph the release is another proof that Obama has made America more likeable but not necessarily more influential:

"The rehabilitation of America’s standing in the world was going to be one of the great gains, if you remember, of the Obama election victory. No more was the voice of the US to be held in contempt by its old allies. The Obama White House would restore the moral authority of the nation, and thus its influence in the world. So much for that. As the Scottish Justice Secretary intoned his ruling that Megrahi was to be permitted to go free because he was “a dying man”,  most Americans (even of the liberal Obama persuasion) would be wondering what a life sentence meant if it did not involve dying in prison. But the important political lesson will have gone home. The President and his Secretary of State could do nothing - for all their administration’s  supposed global prestige - to prevent what they considered to be an outrage. On yet another score, Mr Obama could not deliver the goods."