.Amnesty Who?
"There is a good article on thinkprogress.org with quotes from Donald Rumsfeld prior to the invasion of Iraq. Clearly the United States took the word of Amnesty International very seriously when their facts supported our rush to war in Iraq, but now that they are critical of the U.S. they are no longer a credible organization.I wish I had the answer to that one.
How many more organizations does this administration have to ignore or try to discredit before people actually stop and think maybe its not everyone else, maybe just maybe it is this administration that is the biggest threat to human rights."
RantBurg
posted by madtom at 8:32 PM
4 Comments:
Rantburg does make some good points but it is a little over the top to call the USA the biggest threat to Human rights
For all the USA problems eg Guantanamo bay, which personally I am totally against and prison abuses in Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan, it does something about them to try to end the abuse
The biggest threat to Human Rights is Extremist groups that attempt to force extreme ideology onto the goverment and to end voting and democracy
I was watching the press conference the other night where President Bush made the "absurd" comment. And in one of the questions he was asked about violent reaction from the government of Uzbekistan, the President said he was going to send the Red Cross to investigate the allegations.
You know, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have been damning America as a major human rights violator for as far back as I can remember. I recall during the Clinton administration, when he ordered the air attacks on Kosovo to stop the Serbian genocide there, Amnesty International convenently released a report on abuse of convicts in US prisons. They seemed to be primarily outraged by male prisoners raping eachother. And the death penalty. That's a HUGE human rights violation.
Prisoners raping each other and capital punishment = genocide in Kosovo.
What I don't get is why the Bush administration has to work so hard discrediting these guys. They discredited themselves LONG before Bush took office. Their reports are useless. These organizations have noble intentions but have made themselves irrelevant by their refusal to categorize human rights abuses by severity, and by their tendency to classify things like convicts raping eachother as human rights abuses.
*sigh*
BTW, I condemn what happened at Abu Ghraib... as a military vet, it disgusts me what happened there and I think the perps should have been executed. But the death sentence would have been a human rights abuse, I forgot. Sorry. In any case, we'll never know how many people died as a result of the violent reaction to that scandal, and those were not "abuses" alleged in the Taguba report, they were war crimes. The big 3 of war crimes are murder, torture and rape. All THREE were alleged, but none were charged. Very bad conduct by our soldiers, and it was poorly handled by military authorities.
But, in any case, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International did not expose Abu Ghraib, a military investigation did.
"They seemed to be primarily outraged by male prisoners raping eachother."
If I not mistaken, the President also brought up this very issue early in his first term. At the time he seemed to agree with them, I guess the issue served his agenda at the time.
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