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“Guantánamo has become the gulag of our time”

By Max J. Castro
Taken from Progreso Weekly
Jun 2, 2005

The words in the headline don’t come from the mouth of an Islamic extremist or one of the United States’ traditional adversaries. They are the words of Irene Khan, Secretary General of the world’s most celebrated human rights organization, as she launched the human rights group’s 2005 report, which covered the global human rights situation during the previous year.

Khan’s astonishingly harsh assertion was part of a larger indictment of U.S. policy under the Bush administration contained in the annual report of Amnesty International (AI), the world’s most prestigious human rights organization. The Amnesty report, which covered 149 countries, decried the human rights situation in many countries but reserved its strongest criticism for the United States. In a section titled “’Terror’, ‘counter-terror’ and the rule of law,” the AI report states:

U.S. President George W. Bush has repeatedly asserted that the USA was founded upon and is dedicated to the cause of human dignity. It was a theme of his speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2004. Yet during his first term of office, the USA proved to be far from the global human rights champion it proclaimed itself to be.

In a statement evidently aimed at the Bush administration, AI’s Khan warned of “a dangerous new agenda” which couches human rights and torture in deceptive language:

Governments are betraying their promises on human rights. A new agenda is in the making with the language of freedom and justice being used to pursue policies of fear and insecurity. This includes cynical attempts to redefine and sanitize torture.

The 2005 AI report took special notice of the Bush administration’s attempt to redefine torture, referring to “a series of government memorandums that emerged after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke – which suggested that the administration was discussing ways in which its agents could avoid the international ban on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment – indicated that the U.S. administration’s stated opposition to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment was paper-thin.”

Calling human rights “not only a promise unfulfilled but a promise betrayed,” the report goes on to say that “the ‘war on terror’ appeared more effective in eroding international human rights principles than in countering international ‘terrorism’.”

Had the performance of the U.S. media over the last few years not demonstrated the extent to which it has been cowed by the Bush administration and the right, one would have thought the AI report would be a big story. For more than two decades, the United States has positioned itself as the arbiter of the human rights records of every country on the planet. President Bush constantly lectures other nations and leaders about freedom, democracy and the rule of law. For an impartial, highly respected human rights organization, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, to voice such a tough and comprehensive critique of United States policies and actions is news –except in the Neverland that much of the U.S. media has become. Indeed, in its constant and misguided quest for a false “balance” between plain truth and the “truths” of power, much of the U.S. media reported the predictable and self-serving denials from officials almost as prominently as the charges contained in the AI report. Even the best media gave short shrift to the AI report; the New York Times, for example, carried a single story.

The U.S. media is often remarkably good in reporting about the trees – stories about specific abuses; where it tends to fall down is when it comes to “connecting the dots” to expose the existence of the forest, as the AI report does. Indeed, in the wake of the much-ignored AI report and without reference to it, the Los Angeles Times reported a story (Long and Unexplained Jailings Anger Iraqis, May 29) that suggests that the United States in 2005 continues the practices decried in the AI report:

A year after the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal erupted, Iraqi anger has flared anew over the growing numbers of detainees held without charge at the notorious detention center and another prison in the south.

In the battle against the insurgency, U.S. military sweeps net many guerrillas, but also thousands of people whose offenses are nonexistent, minor or impossible to prove. They are often held for months, only to be released without explanation.

The Bush administration seems to have learned nothing from its bitter experience in Iraq. In a desperate attempt to “break the back” of the insurgency – a goal which seems more elusive than ever but which the administration needs to achieve before it can declare victory and begin to pull out the troops – U.S. actions breed new insurgents and set the stage for more human rights abuses. Ultimately, the Bush administration’s betrayal of international law and human rights is also a betrayal of the interests of the United States and the American people.

 

 

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