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Politics : Bush Administration's Media Manipulation--MediaGate? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skywatcher who wrote (3481)	5/26/2005 1:45:59 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 9838

Blame America Human Rights: Selective outrage has reached a new height — or low — with Amnesty International calling Guantanamo Bay the "gulag of our times." That's just one group's opinion, of course, but AI gets plenty of ink, and it has always seemed a reliable indicator of elite opinion overseas, especially in Europe. So when it compares Guantanamo explicitly to the vast prison-camp network of Stalin's Soviet Union, and when it essentially calls the U.S. the world's leading abuser of human rights, we wonder if anti-Americanism hasn't driven some people a bit mad. And we don't exaggerate when we say AI pegs America as the world leader in abuse. If America isn't actually beating, torturing, unjustly imprisoning and otherwise repressing the most people, AI says it is doing the most to encourage such practices. This is how Irene Khan, AI's secretary general, puts that case: "The USA, as the unrivaled political, military and economic hyperpower, sets the tone for governmental behavior worldwide. When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a license to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity." In other words, don't blame Kim Jong Il in North Korea, the Sudanese officials behind the ethnic cleansing of Darfur, the authorities in Uzbekistan and the world's many other bad actors. The devil — George W. Bush — made them do it. AI accuses the U.S. of setting a bad example by condoning torture — with Abu Ghraib as Exhibit A — and holding prisoners indefinitely at Guantanamo. The Guantanamo detentions have stirred controversy in the U.S. as well as abroad. The Supreme Court has weighed in with an order letting prisoners challenge the basis of their detentions. But AI seems unconcerned with the larger context, the conflict in which these prisoners were taken. Like many other critics of the war on terror, AI seems to think these detainees are no more than criminal suspects denied their rights to a speedy trial. In fact, they are mostly captured combatants in a war that is still going on. Let go from Guantanamo, those prisoners would probably not simply go back to chicken farming or other peaceful pursuits. They would go back to fighting. One irony of the AI report is that, in its summary of human rights in the Americas, it mentions Cuba only once — as the location of Guantanamo. This doesn't mean Fidel Castro has mellowed, let his many political prisoners free and allowed basic freedoms. It simply reflects the fact that the U.S. is an open society and Cuba is not. As AI notes, the group has not been allowed into Castro's realm since 1988. Like so much of the world, AI works up its greatest outrage at the problems of a free country revealed by a free press, not at the greater evils that it knows are being kept hidden elsewhere. investors.com