Amnesty International, like Greenpeace, is an organization I would join if it wasn't run by ideologues. Human rights should unite everyone of good will, but Amnesty has always been harder on Western or pro-Western governments than on the truly repressive regimes.
Now they have veered into Bush-hating territory. Two weeks ago, they caused a minor fracas by referring to the terrorist detainee camp in Guantanamo as a "gulag," then admitted they had no idea whether that was true. (Hint: unless it's a slave-labor camp, it's not a gulag.)
Dr. William F. Schulz (no relation to John or Steve), the director of Amnesty International USA (isn't that name an oxymoron?) said, "We have documented that the use of torture and ill treatment is widespread and that the US government is a leading purveyor and practitioner of this odious human rights violation."
At best, Dr. Schulz is misrepresenting and exaggerating Amnesty's findings. Even the few details they provide are questionable:
The Bush Administration cited Egypt for beating victims with fists, whips and metal rods. And yet US Major Michael Smith testified at an administrative review hearing last year that an autopsy of a captured Iraqi general revealed he had suffered five broken ribs that were "consistent with blunt force trauma, that is, either punching, kicking or striking with an object or being thrown into an object."
Five broken ribs might be painful, but that couldn't have been the cause of death. And who broke those ribs? Dr. Schulz implies that it was U.S. troops. Yet for all he knows, it was the general's fellow inmates.
Don't take my word for it — read the report yourself, or at least some of it. The country findings are long on summary, short on detail. The moral equivalence would be laughable if it weren't so sickening:
US-led forces in Iraq committed gross human rights violations, including unlawful killings and arbitrary detention, and evidence emerged of torture and ill-treatment. Thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed during armed clashes between US-led forces and Iraqi security forces on the one side, and Iraqi armed groups on the other [emphasis added].
On the one side, you have thugs and murders who bomb mosques, churches, marketplaces, civilian vehicles; who kidnap and behead the innocent in the name of God; who desperately want to beat the rest of Iraqi society into submission so they can administer their "human rights violations" (and you can bet Amnesty won't be invited to observe.) On the other, you have thousands of Iraqis and Americans trying to stop these human beasts and build a more just society. But to Amnesty, it's just two sides fighting.
Dr. Schulz calls for "a truly independent investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and other detention centers" and says not doing so "is tantamount to a whitewash, if not a cover-up, of these disgraceful crimes." Why isn't the Justice Department and the military judicial system equal to the task? Are they not independent? If not, who are the guilty men who are going free?
This irresponsible statement is an accusation against dozens of Bush Administration figures: "You're a criminal. Prove you aren't." Ironically, if a government presumed that a suspect was guilty and made him prove his innocence, they'd be violating the accused's human rights, and Amnesty would complain. Ye hypocrites!
Eric:
I'm surprised by your opening concession. "Human rights" do not, in fact, unite everyone of good will because people don't have the same conception of either "human" or "rights" (one could define "people of good will" tautologically, of course). Not to speak of such related political concepts as "freedom" and "common good." Political divisions exist and are real, and it does no good to pretend that people mean the same thing when they talk about these topics.
And this Amnesty report's idiocy isn't a new phenomenon. "Human rights group" is, like "UN ambassador" and "sex education," one of those terms that anyone who is that enthusiastic about it is almost by definition the sort of person who should not be allowed near it. The "human rights" industry has always had a leftist anti-American flavor because it primarily affects and disarms only those who already subscribe to the "human-rights" ideology to some extent. Remember Peanut Jimmy's human-rights-based foreign policy in the late-70s, the primary effect was to alienate imperfect US allies, creating an image of self-righteous masochism and being powerless when Iran invaded the United States (CQ).
In fact, I'll suggest the following: the MORE you hear about human-rights violations in Country X, the LESS seriously it is violating them. Other examples include South Africa in the 80s and the [yes, I do mean this] anti-Semitic Israel obsession of today. The reason for this is simple: you can only hear of something if the information flow is available. Nations that are truly committed to "human-rights violations" also control that information flow. In a substantially free country, with a free press and free speech and a government accountable to public opinion, what violations will be played up and magnified for a variety of reasons including ironically that their very rarity allows obsessing over individual cases (I once made a similar point about US casualties in thre Iraq war). Or as Natan Sharansky, a man who really knows what a Gulag is, said: "I have very serious criticisms of Amnesty. There is no moral clarity. It doesn't differentiate between what I call fear societies and free societies. In the democratic world, there are violations of human rights, but they are revealed and dealt with. In a fear society, there are no violations of human rights because human rights just don't exist. All citizens are deprived of those rights. Amnesty International says it doesn't support or oppose any political system, so it ends up with reports that show a moral equivalence between, for example, Israel and the terrorist regimes that attack it."
Suggest you read psychiatry professor Robert J. Lifton's epic study of Red Chinese Brainwashing THOUGHT REFORM AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALISM (and his epic study of the corruption of medicine under the Nazi's THE NAZI DOCTORS). Most of these "right" groups have devolved into "cult type control". No variation is allowed in thought: "our way of being 'politically correct' or else get out.". Lifton calls this "Totalism".
Was horrified 35 years ago to find the civil rights groups acted this way. Without grace and respect for the individual, human power always tends to such corruption. Follow the good, but not the bad, with these groups. God used them in His own way for good.