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March 01, 2005
All Those Horrible Things Other People Do
How timely. Just as the State Department issues its annual Human Rights report, I received a copy of "America's Disappeared." This year, the hypocricy has exceeded tolerable limits for even historicaly cautious organizations:
In an unprecedented move, the US Human Rights Network, a network of more than 160 US-based human rights organizations, today issued a memorandum to President George Bush decrying the current state of human rights in the US, as the US State Department released its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.“It is the height of hypocrisy for the US government to issue a report condemning human rights abuses in other countries at a time when it is violating these very same standards at home and abroad,” said Ajamu Baraka, Executive Director of the US Human Rights Network (USHRN).
That's right. There's no U.S. chapter in the report:
The United States is not monitored by the State Department, but Michael Kozak, assistant secretary for human rights, said, ``The events at Abu Ghraib were a stain on the honor of the U.S. There's no two ways about it.''
Things have gotten so bad that not only do we outsource torture from time to time, we criticize the recipient countries for ... torture:
The State Department's annual human rights report released yesterday criticized countries for a range of interrogation practices it labeled as torture, including sleep deprivation for detainees, confining prisoners in contorted positions, stripping and blindfolding them and threatening them with dogs -- methods similar to those approved at times by the Bush administration for use on detainees in U.S. custody....
The State Department report also harshly attacked the treatment of prisoners in such countries as Syria and Egypt, where the United States has shipped terrorism suspects under a practice known as "rendition." An Australian citizen has alleged that under Egyptian detention he was hung by his arms from hooks, repeatedly shocked, nearly drowned and brutally beaten. Most of his fingernails were missing when he later arrived at Guantanamo Bay.
Nonetheless, the prize for the best-absurdity-pronounced-with-astraight-face goes to the State Department press release itself:
The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor issued the annual reports for 196 countries February 28.The reports identified serious problems in several Middle East countries, including: arbitrary arrests, torture of detainees, incommunicado detention, trials without due process, lack of access to legal counsel, poor prison conditions, long pretrial detentions, and the death of prisoners in police custody.
All those horrible things other people do.
Posted by zeynep at March 1, 2005 10:51 PM
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