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DelightMachine -> RE: Torture "widespread" (5/3/2006 7:25:14 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: cloudboy
You've really got to be kidding here, right? Yes, the doings at AG were all the workings of a few seargents and privates "acting alone" and unguided by higher authrorities.
What do the practices of Saddam H., IRAN, or any torture outside the US jurisdiction have to do with the OP? Somehow us being "a little nicer" is a point of pride with you or a legitimate foreign policy talking point for our Department of State? You can forget about it, we've pissed the world's goodwill so far down the drain that a college of Saints in Washington couldn't rehabilitate us.
Shitting these non sequitor's below is evading the topic. No one asked for a US v. The World comparitive torture essay. The question is, how can we practice / perpetrate torture and then condemn the very practice of it by others? We can't, regardless of your wormy, sliding scale arguments.
Cloudboy, you get very exercised about allegations against the United States but I haven't seen you get exercised about worse allegations elsewhere.
Merc's posts are more to the point than he actually mentions. Now this is MY point, not HIS: Amnesty International has been biased against the United States for some time. As a left-wing organization, it's been especially biased during the Bush administration and during the War on Terror. So it's hard to trust this organization when they talk about Guantanamo or, frankly, anything else regarding the United States. That makes Merc's post entirely ON topic.
When the United States, United Kingdom and others were preparing to invade Iraq and during the war, and now after, I've heard Amnesty International went soft on Iraqi atrocities and exaggerated United States actions, calling many questionable things "violations of human rights." This is not to say that AI didn't criticize Iraq for many of its human rights violations previously -- the organization has taken some steps to be fair, just not nearly enough.
AI's bias is a very old story. Here's one criticism from a rightwing Web site three years ago, showing that AI was doing essentially the same thing then that MsMac quotes in the OP:
quote:
On May 28, 2003, Amnesty International, the supposedly apolitical human rights organization, turned forty years old. On that day it released its annual report on human rights abuses across the globe during the year 2002. For 311 gruesome pages, Amnesty documented the horrors of execution, torture, abduction, rape, starvation, repression, and mass murder that darken many corners of the world. In one sad country after another, Amnesty found that mankind was suffering greater abuses in 2002 than they had in 2001, and Amnesty found a culprit to blame for the ever-declining state of human rights in the world: the United States of America. For an organization that proclaimed itself an ideologically unbiased human rights advocate, suddenly they seemed unapologetic in their obviously political and hypocritical stance opposing the conservative government of the U.S. and President Bush’s war on terror.
The Amnesty report thundered: “The ‘war on terror,’ far from making the world a safer place, has made it more dangerous by curtailing human rights, undermining the rule of international law and shielding governments from scrutiny. It has deepened divisions among people of different faiths and origins, sowing the seeds for more conflict. The overwhelming impact of all this is genuine fear -- among the affluent as well as the poor.”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=8231
Contrast what AI is quoted as saying in the last paragraph above with what's pointed out here, in another few sentences from the same article:
quote:
One can’t but help wonder if all of this vitriol aimed at the United States doesn’t have something to do with a profound sense of failure on the part of Amnesty International. After all, for years Amnesty International attempted with words, reports, monitors, and “official state visits” to end suffering in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, but they were completely ineffectual. Indeed, the situation deteriorated year after year. Then the U.S. and its “cowboy” president come along and ended the torture, rape, and mass executions in a matter of months.
As to the point of torture committed by people in the U.S. government: If it can be shown to be necessary to prevent a terrorist atrocity, I'm for it. If it can't be shown to be DIRECTLY necessary (that is, there isn't an INCREDIBLY CLEAR reason why the torture may be needed to foil terrorists that we're hot on the trail of) then it's criminal in my book. The allegations against the United States run the gamut from serious to silly. I'm concerned about the serious ones. Amnesty International may be right in some of its allegations. It bothers me.
I don't expect anyone to actually read the paragraph immediately above. I'm absolutely positive that I'll be accused of ignoring the substance of the AI charges. That's because people who like to attack on these message boards don't like to actually read what's been written by the target of their attacks.
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