inside the glass house

US double standards on human rights, transparency
NEW YORK -- Amnesty International (AI), which plucked up courage to denounce the Bush administration's bluff on human rights, is now being vilified for its stinging criticism of U.S. mistreatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre.

Last week's coordinated attacks on Amnesty came not only from President George W. Bush but also his Vice President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General Richard Myers.

Amnesty's unusually harsh criticism of the Bush administration's repressive treatment of prisoners of war and suspected terrorists obviously hit a raw nerve because the London-based human rights organisation was at the receiving end of some heavy artillery fire.

While Bush dismissed Amnesty charges as "absurd," Rumsfeld called the criticism "reprehensible." Cheney said he was "offended" by the Amnesty report. "No force in the world has done more to liberate people that they have never met than the US military," said Rumsfeld in defence of the United States.

But then, does the cost of such freedom matter? And what happens when so-called "liberators" turn out to be military occupiers sustained by quislings and puppet governments -- as in Iraq and Afghanistan?

During the release of the organisation's annual report, AI Secretary-General Irene Zubaida Khan compared the US-run detention centres as "gulags" -- the notorious Soviet era prison camps where common criminals, as well as political and religious dissenters, were forced into hard labour, some of them dying from beatings, torture or sheer exhaustion.

Khan, a native of Bangladesh and educated at the Harvard Law School with a track record at the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, fought back last week when she threw an open challenge to the Bush administration.

"The administration's response has been that our report is absurd, that our allegations have no basis, and our answer is very simple: if that is so, open up these detention centres, allow us and others to visit them," said Khan, the first woman and the first Asian to head Amnesty.

She also told reporters during a visit to Tokyo last week that "transparency" – which the US always demands from other nations on issues ranging from human rights to corruption – "is the best antidote to misinformation and incorrect facts."

The message from Amnesty was clear: the Bush administration has lost its moral authority to sit in judgment over human rights violations in third world nations when it refuses to put its own crumbling house in order.

In its report, Amnesty was brutally frank: "At Guantanamo, the US has operated an isolated prison camp in which people are confined arbitrarily, held virtually incommunicado, without charge, trial or access to due process. Not a single Guantanamo detainee has had the legality of their detention reviewed by a court.''

And this, despite a US Supreme Court ruling last year that provided grounds to do so. "Guantanamo is only the visible part of the story. Evidence continues to mount that the US operates a network of detention centres where people are held in secret or outside any proper legal framework -- from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond," it added.

According to a news report last week, the US holds about 520 men at Guantanamo Bay, "where they are denied rights accorded under international law to prisoners of war, many have been held without charge for more than three years".

This is also in violation of Geneva Conventions which govern the treatment of prisoners of war. However, the Bush administration argues that some of these detainees are terrorists and do not qualify for protection under international conventions.

But human rights activists say that most of the detainees were taken prisoners in US-led wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and are therefore legally entitled to protection under UN conventions. In better times, however, the Bush administration remained jubilant when Amnesty beat up on others for human rights violations.

"It is worth also worth noting,'' said Amnesty, "that this administration never finds it 'absurd' when we criticise Cuba or China, or when we condemned the violations in Iraq under Saddam Hussein." So, why should there be two different yardsticks to measure human rights violations – one for the US and one for the rest of the world?

The only charge the administration has not openly made so far is that human rights organisations have now been infiltrated by terrorists. But it is bound to come sooner than later.

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