"We Cannot Have the Same Expectations of the Terrorists…" (What Amnesty International says)

Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, has labelled Guantanamo Bay the "gulag of our times," in her foreword to the most recent Amnesty International Annual Report. This illustrates how the world's most famous human rights non-government organisation (NGO) has become rotten to the core.

This year criticism of the United States was both inevitable and justified, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, labelling Guantanamo Bay — home to some of the world's most fearsome terrorists — a "gulag," has raised more than a few eyebrows, and raised serious questions about Amnesty's political motivations and credibility. For anyone to liken Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet Union's system of forced labour prison camps, where millions perished in the most horrific and brutal of circumstances, is absurd.

But this incident is not the only instance which should give one reason to question Amnesty's trajectory and moral compass. The human rights industry actions were called into question following a widely-read and withering broadside fired against the conduct of human rights NGOs such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch since September 11 entitled "The human rights lobby meets terrorism", originally published in Commentary magazine, which catalogued its flawed approach to dealing with terrorism, this being particularly evident in its politically slanted commentary on Israel.

What made this critique so compelling was that its authors were Arch Puddington and Adrian Karatnycky, from the human rights NGO Freedom House. Khan's recent comments illustrate that the message didn't get through and that there is an accountability deficit within the human rights industry.

While it has often been discussed how September 11 caught democracies around the world unawares, it also caught the human rights NGOs ill-prepared to confront an environment where some of the greatest challenges to human rights would come not in the form of governments but in the form of terrorist organisations such as Al-Qaeda, which some have called the "the ultimate NGO."

The Human-Rights Lobby Meets Terrorism

In the months since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the world's two leading human-rights organizations — Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — have been very busy. And so they should have been. International law, to which these organizations are committed above all things, recognizes terrorism as a distinct and uniquely malevolent form of aggression against civilians; and the attacks themselves assuredly constituted a massive and horrendous violation of human rights, unprecedented in the history of the United States.

Yet, from the steady stream of reports, statements, and open letters the organizations have sent to leaders like President Bush and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, one learns little of this. Although both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued denunciations of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, not once have they spoken about the precise nature of these vicious acts, or called them by their proper name: terrorism. They have raised many concerns, to be sure, but terrorism itself has not been part of their agenda.

To understand what is going on, it helps to have some idea of how most of the human-rights community has treated this question in general in recent years — and also how it has treated the United States of America.

It turns out that the organizations' reluctance to use the word "terrorism" is not new. One can examine the hundreds of documents that Amnesty Internationa] has issued over the years on countries and regions victimized by terror, from Colombia and Kashmir to Spain and Great Britain, without ever encountering a straightforward reference to the term. Instead, one reads of "brutal" or "horrific" acts, or of "violent assaults" — phrases that could apply as easily to the aggression of one army against another as to the deliberate murder of civilians by political or religious extremists.

Occasionally, human-rights organizations have resorted to almost comical euphemisms. In speaking of the "war on terrorism," Human Rights Watch has preferred to describe it as the "war against indistinct enemies." As for those cases when the word simply cannot be avoided, Amnesty International has invariably placed it in quotation marks, thus implying its own skepticism

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(Adrian Karatnycky & Arch Puddington in Commentary, January 2002)
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> Why these guys get ANY airtime is beyond me.

I checked their site, and this is what they said about membership:

"At the latest count, there were more than 1.8 million members, supporters and subscribers in over 150 countries and territories in every region of the world."

1.8M is wishful thinking because they are at least honest enough to include "supporters" in the figure. I suppose my hit just now will bump it to 1,800,001. Even if you include the MSM as supporters, there couldn't be more than a hundred thou of these nuts in the U.S.

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