Fisking Amnesty International

 
Amnesty International ought to have a stone tied to its neck and be hurled into the sea. This organization is not only harmful, in the longer term it is lethal to the cause of human liberty and safety. Here's a sample from their latest report, with editorial comment from Gates of Vienna. Judge for yourself:

Our report presents a damning picture of failed leadership and broken promises. But of all the promises made by governments, none was as hollow as the promise to make the world a safer place from terrorist attacks.

No one "promised" to make the world safer in the next fifteen minutes. It will take years to undo our inattention and mistaken policies which have contributed to the current chaos and disorder.

	Attacks by armed groups pose a major threat to human rights in today's world. Over the past year we have seen unimaginable brutality and barbarity by armed groups in Iraq, Beslan and Madrid.
	Yet, the US government and its allies who lead the "War on Terror" continue to persist with politically convenient but ineffective strategies, which undermine human rights.

This bloviating would be amusing were it not so wrong-headedly harmful. The War on Terror is anything by "politically convenient." The convenience lay in looking the other way, which we did for decades -- if there was ever an ineffective strategy it was the "don't ask, don't tell" attitude that passed for foreign policy in the US. It will take decades to undo the policies that date all the way back to Yalta.

There can be no sustainable security strategy without justice and respect for human rights.

"Security strategy" begins with making things secure. Ask the Iraqis if they respect the human rights of the thugs who murder them daily on the streets, thugs who admit they did it not for religion but for money. Respect is built on mutuality. The disingenuous call for one-sided respect for "human rights" is naïve at best.

The continued violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Despite the building of the Wall – in defiance of international law, the most stringent restrictions on freedom of movement of Palestinians, and the biggest demolition of houses in recent years, the security situation remains precarious.

"International law" is a bureaucratic, utopian and socialist construct that takes second place to national security. If the international bodies of law demand that you participate in your own destruction, then these bodies ought to be dismantled for the good of the rest of all of us. The wall of PC opinion being erected against Israel is far more lethal than anything it has done. In fact, such pontificating drives the Israeli defenses.

In 2004, far from any sign of principled leadership, we saw a new and dangerous agenda in the making, rewriting the rules of human rights, discrediting the institutions of international cooperation and usurping the language of justice and freedom to promote policies that create fear and insecurity.

International "cooperation" involves going along to get along, including massive corruption and death-dealing to those who interfere with the socialist-driven agenda of envy and greed. It is the "international cooperation" that left Saddam Hussein in power and allowed fat cats in the EU to draw down billions in payoffs. For heaven's sake, grow up.

The US is leading this agenda, with the UK, European states, Australia and other states following.

Under this agenda, accountability is being set aside in favour of impunity; a prime example being the refusal of the US Administration or US Congress to conduct a full and independent investigation of the use of torture and ill treatment by US officials, despite the public outrage over Abu Ghraib and despite the evidence, collected by AI and other, of similar practices in Bagram, Guantanamo and other detention centres under US control.

The "public outrage" is a media-driven myth. AI obviously believes the magazines it reads. A little field work in places other than Manhattan and San Francisco might yield a different conclusion about public opinion. "Outrage" is building over the unabated stream of illegal aliens who are destroying the social infrastructure of the states they invade.

The US refuses to apply the Geneva Convention for detainees in Afghanistan.

As well it should. The Geneva Convention is designed for conventional combatants in a conventional war. Here, once more, the AI reveals its sloppy thinking in making a mistake of category. Someone ought to take up a fund to send these people to a Philosophy 101 course.

But nothing shows the disregard of international law as clearly as the attempts by the US, UK and some European countries to set aside the absolute prohibition of torture and ill treatment by re-definition and "rendering" – or the transfer prisoners to regimes that are known to use torture. In effect sub-contracting torture, yet keeping their own hands and conscience clean.

And nothing shows the dangerous subversion of the rule of law and human decency than the AI's demand that rapists, murderers of children, beheaders of bystanding civilians, exploders of school children be treated as POWs. They are not. Another categorical elision.

Under this dangerous agenda, justice is not only denied, it is also distorted.

It was distorted beyond recognition before we even got there. The justice being applied is justice, not mercy. They ought to be shown the same mercy they applied while they were at liberty to act.

In the US, almost a year after the Supreme Court decided that detainees in Guantanamo should have access to judicial review, not one single case from among the 500 or so detained has reached the courts because of stonewalling by the Administration.

One way to help people to stop murdering your citizens is to incarcerate those you believe have some responsibility for the actions which led to the death of your countrymen. With 3,000 slaughtered on 9/11 the US is being generous.

Guantanamo has become the gulag our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law.

Anyone who has survived the gulags laughs at this poseur performance. How many gulag survivors were consulted for this report?

By peddling the politics of fear and division, this new agenda has also encouraged intolerance, racism, and xenophobia.

This is not a new agenda. It is a return to a robust Jacksonian approach to American defense. Part of the problem is the limp "tolerance" and calls for diversity and rule by international law. A recipe for civil disaster proposed by those ignorant of history and anxious to repeat each of its mistakes.

Furthermore, the US, as the unrivalled political, military and economic Super Power, sets the tone of governmental behaviour world-wide. By thumbing its nose at the rule of law and human rights, what message does the US send to repressive regimes who have little regard for the rule of law anyway?

This is mere opinion driven by political motivation. America remains the world's best option and the world knows it. We are finally in the process of figuring out who can be trusted and who can't.

Amnesty International is neither to be trusted nor believed. Like trolls in the blogosphere, or like the MSM, which is one of the vectors for the spread of their infection, they are best ignored for the moment.

Meanwhile, whoever comes up with an effective method for curing this disease will win the hearts and minds of those left who can still love and think.

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UPDATE: Jamie, a commenter at Belmont Club has supplied the correct word for Ms. Khan's remarks: she is TRIVIAL.

Exactly.