"Amnesty gets Bushwhacked"
The human rights monitor has lost its way equating the US with the horrors of Stalin.
IT WAS expected that this year’s annual report by Amnesty International would include a blistering critique of the Bush Administration’s conduct of the war on terror. That much is pro forma for the human rights movement, it’s the fashion of the day. What was not expected was the tawdry, if eye-catching, sound bite in the foreword to the report, in which Amnesty’s secretary-general, Irene Khan, sought to characterise the American military’s Guantanamo Bay prison camp as "the gulag of our times".
This lurid hyperbole does Khan no credit. It is inexcusable for an organisation founded on the principle of protecting the innocent against the predations of grisly mass murderers such as Stalin to demean the historical record for the sake of a cheap shot.
Is she seriously suggesting the treatment of 540 detainees at Guantanamo is to be mentioned in the same breath as the 30 million-plus deaths in Soviet forced labour camps? If that’s the level of intellectual dishonesty, why not go the extra distance and throw in Auschwitz as well?
It is another example of the sad loss of perspective among some global opinion leaders opposed to US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. This has become a debate in which intellectual rigour takes a back seat to ideological prejudice, where souped-up assertions portraying the US and its allies in the worst possible light override calm contemplation of the facts.
How many people, for example, still swear blind that 100,000 civilians have been killed in the war in Iraq? For some, it has become an article of faith that this is the cost of an illegal war of aggression waged by a ruthless imperial power.
For this we can mainly thank the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, which published a controversial survey on the impact of war in Iraq ahead of last year’s US presidential election. Based on a sample of 788 households in Iraq, it estimated the "excess deaths" resulting from war to be in a range between 8000 to 194,000. It claimed a 95 per cent confidence that the actual death toll was at least 98,000.
Now, the United Nations Development Program in association with Iraq’s Ministry of Planning has published its own survey, based on a much larger sample of almost 22,000 households. The Iraq Living Conditions Survey estimated war-related deaths to be nearer 24,000, including both civilian and military casualties. Still hideous, but not the apocalyptic vision of industrial-strength slaughter embraced so readily, so ghoulishly, by some critics of the war.
It is troublesome and puzzling that two of Britain’s most august institutions, The Lancet and now Amnesty, would, in their apparent eagerness to indict the US and its allies, risk trashing their own reputations for honest, accurate and impartial reporting.
Amnesty is one of the 20th century’s inspiring creations. Its charter is to protect the rights of prisoners of conscience and for more than 40 years it has been a vital watchdog exposing cruel and repressive acts by myriad tyrannical regimes.
Now it has taken up the cause of championing the rights of inmates at Guantanamo Bay. This is a departure from tradition.
According to the organisation’s own definition, prisoners of conscience are people who have been imprisoned solely due to the peaceful expression of their political or religious beliefs. That is, people who have neither used nor advocated violence.
This precept defines the strength of Amnesty International as a global brand. Amnesty does not take sides between armed combatants and, in the past, it has applied this principle with unyielding discipline. It did not bend the rules even for Nelson Mandela. In all his years at Robben Island, Mandela was not formally adopted by Amnesty because, as leader of the ANC, he had defended the use of violence.
Why, then, is Amnesty increasingly active on behalf of men taken captive during fighting in Afghanistan and elsewhere as part of the war on terror. At face value, it is hard to see how even the most lateral application of Amnesty’s definition of a prisoner of conscience could be applied to somebody who has taken up arms to fight a holy war. These are hardly men of peace.
None of this is to say Amnesty should not use its considerable authority to pressure Washington to ensure the US military respects the basic rights of these prisoners. The scandal at Abu Ghraib reminds us that gruesome and humiliating treatment has been inflicted on some prisoners in US custody. Now, there are allegations – albeit unproven – of torture at Guantanamo Bay.
Having consistently campaigned against unlawful detention and torture, Amnesty is right to demand a thorough investigation. And, yes, the United States, Australia and other strong, successful democracies should always be treated as exemplars on human rights, and be held to the highest standards possible, including in times of conflict.
Even if that means allowing legal counsel and other basic rights for men who have never raised a glass to liberty, and who believe they have a licence from God to kill all who do not submit to the will of Allah.
Even if it means probing allegations of prisoner abuse, despite knowing that Rule One, Lesson Eighteen, of the al-Qaeda training manual instructs that any brothers taken captive "must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them". Even when it means taking TV cameras, international media, and foreign diplomats to Guantanamo for occasional inspections – an unusual practice, it has to be said, for any government intent on hiding guilty secrets of crimes against humanity.
Uncle Joe Stalin would have had no time for all this. Totalitarian thugs know how these things work. The simple, iron-clad rule: nobody gives evidence from the grave. You might have thought Amnesty would understand this equation better than most, and reserve its harshest language for the truly deserving.