Posted on 12/03/2002 3:09:05 PM PST by knighthawk
Yesterday, the British government unveiled a dossier of human-rights outrages perpetrated by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The report itemizes such abuses as the summary beheading of dozens of women accused of prostitution, the use of eye gouging, child torture, piercing of hands with electric drills, submersion in acid, and other forms of torture against dissidents.
While the dossier makes for disturbing reading, it is not especially controversial: The UN Commission on Human Rights recently passed a resolution on the "widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law by the Government of Iraq, resulting in an all-pervasive repression and oppression sustained by broad-based discrimination and widespread terror." Amnesty International has noted that "torture is used systematically against political detainees."
Yet the report was immediately subjected to a barrage of condemnation. The response came not, as one might have supposed, from the likes of the warden at the notorious "casket prison" in Baghdad, an underground facility where Saddam's political opponents are kept in rectangular steel boxes, like mortuary slabs, until they confess or die. Nor from Ali Hasan al-Majid, better known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of chemical weapons on the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing 5,000 people. Nor from Aziz Salih Ahmed, one of Iraq's well-practised state torturers, whose job is listed on his government identity card as "violation of women's honour," -- i.e., professional rapist.
No. Rather, the criticism came from that once-implacable foe of torture, Amnesty International. Irene Khan, the organization's secretary-general, condemned Britain for its "selective attention to human rights" and suggested it was conducting a propaganda war in support of a possible military campaign through a "cold and calculated manipulation of the work of human rights activists."
It is unclear how the release of the dossier by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office can be construed as anything but a welcome development for human rights campaigners. Not only does it serve as a validation of AI's own work, it backs up the group's efforts with government intelligence previously unavailable to the public.
One of the great ironies of the campaigns to oust the world's truly odious regimes, such as those run by Saddam, the Taliban and Yasser Arafat, is that they are generally resisted by many of the same groups and individuals normally associated with campaigns to free political prisoners and protect human rights. AI's latest gesture shows that anti-Western agitation has become the organization's guiding philosophy -- and that it will do its level best to oppose a just war, even if it has to make nonsense of its own mission statement in the process. Evidently, the group's activists would prefer to stick their fingers in the eye of Britain and the United States than tolerate the truthful incrimination of a regime that represents everything AI purports to oppose.
Kind of like the NOW with Clinton.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.