- The United States' "war on terror" has been
"extremely damaging" for human rights, and has been used as an
excuse by totalitarian regimes to impose oppressive laws, a leading think
tank said yesterday.
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- The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS),
traditionally viewed as an establishment body, concluded in a report that
issues such as Guantanamo Bay mean that Washington can no longer "assume
a high moral position".
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- Countries such as Pakistan and Uzbekistan have brought
in so-called anti-terrorist laws insisting that they are not much different
to the Patriot Act enacted by the Bush administration, said the report's
author, Professor Rosemary Foot.
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- The IISS compiled a dossier Iraq's alleged weapons of
mass destruction before the war. It said Saddam Hussein had stockpiles
of chemical and biological weapons, and would use them if attacked. Tony
Blair's dossier, which followed two weeks later in September 2002, drew
heavily on the IISS document.
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- Last month the IISS said it had commissioned a new study
to reassess its findings. Yesterday's report, ''Human Rights and Counter-terrorism
in America's Asia Policy", examined the effect of US support for human
rights in five countries seen as being in the front line against Islamic
terrorism - Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and China.
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- The report pointed out that following the attacks of
11 September 2001, the US National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice, said:
"Civil liberties matter to this President very much, and our values
matter to us abroad. We are not going to stop talking about things that
matter to us: human rights, religious freedom ... We're going to continue
to press these things; we would not be America if we did not."
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- The report concluded: "US national security officials
have also been reported as using techniques outlawed under the 1984 Convention
Against Torture ... which the US signed in 1994, in their interrogation
of al- Qa'ida suspects. US authorities have returned or sent a number of
prisoners for further interrogation to countries where there are strong
grounds to suspect they will be tortured."
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- "It is ... important to note that the credibility
of America's externally directed human rights message has been damaged
by US curtailment of the rights of its own citizens and non-citizens."
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=492130
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