- America's human rights abuses have provided a rallying
cry for terrorists and set a bad example to regimes seeking to justify
their own poor rights records, a leading independent watchdog said yesterday.
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- The torture and degrading treatment of prisoners in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Guant·namo Bay have undermined the credibility
of the US as a defender of human rights and opponent of terrorism, the
New York-based Human Rights Watch says in its annual report.
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- "The US government is less and less able to push
for justice abroad because it is unwilling to see justice done at home,"
says Kenneth Roth, the group's executive director.
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- The report comes as the Bush administration prepares
for inauguration next week. The administration has shown little interest
in moderating its aggressive approach to its "global war on terror".
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- Yesterday's scathing report argues that the US has weakened
its own moral authority at a time that authority is most needed, "in
the midst of a seeming epidemic of suicide bombings, beheadings, and other
attacks on civilians and noncombatants."
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- "When the United States disregards human rights,
it undermines that human rights culture and thus sabotages one of the most
important tools for dissuading potential terrorists. Instead, US abuses
have provided a new rallying cry for terrorist recruiters, and the pictures
from Abu Ghraib have become the recruiting posters for Terrorism, Inc."
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- The report says that America's disregard of human rights
has encouraged other countries to follow suit:
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- * Egypt has defended a decision to renew "emergency"
laws by referring to US anti-terror legislation
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- * Malaysia justifies detention without trial by invoking
Guant·namo
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- * Russia cites Abu Ghraib to blame abuse in Chechnya
solely on low-ranking soldiers.
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- But there are few signs in Washington of a change of
approach. The White House secretly persuaded Congress to overturn legislation
passed last month by a 96-2 Senate vote that would have imposed restrictions
on extreme interrogation methods, the New York Times reported yesterday.
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- Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser nominated
to be secretary of state, opposed the measure because "it provides
legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled".
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- The US military is proceeding with trials of supposed
Abu Ghraib torturers, arguing that abuse was the work of a small band of
rogue soldiers.
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- Last night, the trial of the alleged ringleader, Specialist
Charles Graner, culminated in Fort Hood, Texas. A verdict is expected today.
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- Official inquiries have largely spared the military top
brass and the administration itself, which first approved the loosening
of guidelines on interrogation in 2002.
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- Alberto Gonzales, the White House lawyer who approved
the guidelines, and who told the president the Geneva conventions were
"obsolete" in the face of the terrorist threat, has been nominated
attorney-general.
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- Human Rights Watch said senior US officials had tried
to pin the blame on young soldiers. It said the US should appoint a special
prosecutor to investigate abuse and bring to justice all those responsible.
But the Pentagon said it was "factually incorrect" to say that
senior officials were responsible.
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- The erosion of human rights has also reached the EU,
Human Rights Watch warns. It points out that the British government refuses
to rule out using information extracted from torture in court proceedings.
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- Basic principles of international law were being chipped
away in Britain, Steve Crawshaw, the London director of Human Rights Watch,
said yesterday. "It was dismaying that it needed a law lords' judgment
to rule that detention without trial was not acceptable in a democracy,"
he told the Guardian. "It is even more dismaying that the British
government seems reluctant to concede this."
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- Human Rights Watch also points to shortcomings in security
laws in Iraq proposed by the US. In the vast majority of trials it had
observed there, defendants were detained without judicial warrants, and
had no prior access to a lawyer.
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- It points to another kind of abuse - "massive ethnic
cleansing" in Darfur, western Sudan. "Continued inaction risks
undermining a fundamental principle: that the nations of the world will
never let sovereignty stand in the way of their responsibility to protect
people from mass atrocities."
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2005
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk
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