inside the glass house

US on the wrong side of the rights divide
NEW YORK - US Vice President Dick Cheney, the diehard rightwing conservative and one of the prime architects of the disastrous US-led war against Iraq, says he is toying with the idea of running for president in 2008 because "there's a lot of unfinished business".

As that irrepressible comedian Jay Leno said last week apparently there are some countries in the world that still don't hate the US yet. So presumably, Cheney wants to take care of them as well.

The Muslim world is up in arms against the US for treating all Muslims as potential terrorists and for invading or threatening to invade mostly Islamic countries -- Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria -- while a virtual nuclear-armed North Korea gets away scot-free after defiantly giving the finger to the Bush administration.

The Latin Americans are increasingly moving away from the American orbit electing governments that are clearly anti-US. The Organisation of American States (OAS) jettisons a US-supported candidate and elects as its new president someone sympathetic to a longstanding American political nemesis, Cuban president Fidel Castro.

The overwhelming majority of the 191-member United Nations is still livid over the fact that the US went to war against Iraq without the blessings of the Security Council.

And now the Bush administration is worsening the already-frosty relationship by trying to impose on the world body an avowed UN-hater by the name of John Bolton as the next US ambassador.

Who else in the world is crying out to be antagonised by the bulldozing tactics of the Bush administration?

Last week Newsweek magazine, under heavy White House pressure, retracted a story that US soldiers had desecrated the Quran at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, home to most of the suspected terrorists who happen to be Muslims, mostly from Iraq or Afghanistan.

The New York-based magazine has been accused of journalistic cowardice for caving into Bush administration demands even though subsequent investigations may have proved Newsweek was right.

The American Civil Liberties Union said last week that documents released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) -- under the Freedom of Information Act -- detailed interrogations by military personnel where several prisoners had complained repeatedly about the "disrespectful handling" of the Quran.

Mercifully, there is a Freedom of Information Act even under the present administration, which has suspended most of the basic civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism.

But the military, however, has dismissed the charges as "unsubstantiated" -- unsubstantiated, naturally, by soldiers who committed the offence.

No soldier in his right mind would admit violation of army rules and regulations -- unless there is irrefutable photographic evidence, as was the case of prisoner abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

Last week the administration was also blasted by Amnesty International (AI), which described the Guantanamo detention centre as a "gulag of our time" where hundreds of detainees continue to be held without charge or trial.

At a news conference during the launch of AI's annual report, the Secretary-General of AI Irene Khan was critical of human rights abuses by Western nations who are quick to point out the faults of others.

According to the Amnesty report, thousands were detained during US military and security operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and routinely denied access to their families and lawyers.

The head of AI in the US William Schulz went even further when he urged foreign governments to investigate and prosecute senior US officials for torture and ill-treatment of their nationals, including Canadians, Brits and Australians, most of them of Middle Eastern origin.

He said US officials should be prosecuted for violating not only the UN Convention Against Torture but also the Geneva Conventions governing treatment of prisoners of war.

"If those investigations support prosecution, the governments should arrest any official who enters their territory and begin legal proceedings against them," Schulz added.

"The apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera because they may find themselves under arrest as (former Chilean dictator) Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998," he added.

Meanwhile, a coalition of some 350 lawyers and legal scholars is urging the administration to establish an independent commission to address the allegations of abuse and torture, including an assessment of the responsibility of senior administration officials and military officers.

"A wall of secrecy is protecting those who masterminded and developed the US torture policy," Schulz said. "Unless those who drew the blueprint for torture, approved it, and ordered it implemented are held accountable, the United States' once-proud reputation as an exemplar of human rights will remain in tatters," Schulz added.

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