inside the glass house

US on HR violations:Do what we say, not what we do
NEW YORK -- The Bush administration has acquired an ability to justify its actions worldwide either because of its skill in articulating its case or manipulating the facts.

A request by UN human rights monitors to visit prisoners – mostly terrorist suspects – held at the US-run Guantanamo Bay military base has been pending for more than two years.

Last week the Bush administration seemed to have relented. Or so it seemed. But there was a catch; the three UN investigators were to be allowed into the now-infamous military base but they were told they will not be permitted to interact with prisoners.

The message was clear: a visit, "yes" but talk "no". The Bush administration justified its no-talk policy on the flimsy excuse that only representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross could talk to the more than 500 detainees currently holed up in a detention facility aptly described by Amnesty International as a Soviet-style "gulag".

The UN rejected the offer – and rightly so. Unless the Pentagon permitted the three Special Rapporteurs to talk to the detainees, they will not accept the American offer. They also rejected what seemed like a "guided tour" of the detention facility.

A proposed visit was also reduced to a single day. But still the UN monitors said they were willing to confine their visit to a period of 24 hours – in a spirit of compromise.

If the US does not have anything to hide, why restrict the monitors from talking to prisoners who have been held, mostly incommunicado, for nearly four years?.

So the US stance was as equally regrettable as the non-response for long-standing requests for human rights monitors to visit seven other countries: Algeria (request pending since 1997), Egypt (1996), India (1993), Indonesia (1993), Israel (2002), Tunisia (1998) and Turkmenistan (2003).

And some of these countries, including those in the Middle East, are in the process of being transformed into US-style multi-party democracies by a White House crusading for political conversions.

A letter published in the International Herald Tribune last week made a valid point when it said that "a bigger question is whether, as a result of the events of the last few years, the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are now more like America or is America now more like them".

In the US, the mandate of the UN monitors was to probe allegations of human rights violations in Guantanamo Bay, including arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment and violations of the rule of law.

The speculation is that some of the US troops overseeing detainees are guilty of most, or all, of these charges. Additionally the US military has also been accused of degrading and humiliating detainees in violation of Geneva Conventions that govern the treatment of prisoners of war (POWs).

The atrocities that took place in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad were a case in point. But the Bush administration has continued to violate some of the basic rights of prisoners and terrorist suspects, mostly in the name of fighting terrorism.

At a press briefing last week, Manfred Nowak of Austria, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, said that during recent fact-finding tours in Georgia, Mongolia and Nepal, there were no supervised visits.

And more importantly, one of the countries long accused of human rights violations, has finally accepted UN terms for an unsupervised visit.
As a result, said Nowak, he plans to visit China shortly. The irony of it, he pointed out, was that the Bush administration had encouraged China to accept such a visit and had always insisted that it should include "unsupervised and unannounced" visits to that country to check on human rights abuses.

Nowak said he was sure the US government would appreciate that he could not apply lower standards of independent fact-finding to the US than to other countries.

Known for its double standards in foreign policy, the Bush administration obviously wants different yardsticks to measure human rights violations – one for the US and another for China and the rest of the world.
At least one US Senator – and surprisingly from the ruling Republican Party – is trying to ban "the cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of detainees in US custody.

Senator John McCain of Arizona was a prisoner of war in Vietnam who has personal experience of degrading treatment at the hands of America's former enemy.

But McCain's proposal is being opposed by no less a person than Vice President Dick Cheney, a hardliner in the Bush administration. An even bigger news story last week was a report in the Washington Post that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been interrogating terrorist suspects at a secret facility in Eastern Europe.

The prisons, called "black sites", were established overseas because it would be considered illegal to hold terrorist suspects in secret in US prisons.
The news of the secret prison facilities drew a sharp rebuke from former US President Jimmy Carter who said: "In the last five years, there has been a profound and radical change in the basic policies or moral values of our country." And he is right.

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