June 11, 2006

More respect for human rights from the Bush Administration…

...or not.

Colleen Graffy, the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, excelled herself in the school of defending the indefensible a few months ago when she claimed that Guantanamo Bay detainees were being treated fairly (despite the evidence to the contrary).

Well today she's gone a step further by claiming that the suicides of three detainees were "a good PR move".

I'm not always a big fan of the Liberty brigade, but Graffy's comments show absolutely no respect for the human rights of the three people who killed themselves. There's been practically no evidence shown that these people are guilty of any crimes, so to suggest that they would go to the extreme of committing suicide as "a tactic to further the jihadi cause" is just the sort of speculation that is completely unhelpful. It's not really much different to saying "all Muslims are terrorists", because the lack of information given to the public means that the detainees could be, for all we know, just an innocent guy walking down the street. The typical American knows them only to be a Muslim man, who never had any right of reply to the propaganda pumped out by the State Department and the Pentagon.

The U.S. keep saying they want to close Guantanamo, but those words are completely empty until they do it.


- 2 comments by 0 or more people Not publicly viewable

  1. elendil

    Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a few other NGOs, have designated June Torture Awareness Month. I've created a blogroll you can join if you're interested. You can find it here. The idea is that everyone is linked to from the blogroll, and in exchange, you discuss torture (as you already do), and link to the Torture Awareness site to help support the NGOs.

    There's a lot of bloggers who are angry about human rights abuse in the War on Terror. If we coordinate, we can show our support and help Amnesty and HRW make Torture Awareness Month a success.

    11 Jun 2006, 23:13

  2. elendil

    Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a few other NGOs, have designated June Torture Awareness Month. I've created a blogroll you can join if you're interested. You can find it here. The idea is that everyone is linked to from the blogroll, and in exchange, you discuss torture (as you already do), and link to the Torture Awareness site to help support the NGOs.

    There's a lot of bloggers who are angry about human rights abuse in the War on Terror. If we coordinate, we can show our support and help Amnesty and HRW make Torture Awareness Month a success.

    11 Jun 2006, 23:14


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