View previous stories
	Right's Hostility to NGOs Glimpsed in Amnesty Flap by Jim Lobe Inter Press Service USA   Published: June 6, 2005   The furore over Amnesty International's characterization of U.S. overseas detention facilities and practices offers important insights into the deep distrust of the George W. Bush administration and its neo-conservative supporters towards some non-governmental organizations (NGOs).   There was, of course, the administration's ritual reflex - most recently seen in its offensive against Newsweek - to mostly undisputed charges that U.S. authorities have committed and continue to commit serious abuses, in some cases amounting to torture, against individuals rounded up on suspicion of supporting terrorism; namely, to blame the "messenger", be it the International Red Cross, the media, or, in this case, Amnesty.   In the last case, however, there was an interesting wrinkle; namely the way each senior administration official -- from the president, to Vice President Dick Cheney, to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, to the Armed Forces chief of staff, Gen. Richard Myers -- all immediately followed their initial statement of outrage against Amnesty's use of "gulag" to describe the treatment of U.S. detainees with some version of the same non sequitur, stated most eloquently perhaps by Cheney on CNN's Larry King show.   "I think the fact of the matter is, the United States has done more to advance the cause of freedom, has liberated more people from tyranny over the course of the 20th century and up to the present day than any other nation in the history of the world," he declared, as if U.S. military interventions somehow justified non-compliance with the Geneva or U.N. Torture Conventions.   The fact that precisely the same "defense" figured at the top of each official's comeback suggested, of course, that their "talking points" were all prepared by the same source -- testimony perhaps to the kind of extraordinary discipline exercised by this White House to see to it that what used to be called the "message of the day" -- perhaps now more accurately referred to as the "party line" -- is repeated over and over again.   While Cheney was the most direct in denouncing the world's largest and most famous human rights organization -- "I just don't take them seriously" -- the other officials declined to attack Amnesty's bona fides, no doubt because even the Bush administration knows that NGOs like Amnesty get much higher credibility ratings than leaders of any other major institution, such as business, labor, or government.   The attack on Amnesty's good faith, rather, was left to the administration's right-wing supporters, notably the aggressive nationalists for whom the embattled U.N. ambassador-designate, John Bolton, is a modern-day hero and the National Review their favorite weekly, and neo-conservatives whose worldview is most reliably expressed on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard.   "It's old news that Amnesty International is a highly politicized pressure group, but these latest accusations amount to pro-al Qaeda propaganda," wrote the Journal's editorial staff, which pointedly put Amnesty's reputation as a "human rights" group between quotation marks.   Another article in the National Review by two members of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, a right-wing legal group that includes Bolton and many of the administration's lawyers who advised against the application of the Geneva Conventions to terror suspects and sought to justify interrogation methods that the Red Cross called "tantamount to torture", took a similar tack, stressing that the London-based organization"and similar left-wing NGOs" were pursuing a partisan and "anti-American" agenda.   The Rev. Sun Myun Moon-owned Washington Times also put in its two cents over the week with articles that featured revelations that Amnesty's U.S. director and board chairman each contributed 2,000 dollars to Democratic Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign last year.   These attacks were simply the latest and most visible manifestations of a larger, albeit somewhat erratic, campaign by the extreme right in the U.S. to depict certain influential international NGOs as part of a veritable conspiracy of leftists and "globalists" (including U.N. bureaucrats) to constrain Washington's freedom of action in the world, subvert U.S. sovereignty and democratic governance, and destroy free-market capitalism.   As none other than Federalist Society member and Bush's Labor Secretary Elaine Chao warned at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee conference last year, "(NGOs) should be at the top of every conservative's watch list."   Unable to win democratic elections at home, "NGOs and multilateral organizations are becoming key players in global public opinion and global standard setting," she said. "They are patiently laying the groundwork in international law, standards and practices that the United States will one day be pressured to adopt."   That is true not only with respect to human rights NGOs, according to this critique, but also to environmental groups, such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, which promote global standards for sustainable development, and other kinds of groups as well, including women's or population NGOs that advocate abortion and health rights and "other liberal social policies," as one Catholic rightist, Kate O'Beirne, complained in the National Review.   "'Global Governance' ...sums up what at least the advocacy organizations think they are doing," said Cornell University Professor Jeremy Rabkin, one of the most prolific NGO-bashers, at a conference in 2003 held to mark the launch of the NGOWatch website, a joint project by the Federalist Society and the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI).   "Once you say 'global,' of course, you are appealing to people who have very cosmopolitan views and you're not appealing to people who say, 'No, wait, we in our country want to just do what we do in our country.' If it is global, it is anti-national. ...(O)f course, this is a left-wing program which is going to appeal to people who have left-wing sensibilities."   The result is the push to create new multilateral institutions and legal instruments, such as the global land-mines treaty, the Kyoto Protocol to fight global warming, and the Rome Statute to create the International Criminal Court (ICC) that will ultimately bind the United States and constrain its powers even if Washington fails to ratify them through its democratic institutions.   "Thus used, international law portends breathtaking derogations of sovereignty, self-determination, and democracy," according to a recent article by Andrew McCarthy of the neo-conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. "Its proponents couch their impositions in the loftiest of inspirational rhetoric, cleverly casting naysayers as the enemies of justice and human dignity. But this is a wolf in sheep's clothing."   "For the sake of our security and authority to forge our own national destiny," according to McCarthy, "we must begin to push back."   In addition to the NGOWatch website, "pushing back" has also included orchestrated attacks over the last two years on major NGO funders, such as the Ford Foundation and George Soros' Open Society Institute; a constant questioning by the Journal, the Review, and other right-wing media and commentators of the political leanings of NGO leaders; occasional attacks by senior administration officials; threats of investigative hearings in Congress; and the nomination of John Bolton as U.N. ambassador, a perch from which he can be expected to try to reduce the influence of NGOs which he believes are pursuing a "globalist" agenda.   © Copyright 2005 IPS - Inter Press Service
	Tarnished Image abroad fails to register with Americans at Home by The Guardian / New York Times   Published: May 21, 2005   "Tarnished image abroad fails to register with Americans at Home", by Jonathan Steele. (The Guardian)   The US faces an uphill struggle to win a positive image for its foreign policy after the disclosures of torture and other atrocities at Bagram air base, according to senior American and international analysts.   "The Abu Ghraib pictures have become an icon of the occupation of Iraq. It's difficult to erase them from people's minds. Bagram only adds to the problem," Nadim Shehadi, acting director of Chatham House's Middle East programme, said yesterday.   The Bagram revelations - described by the New York Times as "a narrative counterpart to the images from Abu Ghraib" - are the latest in a string of episodes which started soon after President George Bush launched his so-called war on terror.   They began with pictures of hooded prisoners being flown to the US base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba in 2002. The first detainees released spoke of torture, sleep deprivation and other forms of ill-treatment.   The scandal over the US-run prison at Abu Ghraib a year later was more dramatic and shocking, both because the torture was caught on camera, but also because of the strong element of sexual humiliation. Reporters found evidence that torture was not just the action of a few soldiers, but had the consent of officers and was systematic.   Policy statements emerged to show that Mr Bush and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had authorised US interrogators and military prison officials to ignore the statutory rights of detainees. In February 2002, Mr Bush ruled that the Geneva convention did not apply to the conflict with al-Qaida, and that Taliban fighters would not be accorded the rights of prisoners of war.   More recently, it was disclosed that the US has sent detainees to be interrogated in countries which practise torture. The aim, apparently, is to avoid leaks from witnesses and whistleblowers about the prisoners' treatment, although US officials deny that the practice (known as rendition) amounts to outsourcing torture.   According to Professor Richard Sennett, a US sociologist at the London School of Economics, pressure on the Bush administration from US public opinion is weak because most Americans do not believe that the atrocities are systematic.   "With all due respect to my countrymen, I don't think they realise how bad the US image is. It's still the 'rotten apple theory' when this stuff happens. This is an administration which has practised a lot of denial. Criticism is swept under the carpet by being treated as anti-Americanism," he said yesterday.   A new survey shows widespread anger at the US among Muslims. "Many Muslims are so alienated that they claim they would not like to visit the United States, nor would they mind if the US withdrew, politically, economically, and militarily, from the Muslim world", says the report based on focus groups in Egypt, Indonesia and Morocco. The report was carried out for the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations by Charney research, a New York polling firm.   New Delhi. May 20, 2005   "Guantánamo comes to define U.S. to Muslims", by Somini Sengupta & Salman Masood. (New York Times)   In one of Pakistan's most exclusive private schools for boys, the annual play this year was "Guantánamo," a docudrama based on testimonies of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, the United States naval base in Cuba.   The cast was made up of students between 16 and 18 years old, each playing the role of a prisoner being held on suspicion of terrorism. To deepen their understanding of their characters, the boys pored through articles in Pakistani newspapers, studied the international press and surfed Web sites, including one that described itself as a nonsectarian Islamic human rights portal and is called cageprisoners.com.   It didn't matter that the boys at the Lahore Grammar School, an elite academy that has sent many of its graduates to study in American universities, lived in a world quite removed from that known by most prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. The more they explored, the more the play resonated, the director of the school's production, Omair Rana, recalled Friday in a telephone interview. The detainees were Muslim, many were Pakistani and one had been arrested in Islamabad, the country's capital.   "It was something we all could relate to," Mr. Rana said of "Guantánamo," a play created "from spoken evidence" by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, a Briton and a South African, that was staged in London and in New York last year. "All that seemed very relevant, very nearby - in fact, too close for comfort."   Accounts of abuses at the actual American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, including Newsweek magazine's now-retracted article on the desecration of the Koran, ricochet around the world, instilling ideas about American power and justice, and sowing distrust of the United States. Even more than the written accounts are the images that flash on television screens throughout the Muslim world: caged men, in orange prison jumpsuits, on their knees. On Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, two satellite networks, images of the prisoners appear in station promos.   For many Muslims, Guantánamo stands as a confirmation of the low regard in which they believe the United States holds them. For many non-Muslims, regardless of their feelings toward the United States, it has emerged as a symbol of American hypocrisy.   "The cages, the orange suits, the shackles - it's as if they're dealing with something that's like a germ they don't want to touch," said Daoud Kuttab, director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University in Ramallah, in the West Bank. "That's the nastiness of it."   The Bush administration's response to the Newsweek article - a general condemnation of prison abuses, coupled with an attack on the magazine - apparently did little to allay the concerns of many Muslims. Then on Thursday, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a report detailing the many complaints from detainees at Guantánamo about desecrations of the Koran between early 2002 and mid-2003.   In India, a secular country by law whose people and government are growing increasingly close to the United States, a cartoon appeared in Midday, an afternoon tabloid, on Friday showing a panic-stricken Uncle Sam flushing copies of Newsweek magazine down a toilet.   To the cartoonist, Hemant Morparia, it appeared as though the Bush administration's answer to the problem was to bury the truth. "People suspect American intentions," Mr. Morparia, a Mumbai-based radiologist who doubles as a cartoonist, said. "It has nothing to do with being Muslim."   From Mumbai, India, to Amman, Jordan, to London, Guantánamo is a continuing subject for discussion, from television talk shows to sermons to everyday conversations. In countries like Afghanistan, Britain and Pakistan, released detainees often return home and relate their experiences on television news programs. Accusations of egregious abuse sometimes prompt violence, as in last week's demonstrations in Afghanistan.   Guantánamo provides rhetorical fodder for politicians seeking to bring down United States-allied rulers in their own countries, and it offers a ready rallying point against American dominance, even in countries whose own police and military have been known for severe violations of human rights.   "Even illiterate people pronounce it in a perfect manner, which surprises me a bit, quite frankly," said Irfan Siddiqui, a columnist for Pakistan's popular Urdu-language daily, Nawa-i-Waqt. "But it shows the significance this issue has attained."   In Europe, accusations of abuse at Guantánamo, as much as the war in Iraq, have become a symbol of what many see as America's dangerous drift away from the ideals that made it a moral beacon in the post-World War II era. There is a persistent and uneasy sense that the United States fundamentally changed after September 11, and not for the better.   "The simple truth is that America's leaders have constructed at Guantánamo Bay a legal monster," the French daily, Le Monde, said in a January editorial.   The United States opened the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, on the eastern end of Cuba as a detention center for suspected terrorists from the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It houses about 680 prisoners, mostly from Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also some from Britain.   On many Arab streets, there was as much conspiracy seen in the retraction of the Newsweek story as in the story itself. "People already expect the U.S. to deny it, because it already has no credibility in the region," said Mustafa al-Ani, director of the Security and Terrorism Studies Program at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "So the initial story will have an impact, and the response simply will not."   Or as a Jordanian pharmacist, Farouk Shoubaki, said of the original report, "It is something the Americans would do." As Mr. Shoubaki's remark reflects, Guantánamo offers disconcerting testimony that for many Muslims, the America they used to admire has sunk to the level of their own repressive governments.   Najam Sethi, editor of The Daily Times, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan, said the Guantánamo accusations were seen in his country as "further proof" of hypocrisy and anti-Islamic sentiment in the government of the United States. To many, he said, it was taken "as evidence of how America and the West makes the war against terrorism synonymous with the war against Islam."   "Everyone is focused on the desecration of the Koran and attempts to hurt the feelings of Muslims," he said. "The tenor of the debate is acquiring 'civilizational' dimensions."   Afghans, who have the largest number of citizens held at Guantánamo, with as many as 300 at its height, share the general dislike of the prison, but are generally practical and philosophical about it. They say they are used to people being thrown into prison, being tortured there and even dying.   But public anger has grown at the reports of sexual abuse and desecration of the Koran. Even a former Afghan commander, Abdul Khaliq, who said he was happy to see captured Taliban members sent to Guantánamo, is now upset by the stories of sexual abuse and insults to Islam reportedly perpetrated there.   "The Americans were good people before," said Mr. Khaliq, who now works on a road construction project. "Definitely, people are changing their minds towards the Americans." In a country like Pakistan, the issue is especially vivid because Guantánamo prisoners who have been released are often interviewed by a local news organizations.   As far back as November 2003, a television talk show, modeled after "The O'Reilly Factor," featured an interview with Mohammad Sagheer, the first Pakistani to be released from Guantánamo. And as recently as Friday, an Urdu-language television talk show taped interviews with two ex-prisoners who said they witnessed the desecration of the Koran there.   The latest issue of Newsline, a Karachi-based magazine, featured a story titled, "Back from Camp," which chronicled the story of a former prisoner, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, a poet who pleaded for the Americans to return his writing.   "These are issues that sink into people's minds," said Samina Ahmed, the Pakistani representative of the Brussels-based research and advocacy organization, International Crisis Group. "Their religion is being demeaned in the context of the war on terror. That's an issue the U.S. is going to have to address."   In Britain, Guantánamo has entered the political lexicon along with Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad as an emblem of American injustice and abuse. During the London marathon in April this year, David Nicholl, a neurologist, ran the race in an orange jumpsuit to protest the detention of five former British residents at Guantánamo.   "We are all against terrorism but we are not obliged to close our eyes to the excesses of our allies," Chris Mullin, a former British Foreign Office minister told Parliament on Wednesday.   In India, one human rights advocate who routinely takes the Indian military to task for its alleged abuses against insurgents in Kashmir and the northeast, said the United States stance on things like torture and interrogation of suspects at Guantánamo signaled what he called "a human rights disaster" for everyone.   On Friday afternoon in an Islamabad bookshop, Maheen Asif, 33, leafed through a women's magazine, and paused for only a moment when asked for her impression of Guantánamo Bay. "Torture," she said, as her daughters, 8 and 5, scampered through the stalls. "The first word that comes to my mind is 'torture' - a place where Americans lock up and torture Muslims in the name of terrorism."   (Reporting for this article was contributed by Craig S. Smith and Ariane Bernard in Paris; Alan Cowell in London; Hassan Fattah in Amman, Jordan; Carlotta Gall in Kabul, Afghanistan; Salman Masood in Islamabad, Pakistan; and Somini Sengupta in New Delhi).
	View more stories