U.S. Has Lost Credibility On Rights, Group Asserts

[bemildred]

The advocacy group Human Rights Watch said yesterday that Washington's once-powerful role as a prime defender of human rights had effectively ended because of arbitrary detentions and reports of torture since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the group urged the European Union to step up as a leader of the cause.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, released the group's World Report 2007, an assessment of last year's global human rights practices, by saying that the counterterrorism record of the United States over the past five years has tarnished its credibility as an influential moral voice.

He listed several practices he said were being used by the Bush administration in its fight against terrorism, including torture, arbitrary detentions, allowing CIA interrogators to use coercive techniques and the unsupervised handling of so-called enemy combatants held in other countries.

"This catastrophic path has left the United States effectively incapable of defending some of the most basic rights," Roth said in the report, released on the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

WaPo

[ShockediSay]

1. They're not supposed to be fighting 'terrorism'

They're supposed to be fighting our enemies, the Qaedans!!!...People who attacked us and will at the first opportunity

Otherwise we'd be at war with Chechneyans, Israelis, ETA (Spain) and the list goes on and on and on and on

Terrorism has been around since Cain and Abel

Are we going to go to war with ca half the world???

[daleo]

2. It's true

What more can one say.

[depakid]

3. And the so called "mainstream" media shares much of the blame

Though not the Post. For some strange reason, they've always had a bee in their bonnet about this issue.

Not so with others-