Picking Winners For Allies & Demonstrating Our Own Umitigated Gall

Rice Says US Allies Among Worst Human Rights Abusers

It is interesting that the State Department, which was a major participant in the extraordinary rendition operations by US intelligence and military agencies, as well as our abandonment of principles of our own Constitution and tenets of international law and treaties, has the audacity and gall to criticize any nation for human rights abuses.

But what is also important is that this news report leaves out some other, very important allies that have atrocious human rights records, including Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Japan (violence against women), Singapore, France (religious persecutions and unfit prison conditions), Germany (free speech, police brutality), Greece (religious persecution, free speech, violence against women), Poland, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Hungary, Spain, Turkey, Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Yemen, Pakistan, India, and so many more. In fact, the US State Department, which persecuted a Canadian citizen by sending him to Syria to be tortured, had the guts to criticize Canada for human rights violations.

If we needed clear evidence of our own hypocrisy, the US State Department and Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice was all too willing to provide it. There doesn't appear to be any other country in the world we are unwilling to criticize for such abuses, except maybe ourselves. Some of the behaviors and human rights violations that were cited in other nations included violence against women, which is still a major problem in our own country.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Tuesday criticized the poor human rights records of several US allies and denounced the genocide in Darfur while announcing the publication of the 2006 US State Department Country Reports on human rights. Despite the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq have received hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid for democracy and human rights programs, the reports indicate that widespread sectarian violence, weak central administrations and abuses of authority have thwarted respect for rights in those countries. Among the other countries with poor reports in the annual DOS exercise were North Korea, Pakistan, Cuba , Venezuela, and Myanmar.

In addition to Afghanistan and Iraq, the reports also criticized Russia and China, with which the US has recently worked in pressuring Iran and North Korea to abandon their nuclear programs. The State Department reports criticized those countries' records of cracking down on dissent and investigating the killings of government critics.