Quantanamo Bay singled out in Amnesty International report

I really hadn't planned on writing on it, but as I surfed from site to site, it became apparent that a lot of people all over the world are reading about this report. Tom Friedman once commented that if the United States wanted to improve its reputation in the Arab world, then it needs to get the Palestinian show off the air, referring to the images on Arab news of Israelis using American made arms transposed against the bodies of unarmed Palestinians. I agreed with Friedman about that, but as that particular conflict has been somewhat restrained of late, the alleged Gitmo abuses have rushed right in to fill the void. From the President's patently unconstitutional suspention of prisoner and POW rights and his completely illegal tribunals, to reports of sexual humiliation, Koran desecration and torture, Gitmo has been a sad part of a bad, and frankly scary, policy that every American should be deeply ashamed of this administration for. There are prisoners in Gitmo who have been denied basic legal rights and face execution without any right of appeal except the President who created these courts in the first place. Many have never even been charged and others are charged with shooting at the soldiers who were invading their country. Read more here.

I choose the CBC story because I figured it was worth noting that even sweet little inoffensive Canada got slammed in the Amnesty report. It serves as a reminder that human rights groups need constant crisis just as much as governments do. Only their motivations are different. The non-profits want to keep the donations rolling in and governments need to convince enough people that the laws they are constantly passing are going to eleviate the crisis.