Tel-Chai Nation

Really not surprising they could do this (via Hot Air):

A SENIOR official at Amnesty International has accused the charity of putting the human rights of Al-Qaeda terror suspects above those of their victims.

Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at Amnesty’s international secretariat, believes that collaborating with Moazzam Begg, a former British inmate at Guantanamo Bay, “fundamentally damages” the organisation’s reputation. [...]

Sahgal describes Begg as “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban”. He has championed the rights of jailed Al-Qaeda members and hate preachers, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the alleged spiritual mentor of the Christmas Day Detroit plane bomber.

Awlaki was the very imam who counseled Malik Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood jihadist murderer, and is also a suspect in the 9-11 attacks. Anyone with common sense should not continue to donate to this awful movement.

Power Line and The Corner have some more.

Update: I also thought to add a few more older items about Amnesty Irrational as well from 2005 that are worth noting. For example: The Wall Street Journal reports about Amnesty International's positions, which are favorable towards the al-Qaeda. And one of Amnesty's directors said some really extreme things against the US recently too.

At a press conference Wednesday releasing its annual human rights report, William Schultz, the executive director of Amnesty's U.S. branch, called the U.S. a "leading purveyor and practitioner" of torture. He urged foreign governments to investigate and arrest U.S. officials. "The apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera," he said, "because they may find themselves under arrest as Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998." The "apparent" is a nice touch, perhaps an unconscious bow to the fact that multiple probes and courts martial have found no evidence that the U.S. condones or encourages torture.

Shocking indeed. These Chomskyites sure do know how to fuel the fires of hate, don't they? And that's exactly why Amnesty is be avoided, and should not be worked for.

In the Jerusalem Post, an interesting op-ed on what Amnesty International is really like, and how they lead a selective policy as to what they'll argue about, and what they won't:

AI lacks staff and financial resources to research 149 countries on the same level. Therefore, AI employs a hierarchy according to which it allocates its resources. Thus, the report includes entries on countries which were intensively researched and visited by AI's staff, alongside states that were not. The second category contains two types of states: (1) those where human rights violations are grave, routine, and which usually deny access to researchers; and (2) countries in which human rights violations are rare and are properly addressed by local nongovernmental organizations and governmental agencies. However, AI does not make this distinction or share its research methodology with the public. Transparency, which AI rightfully demands from governments, is not employed in its own publications. Thus, the considerations that led AI to research one country intensively, and other superficially, are vague and open to interpretation.

This problem is amplified because AI's report is an unreadable volume. It is written in a phone-book style that tortures the reader. I guess that there is no easy way to present the materials that AI does. Yet, assuming that the editors of the report want it to be read, it would be useful if they published it in a more reader-friendly style. The present situation is, therefore, that most people do not read the report, and those who do usually limit themselves to the entry on their own country, or to countries which interest them most. Hence, the report is read as an anti-Israel document, out of its original global context.

(snip)

It is therefore regrettable that the lengthy entry on Israel displays a very low level of research. In addition, AI ignores all human rights issues in Israel which are unrelated to the Israeli-Arab conflict. Even violence against women is reported only in relation to the conflict. Dozens of Israeli women who were murdered in their homes and scores who were victimized otherwise by their partners, do not deserve even a footnote in AI's report. This attitude might suggest that, in the Israeli case, the core issue for AI is not human rights, but rather the political conflict itself.

In spite of the centrality of the conflict in this report, the alleged human rights violations are reported out of context. It is possible that a soldier killed somebody unlawfully, yet this conclusion depends on the conditions that prevailed while the event took place. Killing an innocent person is always a tragedy, but it is not necessarily the result of an unlawful action. The report also often seems to "cut and paste" paragraphs from previous years' reports. Thus, it is mentioned that trials before Israeli military courts often "did not meet international standards of fairness." That may be correct, but when did AI investigate the Israeli military judicial system? I read this sentence in almost every AI annual report that I surveyed, but I failed to find any document that records a proper study of the military courts. If I am not mistaken, this specific sentence stems from a document from 1979.

If this is how Amnesty is going to behave, then they'd be better off going out of business, I'd say.

I did not check specific events recorded in the report. I suppose that most of them merit a serious consideration. Nevertheless, the way that AI currently works hardly contributes to the promotion of human rights in Israel. It is perceived as a biased organization, and therefore its critics are refuted dismissed as anti-Israeli propaganda, even in cases when it is entirely accurate.

Good point. Put another way, it's not out of altruism, if that's the ideal description, that they're doing their work, but rather, out anti-Israel bias. And if they cannot or will not act out of genuine concern for world welfare, then there's no point in their continuing to do so.

Here's some more articles of interest on the phoniness of Amnesty today:

Another op-ed from the Jerusalem Post by the chairman of Rabbis for Human Rights.

An editorial from the Washington Post.

An editorial from the Wall Street Journal, reprinted on NGO Monitor's website.

And did Amnesty Intl. call for the kidnapping of US leaders in 2005? Tragically, they did. And as the following articles tell, the damage they did was truly awful, as revealed in Front Page Magazine's War Blog section. According to John Leo, in his Town Hall column:

A different omission marred the reporting of Amnesty International's report charging torture in U.S. detainment camps. The group didn't just call Guantanamo a "gulag," an over-the-top remark that was universally reported. In a press release that most reporters ignored, the group also invited foreign governments to snatch certain visiting American officials off the streets and bring them to trial for crimes against humanity. The suggested snatchees, should they travel abroad, were President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA Director George Tenet, and other unnamed civilian and military officials. Amnesty International said that "all states have a responsibility to investigate and prosecute people responsible for these crimes," just as the British pounced on Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998. The snatching recommendation wasn't new, but the Amnesty press release is a useful reminder of the dangers of signing on to the International Criminal Court.

And, then, here's the statement itself, from Amnesty's one and only leader, William Schultz:

"If the US government continues to shirk its responsibility, Amnesty International calls on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior US officials involved in the torture scandal. And if those investigations support prosecution, the governments should arrest any official who enters their territory and begin legal proceedings against them. The apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera because they may find themselves under arrest as Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998. ...
Amnesty International’s list of those who may be considered high-level torture architects includes Donald Rumsfeld, who approved a December 2002 memorandum that permitted such unlawful interrogation techniques as stress positions, prolonged isolation, stripping, and the use of dogs at Guantanamo Bay; William Haynes, the Defense Department General Counsel who wrote that memo, and Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, who is cited in the memo as concurring with its recommendations.

Our list includes Major General Geoffrey Miller, Commander of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, whose subordinates used some of the approved torture techniques and who was sent to Iraq where he recommended that prison guards “soften up” detainees for interrogations; former CIA Director George Tenet, whose agency kept so-called “ghost detainees” off registration logs and hidden during visits by the Red Cross and whose operatives reportedly used such techniques as water-boarding, feigning suffocation, stress positions, and incommunicado detention.

And it includes Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who called the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and “obsolete” in a January 2002 memo and who requested the memos that fueled the atrocities at Abu Ghraib; Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, former Commander of US Forces in Iraq, and Sanchez’ deputy, Major General Walter Wojdakowsi, who failed to ensure proper staff oversight of detention and interrogation operations at Abu Ghraib, according to the military’s Fay-Jones report, and Captain Carolyn Wood, who oversaw interrogation operations at Bagram Air Base and who permitted the use of dogs, stress positions and sensory deprivation."

Unsurprisingly, it does not include terrorists like Marwan Barghouti, Mahmoud Abbas, et al.

And it just shows that Amnesty's mission is not to uphold democracies and the opressed, but rather, autocracies and the opressors. All they are now, and doubtlessly ever were, is a troupe of comedy performers making ridiculous and embarrassing statements and arguments, and it would be strongly advised for anyone with sense to stay a safe distance from them.

Labels: jihad, political corruption, terrorism