This op-ed by the US ambassador to the UN human Rights Commission Eileen Donahoe is devoid of reality that you have to laugh, if you don’t want to cry. Every paragraph is an exercise in chutzpah and quote worthy but this is I think the worst:
Time and again human rights defenders underscore the importance of our public statements as an essential tool against government repression. The power of truthful words, spoken by the United States, should never be denigrated or underestimated. Those words provide hope and courage to those who fight against the worst rights abuses.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth:
Former CIA agents have confirmed for the first time that the agency tortured prisoners at a “black site” detention center in north-eastern Poland at the height of the war on terror. According to the Associated Press, a former CIA agent identified only as “Albert” tortured the terror suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri multiple times with an electric drill at the converted Stare Kiejkuty military base near Szymany in the Masuria region of Poland.
Al-Nashiri is the suspected mastermind behind one of the first large al-Qaida attacks, which targeted the US destroyer USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden in October 2000. According to former CIA agents who prefered to remain anonymous, Albert tortured the suspect for two weeks in December 2002. The claim is backed up by a review by the CIA’s inspector general, which reads: “The debriefer entered the detainee’s cell and revved the drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded.”
Sure, apologists will claim that this was an “isolated incident”, a “bad apple”, that this does not happen anymore under Obama. Yet Guantanamo Bay is still open, the Obama administration uses the same excuse of national security Bush used to hide the details of what’s going on in its War on Terror and nobody is even talking about any of the other nodes in the American gulag. The United States is not leading the world in human rights, it’s leading the world in ignoring them.