War on Terror Is Now War on Human Rights, Says Group
By Monisha Bansal
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
April 09, 2007
(CNSNews.com) - The head of an international human rights group Friday charged that the war against terror had transformed itself into a war against human rights.
Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International, blasted the labeling of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other clandestine sites around the world, as enemy combatants and holding these individuals without charging them with a specific crime or prosecution.
He said the detainees at Guantanamo are being held in conditions that can lead to mental illness, that the inmates are possibly being tortured, but "exactly what happens to these people is kept a secret from all of us."
He added that with the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Congress condoned these practices and "took bad policy and turned it into bad law."
"With this act, the U.S. Congress officially, in the name of all of us, carried out an assault on the core idea of human rights - on the idea that there are certain rights that belong to all human beings without exception, even those we have labeled enemy combatants," Cox said.
But James Carafano, a senior research fellow at the Center for Foreign Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, stated that he had heard the same kind of criticisms about U.S. policy during the Cold War. "They were vacuous then and they are vacuous now," he told Cybercast News Service. "It is criticism without context or content.
"Carping from the sidelines by those who have no responsibility to do the job and have no respect for the magnitude of the challenge is not productive," Carafano added. "The challenge in any long war is to provide for security, promote economic growth, protect the liberties of your citizens, respect those of your allies, and promote human rights for all - and win the war of ideas.
"Accomplishing all those tasks well is no easy challenge, but vital," he said. "U.S. policies are trying hard to do all these equally."
But Cox said the United States must lead by example.
"There is no country whose example is more powerful than that of the United States," he said. "What makes the U.S. attack on the idea of human rights so serious is not that we are worse than other countries, but that we have always aspired to be so much better and we have proclaimed continually to the world that we are better.
"When the world's superpower and its greatest democracy openly defends its own gross violations of human rights it sends the most powerful message to dictators and killers around the world," Cox said.
"It actively helps them justify what is unjustifiable. It encourages repressive policies by our allies and most seriously it undermines the difficult and dangerous efforts of brave men and women around the world fighting against tyranny and acts of cruelty," he added.
