Human rights: The U.S. and the beam in other’s eyes
A La Jornada (Mexico) editorial
Human rights: The U.S. and the beam in other’s eyes
The Office of Information of the Chinese Council of State yesterday issued a release, based on press articles and data from nongovernmental organizations about the human rights violations committed by the United States, inside and outside its territory.
In the document, the Chinese government laments the fact that Washington uses the issue of individual guarantees “as a political instrument to meddle in the internal affairs of other countries, to defame the image of other nations, and to seek its own strategic interests,” and invites the authorities of that country “to extract the lessons of history, adopt a correct position, make an effort to improve its own human rights conditions, and rectify its actions” on that issue.
The document is especially relevant because it is issued two days after the U.S. State Department published its annual report on human rights, which condemns the alleged abuses committed by the governments of countries like Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela and China itself, among others. Significantly, that criticism comes from the regime that most frequently violates individual guarantees on a worldwide scale, as indicated by several international humanitarian organizations, and as documented now by the Beijing government’s report.
The armed crusades staged by the White House and the Pentagon against Afghanistan and Iraq during the administration of George W. Bush and continued until now by the government headed by Barack Obama are the clearest, most immediate examples of the United States government’s historical vocation for aggression and barbarity, a practice that has meant the sustained deterioration of the worldwide existence of human rights.
It should be remembered that, in the context of these military aggressions – which have taken the lives of tens of thousands of innocent civilians – Bush himself recommended ignoring the existing regulations regarding prisoners of war and thus gave his militias and civilian functionaries carte blanche to kidnap and torture all those who might be catalogued, on a discretionary basis, as “enemy combatants.”
Such judicial regressions were expressed in the atrocities committed against the prisoners in the Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo concentration camps and in the secret flight networks of the CIA, devoted to the kidnapping and transportation of suspects of terrorism.
Of course, as pointed out by the Beijing government’s report, Washington’s abuses against individual guarantees occur not only outside U.S. territory. Inside it, and protected by the “war on terrorism” unleashed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the government in Washington has violated the liberties of its own citizens and has legalized telephone espionage, electronic-mail interception, the clandestine opening of correspondence and the removal of personal documents.
So far, the Obama administration has been unable (or has not wanted) to make effective its intent to reverse this attitude; rather, its has shown a resistance to abandon the traditional meddlesome, bellicose, hegemonic and, in the long run, anti-human rights policies that characterized his predecessor.
With this background, and in the light of the report published by the Chinese government, it becomes clear that Washington lacks the necessary moral quality to rise as an example and judge of human rights, and that the existence of such rights in the world will be difficult to maintain while exercises in hypocrisy, such as the reports issued by the State Department, persist.
In this matter, as in others, it is necessary to advance toward objectives consensualized among nations, not imposed as a mere exercise of imperial power, hypocrisy and arrogance.
