August 27, 2006: Two recent reports from Amnesty International are the latest examples of the human rights group siding with terrorists. In the first of these reports, Amnesty International is not only objecting to Saddam Hussein getting the death penalty (which it opposes in all cases), but it also complained about various procedures. In the second case, the human rights group accuses Israel of committing war crimes in its recent fighting with Hizbollah in Lebanon.
Amnesty International sticking up for the human rights of terrorists, dictators, and other assorted forms of bad guys is not unprecedented. In 2001, the organization sued the CIA to get documents pertaining to the hunt for Pablo Escobar (the head of the largest drug cartel in Colombia). The group claimed that the CIA had knowledge of "human rights" violations committed against associates of the Medellin drug cartel. In 2002, Amnesty International worked to free Ahmed Hikmat Shakir from Jordanian custody. Shakir was known to have attended the January, 2000 al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, and had escorted at least one of the 9/11 hijackers though Malaysian customs. Amnesty International also has regularly campaigned against the holding of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. The organization also tends to downplay or flat-out ignore violations by various terrorist groups. This includes the beheading of prisoners and deliberate attacks against civilian targets, like airliners and pizza parlors. Amnesty International criticized Saddam's human rights record. However, the group also claimed that the 2003 liberation of Iraq was not justified. In other words, Saddam's regime did bad things, but they did not warrant corrective action – just reports and press releases.
This pattern also holds in their condemnation of Israel including a "disproportionate and indiscriminate response" to the Hizbollah attacks. In their press release and report on the recent conflict, Amnesty International ignored the fact that several thousand rockets were indiscriminately fired into northern Israel, with the express purpose of killing as many civilians as possible. They also ignored Hizbollah's tendency to launch rockets near civilian targets. Israeli counter-battery radars would pinpoint the location and send the air strikes, which attack the site, causing collateral damage. Israel was also acting to rescue two soldiers (who had a human right to not be kidnapped), and some of the targets hit were hit to ensure that Hizbollah could not transfer the soldiers to Iran. Amnesty International also ignored the fact that many of the photos were staged by Hizbollah or altered.
With these press releases and reports, which will get covered by the mainstream media, Amnesty International has aided terrorist recruiting via the repetition of their propaganda. This propaganda now has a veneer of respectability, coming from a third party. It seems that terrorists and other bad guys around the world have a friend in Amnesty International. – Harold C. Hutchison ([email protected])