Comments on: Amnesty Travesty

By: Knucklehead

Knucklehead — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 15:14:41 +0000

Mitch,

Thank you for contructing this piece. It is as excellently pointed as it is frightening.

Re: AI being “institutionally hijacked”, well, it has happened to bigger and, perhaps, better organizations than AI. For all NGOs and other organizations devoted to securing World Peace and wiping out World Hunger the gravy train eventually becomes the main point of their continued existence. Once that happens intellectual corruption is not far behind and outright financial corruption is soon on its way (see Nations, United). NGOs do not have the Savage Marketplace to keep them honest.

By: jdasilva

jdasilva — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 22:29:39 +0000

I think Amnesty International is an important NGO, and one that at makes us remember each year, if nothing else, the names of the despotic regimes globally. However, I think that they’ve fallen prey, as have most Democrats/world liberals post-9/11, to a pattern of blasting something without offering anything constructive as a solution or an alternative.
As someone who looked for a Bush alternative but found Kerry to be merely a man without new ideas who could only complain, I find AI to be doing the same here. Certainly, the U.S. government can do better. But there’s a lack of perspective and lack of focus on any possible fixes or solutions in AI’s report. Even the suggestion that governments arrest U.S. officals is merely bitching and moaning, because it’s something that would never, never, ever happen.

Were AI to suggest some real changes, or couch their warnings in a language meant to convey, Hey, U.S., just be careful, rather than hyperbolic “gulag” hilarity, they might have been listened to seriously. At the least, they’d be able to legitimately say they were ignored. Now, at least for the moment, they are but another overreacting Bush-hater living in another world.

By: Shannon Love

Shannon Love — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 16:27:48 +0000

I fear that Amnesty International is falling prey to institutional hijack. Politically motivated individuals are using the organizations prestige to advance their own narrow political agendas.

On the matter of Gitmo, I am forced to ask: Where would I rather be imprisoned, Gitmo or a Mexican civil prison? For that matter, I would probably prefer Gitmo to any civil prison in the developed world. At least in Gitmo, your chances of being murdered are vanishingly small. People released from Gitmo certainly seem in good health and spirits.

The fact that AI spends so much time on what are at worse minor abuses in the American system when would could toss a dart at a world map and find much more extreme conditions really serves to reveal what a hypocritical enterprise AI has become.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 16:14:06 +0000

Who pays for the A. I. expenses? Soros, French government,…? Who paid Greenpeace to attack Shell at the same time as Chanceller Kohl?
Follow the cash.

By: HA

HA — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 11:01:02 +0000

That is a frightening list of despotic regimes. Just out of curiosity, have the leaders of any of these regimes been charged with crimes in the ICC?

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say they haven’t. Maybe someone with some spare time can Google this and prove me wrong.