"The State Department's annual human rights report was once a beacon of truth for American policymakers as well as the rest of the world. But how can it now be seen as anything more than a sham when the Bush administration consistently breaks our own laws – from illegal wiretaps at home to renditions abroad – yet still tries to portray itself as the protector of freedom, democracy, and liberty for all?"- Patricia Kushlis, a retired official of the U.S. Information Agency said in an interview.
The U.S. State Department's annual report on human rights, which Washington released on the 8th of March, drew great scrutiny from Foreign policy, legal, and human rights authorities.
"The sad reality is that because of the [George W.] Bush administration's haughty unilateralism and its mockery of international prohibitions on torture, most of the rest of the world no longer takes the U.S. seriously on human rights matters," Noah S. Leavitt, an attorney who has worked with the International Law Commission of the United Nations in Geneva and the International Court of Justice in The Hague, told IPS.
Although the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently praised the cooperation of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and their being "strategic partners" in President Bush's so-called “war on terror”, the U.S. Sate Department report, which reviewed performance of 190 countries, called the human rights records of those countries “poor” or “problematic”, citing flawed elections in Egypt, lack of religious freedom in Saudi Arabia, and floggings as punishment for adultery or drug abuse in the UAE.
It also described Iraq's human rights record as "handicapped" by “insurgency” and "terrorism".
"How a country treats its own people is a strong indication of how it will behave toward its neighbors. The growing demand for democratic governance reflects recognition that the best guarantor of human rights is a thriving democracy," Condoleezza Rice boasted while introducing the Country Reports.
Scrutinizing the U.S. human rights practices, the reputable the Human Rights Watch organisation said: "The United States government has been widely condemned for violating basic human rights in the fight against terrorism. Since 2001, the Bush administration has authorized interrogation techniques widely considered torture. It has held an unknown number of detainees as 'ghosts' beyond the reach of all monitors, including the ICRC. And it has become the only government in the world to seek legislative sanction to treat detainees inhumanly."
A similar opinion was voiced by Samer Shehata, assistant professor of Arab Politics at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington.
Mr. Shehata told IPS, "The U.S. has lost a tremendous amount of credibility in any discussion of human rights and rule of law. I can't imagine anyone in the Middle East or the 'Muslim World,' for example, taking the State Department report seriously."
After all, how can you take seriously a report on human rights written by a nation-state that is currently perceived to be among the most egregious violators of human rights and rule of law in the world?"
"Everyone remembers Abu Ghraib and no one has forgotten about Guantanamo, especially not in the Middle East," he added.
Also Dr. Jack N. Behrman, emeritus professor at the University of North Carolina and a former senior official in the administration of President John F. Kennedy (1961-1963), told IPS that "Washington has adopted fundamentalist religious views in its opposition to 'Muslim fundamentalism'. It has practiced torture, deceived and dissembled, promised to assist those harmed by its policies (or lack thereof) and done little or nothing, and harmed and killed many innocents in an effort to dictate how others should live. All of these are practices by 'autocratic and evil empires' that this administration has copied extensively."
On the widely debated issue of torture, Human Rights Watch says "The Bush administration asserts that it does not use or condone torture. Its definition of torture, however, remains unclear. At the end of 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a memorandum repudiating earlier policies that had permitted a broad range of brutal interrogation tactics by, among other legal sleights-of-hand, redefining torture to exclude all techniques that did not inflict pain 'equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.' The Department has not, however, even revealed what its definition currently is."
Turning to the issue of detainee abuse, the Human Rights Watch in its annual report on the United States said "Reports of abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and at secret detention facilities continue to mount. Since 2002, over three hundred specific cases of serious detainee abuse have surfaced. At least eighty-six detainees have died in U.S. custody since 2002, and the U.S. government has admitted that at least twenty-seven of these cases were criminal homicides."
Assistant Secretary of State Barry Lowenkron came under severed criticism from Washington press corps for asking why the Bush administration continues to send what it calls “terror suspects” to foreign prisons while at the same time it accuses those countries like Jordan and Egypt of torturing detainees.
In Jordan, detainees are beaten, and deprived of sleep, in Egypt, credible sources confirmed many cases in 2005 where security forces abuse prisoners, the State Department noted in its human rights evaluation of those two countries in the annual Country Reports.
Addressing this issue of ‘prisoner rendition’, Human Rights Watch (HRW) declared "Despite the unequivocal international prohibition on return of people to situations where there is a risk of torture, the Bush administration openly claims the right to send counter terrorism detainees to countries where there is such a risk so long as it obtains guarantees – so-called 'diplomatic assurances'- from the authorities in the country concerned that the detainees in question will not be tortured."