3-01-05, 10:26 am

Dripping with irony, the recently released US State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices claims 'The United States and its international partners worked with many countries during 2004 to expand freedom by helping to protect the political rights of their citizens and to advance the rule of law in their societies.' Further, the introduction to the report pays special attention to places where the people have struggled to 'choose their own governments.'

The report cites the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq. It revises history to claim that the people there rose up to create new regimes, and simply ignores the reality of a massive invasion and prolonged wars and occupations that brought death and destruction. The report also lauds Ukraine’s new regime for its respect for human rights and the electoral processes that it says installed new democracies in each of these three countries.

One wonders if the report’s claim that 'By providing this compendium of witness to the global human rights experience, we hope that the record of this work in progress will help illuminate both future tasks and the potential for greater cooperation in advancing the aspirations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights' does not simply mock the real task of struggling for human rights and upholding the values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Just ten days prior to the release of the State Department’s self-serving prose, the ACLU released to the public over 1,000 pages of documents gathered through Freedom of Information Act requests from the Pentagon about the mistreatment and torture of prisoners held by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Beatings, mock executions, rape, and other abuses are part of a wide pattern of abuse now just coming to light.

Contrary to the claims of the Bush administration that torture was the work of a 'few bad apples,' administration memos, most notoriously the so-called Gonzales torture memo, reveal this sort of mistreatment to have been the policy of the Bush administration from 2001 until its exposure in April 2004.

Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the State Department claims to want to advance 'the aspirations of,' states rather directly: 'No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.'

Further, as it becomes clear that the rights of individuals detained and deported by the Bush administration since September 11th were violated, the administration might remember other words encoded in the Declaration that it seeks to advance: 'Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.' In fact, the several articles following Article 9 expand on the universal civil rights of the individual in ways that utterly undercut the administration’s practices with regard to people it has called terror suspects since 2001 but has not brought charges against. But let’s not stop there. The hypocrisy continues. Throughout its tenure, the Bush administration has systematically undercut the right of workers to organize or join unions. It has directly and arbitrarily ended collective bargaining rights as was the case with some federal workers or more indirectly using the National Labor Relations Board to make organizing efforts more difficult. The administration should note articles 23 and 24 that seek to protect the right to join unions and to earn a living wage.

Articles 7, 25 and 26 state that all individuals are equal and should have equal protection without discrimination under the law, call for adequate financial and social support for mothers even when they aren’t married and insist on free compulsory education as a right. Specifically, Article 25 states: 'Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.'

When we look around America at stagnant unemployment, growing poverty, 43 million people without health care coverage, the administration’s budget cuts to public education, public housing, programs that aid the poor and protections for working people all to pay for tax cuts for the rich, we cannot help but note that this administration has made every effort to flout the principles and 'aspirations' of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

So when the Bush administration charges countries like Venezuela, Cuba and China with human rights violations and lumps them together with violators such as Bush allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, only the most naive among us might believe the administration’s good intentions.

What you won’t find in this report is a serious self-examination by the State Department of the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Bush administration.

Even more glaring, in the State Department document you will not find a report on a single country that in the past two years started a war with another country based on lies about an imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction or the other country’s ties to an international terrorist organization that didn’t exist. You will not hear about an invasion and occupation of said country that cost the lives of, according to some estimates, over 100,000 people – mostly civilians.

You will not see a call for regime change in such a country.

So what is the State Department Country Report worth? Current snow-bound residences of the Northeast and upper Midwest might find some uses for it. It could help get your fireplace blazing, or if you are low on bathroom tissue and can’t get out to the store, you might brave the discomfort. For myself, I always enjoy a bit of fiction.

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