P.M. Costa Rica: Human rights report on U.S. shows many deficiencies

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Fri, 10 Mar 2006 06:50:04 -0600

Live from P.M. Costa Rica No Human Rights under G'dubya.

Human rights report on U.S. shows many deficiencies

 

 

 

 

A reader's response

 

Human rights report on U.S. shows many deficiencies

 

By an Anonymous Expat*

Special to A.M. Costa Rica

 

 

As usual, that annual ritual of hypocrisy known as the U.S. State

Department Human Rights Report, published in part here Thursday,

http://www.amcostarica.com/030906.htm

did not include some salient facts with regards to the human rights

situation in the United States, which it simply assumes to be above

reproach. Had it done an honest report on the United States, that

report would have looked something like this:

 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 

The human rights situation in the United States continues to

deteriorate. During 2005, several major scandals came to light with

regards to human rights in the United States, and several other

significant situations continue, but remain relatively unreported by

the domestic press in that country, and ignored by its administration.

 

Search warrants: The erosion of the Fourth Amendment guarantees of

judicial review of searches and seizures became the subject of a major

scandal when it was revealed that the federal government has been

involved in a major secret surveillance effort outside of judicial

review for several years, and in contravention to both the Fourth

Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The major

response of the administration, other than angry defiance, was to

simply attempt to amend the FISA to make the surveillance legal under

that law. Human rights groups are seeking judicial review of the

legality of the program under the Fourth Amendment, but to date, no

cases have yet been heard. The attorney general has hinted that there

may be other secret warrantless surveillance programs as well, but

refuses to offer any details.

 

Disregard of habeas corpus: Hundreds of detainees continue to be held

in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without being tried (and in most cases

without even being charged) in civilian courts, as mandated by the

American Constitution as well as obligations under treaties to which

the United States is signatory, and demanded by court judgment. A

legal fig-leaf has been offered by arbitrarily designating them " enemy

combatants, " a categorization with no standing in law, and offering

some of them military tribunals, while the standard of justice for the

military tribunals can only be charitably described as deficient. At

least two of the military officers involved in the tribunals have quit

during 2005, citing as their reason the lack of even rudimentary

standards of justice.

 

Torture: The issue of torture in interrogating detainees, both

domestically and internationally, became a major domestic political

issue in the United States last year when an effort was made to

specifically outlaw its use, and the administration went to great

lengths to prevent the law from being passed. A severely watered-down

version was finally passed and signed into law, with sufficient

loopholes to ensure that torture could continue to be practiced under

U.S. sovereignty as deemed fit by the administration. Human rights

NGOs have complained that the law gives torture an even firmer legal

basis than it had before.

 

Accounts of torture by American intelligence services, military

officials and domestic police continued to appear in the press during

2005. Few, if any, ever received an adequate investigation, and those

responsible are rarely tried and convicted. To date, no one above the

level of unit commander has been cited in the Abu Ghraib scandal, in

spite of clear evidence that the policy originated with civilian

political officials overseeing the Pentagon in Washington.

 

A major scandal erupted worldwide regarding the use by American

intelligence services of a procedure called " extraordinary rendition, "

in which persons being detained, often illegally, by American

intelligence services have been taken to other countries known to

practice torture routinely for interrogation purposes. Hundreds of

flights have been detailed through nations including Britain, Germany,

Switzerland, Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria,

Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.

 

Credible allegations were raised by Human Rights Watch that the CIA is

operating a gulag archipelago of secret prisons in Bulgaria,

Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay at least, and some evidence

exists for other nations as well. HRW claims that the use of torture

in this gulag is routine. Several nations, including Denmark and

Switzerland, have banned flights by the U.S. government through their

airspace without specific prior approval as a result.

 

Political repression: It was revealed as a result of court-ordered

document releases in 2005 that as many as 30,000 activist groups and

individual American citizens had been the subject of surveillance and

occasional harassment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,

sometimes for years, without warrants and without credible allegations

of lawbreaking. The vast majority were left-wing political or

environmental groups, or police-monitoring groups with no credible

link to terrorism.

 

In some cases the harassment is of such an intimidating nature that

the individuals involved are being forced to flee into exile. Human

rights campaigners familiar with this situation in Central America

indicate that, at minimum, 200 per month are fleeing to that region

alone, and the rate appears to be increasing. Sufficient numbers are

fleeing to Venezuela that press reports have begun to appear on the

news wire services about them.

 

Election fraud: Several analyses by highly respected and qualified

academic statisticians appeared in 2005, analyzing the vote in Ohio in

the 2004 presidential election, concluding that the official vote

tallies were either outright impossible or wildly unlikely in the

absence of significant vote rigging. The vast majority of the

anomalous results appeared in districts and precincts using electronic

" touch screen " voting machines, and approximately 95 percent of the

anomalous results favored the victorious candidate.

 

One analysis said that the total vote tally for Ohio clearly had to

have been rigged by a bare minimum of 5 percent, and that the

challenger would have won the state by a minimum of 2 percent had the

election been honestly tallied. Yet efforts in Congress to convene a

formal hearing to investigate these analyses were soundly beaten down,

and to date, no official investigation has been launched at either

federal or state level.

 

Touch-screen voting machines were approved for use in elections in

North Carolina, California, and Florida, even though they do not meet

the minimum legal requirements for security under the laws of those

states, or the federal standards for federal elections. In each case,

the decision was made bystate officials belonging to the ruling

Republican party.

 

It continues to remain legal in many states for the state official in

charge of election procedures and processes (usually the secretary of

state) to also be serving as a campaign official for candidates

running in the elections they are supervising. This occurred in Ohio

in 2004 (Kenneth Blackwell, Bush state campaign chair) and Florida in

2000 (Kathleen Harris, Bush state campaign co-chair).

 

Press freedom: Press servility in the United States continued in 2005,

interrupted only briefly when the administration's response to the

Katrina hurricane disaster made that policy untenable. Otherwise, the

press has continued to accept the administration's ruthlessly enforced

access-for-cooperation policy without complaint. When the

administration began a " plumbing " operation, the press generally

cooperated fully and reported little about the effort which is ongoing.

 

As a result of the servility issue, the credibility of the major

newspapers and television news operations has eroded to the extent

that most major newspapers in the U.S. are reporting significant

erosion of their subscription bases, television news broadcast ratings

are down, while readership in the U.S. of on-line news services,

particularly those based outside of the United States, continues to

grow rapidly.

 

Corruption: A number of major political corruption scandals erupted

in 2005, most of them involving the ruling Republican party. The

" K-Street Project, " an influence-peddling scheme created by a former

speaker of the House, and run by lobbyist Jack Abramoff, involved

members of congress and the administration, and by years' end had

involved at least 10 percent of the membership of the House of

Representatives, and was continuing to grow.

 

The House majority leader was forced to resign his position after he

was indicted in a campaign-financing scandal in his home state. His

temporary replacement was not allowed to run for the position

permanently because he, too, is involved in a scandal.

 

A California congressman was arrested for bribery when it was revealed

that he had accepted $2.4 million in bribes, and even had a " price

list " of bribe-prices for services on offer.

 

At the state level, the governor of Kentucky found himself involved in

a jobs-for-contributions scandal of such proportions that the state

Republican Party complained it was running out of qualified persons to

fill appointed posts.

 

In Ohio, Congressman Bob Ney has been involved in several scandals at

once, including the governor's " coingate " scandal, and yet he refuses

to resign or even not run for re-election.

 

The mayor of Spokane, Washington, resigned when it was revealed that

he had been operating a " jobs couch, " offering city jobs in return for

sex.

 

Transparency and accountability: It was revealed in 2005 that the

administration is now classifying documents at a rate of about 10

times that of any previous administration, and has drastically slowed

down the rate at which old documents — some dating back as far as

World War II — are being declassified and placed in publicly

accessible archives. The administration continues to routinely

obstruct efforts to obtain information, even unclassified information,

through the Freedom of Information Act, and made an unsuccessful

attempt during 2005 to quietly get that act repealed.

 

Disregard of human rights in other nations: It has been revealed that

at least 10,000 detainees are being held by the United States in

detention centers in Iraq, without access to even the most basic of

detainee's rights. Some of the Iraq detainees have been held for as

long as two years without being tried, in many cases, without even

being charged with a crime, or being allowed access to lawyers or

families. Those who have been released offer credible descriptions of

routine torture.

 

Prosecutors in Milan, Italy, have issued an arrest warrant demanding

the arrest on kidnapping charges of 21 Central Intelligence Agency

personnel when it was revealed that the CIA had simply kidnapped a

person it wanted right off the streets of that city in broad daylight

and removed him from the country under its " extraordinary rendition "

program to be " interrogated " in Egypt, without seeking the permission

of the Italian government, or even informing them of what it was doing.

 

The United States has continued its policy of meddling in the

elections of other nations. Through the fig-leaf of the quasi-private

National Endowment for Democracy, during 2005, it continued to funnel

millions of government dollars into elections throughout Latin America

and elsewhere in the world, supporting candidates and political

parties favorable to its interests, usually in contravention of local

law. It has also turned a blind eye as its nationals have done the same.

 

The president of Venezuela continues to complain of U.S. meddling, and

continues to offer credible evidence to support his case. A failed

coup attempt during the recent legislative elections was apparently

funded by U.S. interests. Chávez has complained of support by the

U.S. of an insurgency developing in the Lake Maracaibo region, and

evidence has been uncovered that suggests the group is receiving arms

support from the U.S. State Department via Colombia.

 

 

* A.M. Costa Rica, which said George Bush should be re-elected, feels

compelled to agree with much of this document and specifically of the

erosion of Constitutional rights in the United States and the timidity

of the lapdog press.