Amnesty's International Disappointment

Amnesty International once arguably chronicled the effects of policies on people. This was useful, as it provided a sort of a benchmarking mechanism to tell the truly horrible regimes from the merely odious. This is all Amnesty International can do.

Somewhere along the way, Amnesty began to think that they mattered more than those they claimed to represent. They began to be as worried about fundraising dollars as much as they cared about accuracy, and by then accuracy wasn't as important as projecting the right message.

When I read of Amnesty International's William Schulz slamming the United States as, "a leading purveyor and practitioner of the odious human rights violations," I rolled my eyes, and lost what little respect that I still had for the organization.

Vice President Cheney rightly called Amnesty on their falsehoods and exaggerations, and cited a long and distinguished record of the United States freeing more people than any nation in the 20th Century, including 50 million just during the past four years.

Army Gen. Bantz Craddock, the individual in the best position to know what is actually occurring at Guantanamo Bay, flatly rejected Amnesty's characterization of the U.S. detention facility as a "gulag." Either Amnesty does not know what a gulag is, or they simply don't care to be accurate. Whether their excuse is ignorance or apathy, their image as an honest broker is now broken, their only true capital, credibility, destroyed in many eyes.

Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard B Myers, called the Amnesty report "absolutely irresponsible."

I call it an end to credibility.

Austin Bay, Red State, and The Conservative Voice have more.