Amnesty International blasts US for "cynical attempts to sanitise torture"

The quotes are from Irene Khan, general secretary of AI:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanrights/story/0,7369,1492004,00.html




"The USA, as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyperpower, sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide," she said. "When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity."

...


"The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law," she said. " Guantánamo evokes memories of Soviet repression."

...

The US government's use of dubious terms such as environmental manipulations, stress positions and sensory manipulation to describe the treatment of prisoners amounted to "cynical attempts to redefine and sanitise torture", she said. She also criticised what she said was the UK's acceptance of intelligence derived by torture in certain circumstances.

"To say in a 21st-century democracy that torture is acceptable is to push us back to medieval ages," she warned.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4578627.stm

-SNIP_
Amnesty accuses US over 'torture'

The US is accused of damaging human rights across the world

Governments around the world betrayed their commitment to human rights in 2004, Amnesty International says.
In a 300-page annual report, the group accused the US government of damaging human rights with its attitude to torture and treatment of detainees.

This granted "a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity", the human rights advocates said.

The report also criticised the world as a whole for failing to act over crises, notably in Sudan's Darfur region.
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and human rights abuses have been on the rise globally since Bush started his 'endless war'.

"This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers,
stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by
the prisoners who were freed * were not, as some assumed, inflicted
methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards,
their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees.":

Rudolf Hess, the SS commandant at Auschwitz.

Amnesty slams U.S. on human rights in Latest Breaking News

Amnesty International Report 2005 in Foreign Affairs

Amnesty International Report 2005 with appropriate links in Israel/Palestinian Affairs