The US has undermined respect for human rights across the world with its efforts to weaken absolute opposition to torture, Amnesty International charged yesterday in its annual report.
In a sobering review of human rights across the globe, Amnesty said the international community lacked the willpower and the means to prevent and punish atrocities, citing the failure to curb crises in Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti.
It also said national governments had flaunted rule of law last year, noting perennial rights violators such as Russia, which continued abuses in Chechnya, and China, as well as Egypt, Israel, Nepal and the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan.
But for the second year running, the London-based group faulted Washington for leading the attack on human rights with its "war on terror."
"When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a license to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity," Amnesty International Secretary-General Irene Khan said at the London launch of the report.
The rhetoric of freedom and justice was being used to "redefine and sanitize torture," Khan said, citing US military terms used to hide mistreatment of prisoners like "stress positions" and "sensory manipulation."
Amnesty called the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of foreign terror suspects are held indefinitely, the "gulag of our times," referring to the notorious prison camps of the Soviet Union.
And it slammed Washington's alleged use of "rendering" -- the secret transfer of detainees to countries known to practice torture -- and its continued refusal to hold a broad investigation despite many reports of detainee abuse from Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Terrorism rose in tandem with increasing abuse by governments, defying US promises to make the world safer in the aftermath of the Sept.11 attacks in 2001, the group noted in the overarching, 308-page review.
In Iraq, instances of US and British abuse of Iraqi detainees ran parallel to gross human-rights violations by insurgents who killed thousands of civilians and staged a series of gruesome executions of foreign hostages.
Lawlessness in Afghanistan, alongside reported US abuse of prisoners, continued to cast a shadow over the post-Taliban government there, Amnesty noted.
In Russia, both Chechen armed groups and federal security forces committed atrocities against civilians, spreading instability beyond the borders of the separatist Caucasus republic.
Amnesty noted the crisis in Beslan, in the nearby republic of North Ossetia, where an estimated 350 people died in September in a hostage-taking at a public school.
And in Spain, 191 people were killed and more than 1,600 injured in simultaneous bombings on March 11 of four trains, allegedly staged by al-Qaeda militants.
Amnesty slammed governments for promoting "politically convenient strategies" to combat terrorism which nonetheless failed to prevent these attacks.
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