How Others See Us

I don’t know how you expect our country to be taken seriously, Bush, as a beacon of human rights, when you keep providing the world with glaring examples of our hypocrisy. Here we are, on page 5 of the Saturday edition of the New York Times, with your Rice mouthing off—quite correctly, in my view—about the depravity of trafficking in human beings, which she denounces as “nothing less than a modern form of slavery.” Bravo! Coming in for her fully justified disapproval are Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—our greatest allies in the turmoiled Middle East, where God knows we can use all the friends we can get in the halls of government. Or should I say, the palaces? But still...

Your Rice was talking about “domestic workers being brought in from many countries into domestic servitude,” according to the US government report she was discussing, along with “child beggars, a lot of beatings and rape.” Women are trafficked, too, the report says, "for the purpose of sexual exploitation."

A high-minded rebuke, then. Very appropriate. Unhappily, though, on the very same page of the Times, we learn that you, Bush, have personally characterized as “absurd” the Amnesty International report which used the word “gulag” to describe your prisons in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere; that your Cheney was “offended” by the term; and your Rumsfeld denounced its use as “reprehensible.” “If our reports were so ‘absurd,’” fired back the Amnesty International executive director William F. Schultz, “why did the administration repeatedly cite our findings about Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war? Why does it welcome our criticisms of Cuba, China, and Korea?”

Added Amnesty International’s second-in-command, Kate Gilmore: “The issue of the gulag is about policies and practices. You put people beyond the reach of the law, you locate them in facilities where families can’t access them, you deny them access to legal representation, you attempt to prevent judicial review.” Ouch, Bush! This has the ring of truth.

No matter how ‘absurd’ you personally may believe the report to be, no matter how ‘offended’ you Cheney is, just a single step outside, into the world beyond the offices of your administration might help you understand how we give others a continuing, open invitation to see us in a very different light. Is there not some small disconnect, Bush, between these two separate pieces, on one page of the Times? Are we to be surprised when others accuse us of hypocrisy?