The Daily Grasshopper

There's the usual avalanche of reporting from Iraq in today's papers: the killing of several Iraqi women and children at a checkpoint near Najaf, the continuing back-and-forth between Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and those second-guessing the battle plan, the firing of Peter Arnett by General Electric's NBC, etc., etc. The Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, to their credit, all gave some front-page coverage to the killings near Najaf, though, I suspect as the war wears on and these incidents become commonplace, they will move progressively further back into the front section, eventually not being reported at all.

But I want to turn away from the Middle East, once again, to other matters, equally important but less dramatic and, therefore, easier to overlook. There is a story in today's Times about the release of an annual State Department report. Usually I just give you the link to the stories, but this one is so short I can reproduce it in its entirety (it ran on page A8 in the New England Final Edition of the Times):

State Dept. Reports on Human Rights

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, March 31 - The State Department accused the Chinese government today of numerous and serious human rights abuses and also took Israel and the Palestinian Authority to task for what it described as poor rights records.

In its annual report, the department said abuses in China included 'instances of extrajudicial killings, torture and mistreatment of prisoners, forced confessions, arbitrary arrest and detention, lengthy incommunicado detention and denial of due process.'

At the same time, the report credited the government with some positive steps, including the release of a number of prominent dissidents.

On Israel, the report said the country's overall human rights record in the occupied territories remained poor, and had worsened in several areas as it continued to commit 'numerous, serious human rights abuses.'

The report also criticized the Palestinian Authority's rights record."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/01/international/asia/01RIGH.html

While it's refreshing to see the New York Times acknowledge in print that the government of Israel, the leading recipient of U.S. military aid, is committing human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories, this is far from a comprehensive summary of the State Department's "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices."

(I should point out that a similarly brief synopsis - covering the same three offenders, incidentally - appeared on the front page of the Journal. As far as I can tell, there is no mention of the report's release in today's Globe.)

If you'd like to look at the entire report yourself (your tax dollars at work!), you can. It's here:

http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2002/

For now, I'd like people to reflect on some of the justifications George W. Bush has offered for his crusade for "regime change" in Iraq. He has told us about the savage regime of Saddam Hussein, the torture chambers, the "death squads," and the disappearances. I'd like people to think about those charges when they read the excerpts from the 2002 State Department report for Colombia that I've arranged below. Bear in mind that this is the U.S. government's report on its client state, the third-leading recipient of U.S. military aid:

"COLOMBIA:

The Government's human rights record remained poor; there were continued efforts to improve the legal framework and institutional mechanisms, but implementation lagged, and serious problems remained in many areas. A small percentage of total human rights abuses reported were attributed to state security forces; however, some members of the government security forces continued to commit serious abuses, including unlawful and extrajudicial killings. Some members of the security forces collaborated with paramilitary groups that committed serious abuses. Impunity remained at the core of the country's human rights problems. The civilian judiciary was inefficient, severely overburdened by a large case backlog, and undermined by corruption and intimidation. Despite some prosecutions and convictions, the authorities rarely brought high-ranking officers of the security forces charged with human rights offenses to trial...

Paramilitaries continued to commit numerous unlawful and political killings, particularly of labor leaders, often kidnaping and torturing suspected guerrilla sympathizers prior to executing them. Paramilitaries also conducted kidnapings for ransom. Paramilitaries committed "social cleansing" killings of homosexuals and other "undesirable" elements. However, paramilitaries appeared to commit far fewer large-scale massacres than in 2001. Paramilitaries often interfered with personal privacy in areas where they exercised de facto control, and regularly engaged in military operations in which they endangered civilian lives by fighting in urban areas and using civilian dwellings as combat shelter. Paramilitaries displaced thousands through both terror-induced forced displacements of suspect populations and military operations that drove peasants from their homes. Paramilitaries regularly threatened and attacked human rights workers and journalists who criticized their illegal activities. Paramilitaries also recruited child soldiers...

Credible allegations of cooperation with paramilitary groups, including instances of both passive support and direct collaboration by members of the public security forces, particularly the army, continued. Evidence suggested that there were tacit arrangements between local military commanders and paramilitary groups in some regions, since paramilitary forces operated freely in some areas despite a significant military presence. Some members of the security forces actively collaborated with members of paramilitary groups--passing them through roadblocks, sharing intelligence, providing them with ammunition, and allegedly even joining their ranks while off duty.

The military high command stated repeatedly that it would not tolerate collaboration between military personnel and paramilitaries, and that the armed forces would combat paramilitary groups. Although state security forces doubled operations against paramilitaries during the year and quadrupled the number of paramilitaries captured since 2000 (see Section 1.g.), security force actions in the field were not always consistent with the leadership's positions. In addition to active collaboration, the military often was accused of failing to respond in a timely manner to warnings of impending paramilitary massacres or selective killings. The military generally cited lack of credible information, available manpower, and adequate mobility to explain these failures. Impunity for military personnel who collaborated with members of paramilitary groups remained common...

Victims of paramilitary killings often showed signs of torture...

Paramilitaries regularly threatened journalists. For example, in an interview published in the July 8 edition of Santander department's Vanguardia Liberal daily, a paramilitary commander from the Middle Magdalena region threatened to execute journalists who published sensationalistic stories about paramilitary atrocities. In a July 29 communique, paramilitaries in the department of Arauca stated that 'journalists, anchormen, correspondents, and media owners and managers' would be declared 'military targets' if they failed to 'live up to the responsibilities of their profession.'

On March 21, El Espectador columnist Fernando Garavito went into exile abroad because of death threats, allegedly from paramilitaries. In his columns, Garavito had harshly criticized paramilitary groups, as well as then-presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe."

Today, the appropriations committees in both houses of the U.S. Congress took up the president's emergency defense supplemental bill, which contained an additional $100 million of military aid for Colombia - the price U.S. taxpayers had to pay to get President Alvaro Uribe to join Bush's "coalition of the willing." I'll check tomorrow's papers and let you know if the money got approved, or if it even got reported on.

What's left for you to do is ask yourself these two questions:

1) Why isn't the State Department's report on Colombia, whose record is characterized as "poor," considered newsworthy, especially in light of the fact that the country is the leading recipient of U.S. military aid in the hemisphere, and second only to Israel and Egypt?

2) What right do we have to pursue "regime change" in Iraq when the government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe regularly engages in many of the same terrible practices against its citizens, as detailed by our own State Department, for which we so self-righteously condemn Hussein?

Once again, the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy is out in the open, for those who care to investigate. The principles we claim to uphold around the world stand in stark contrast to the realities on the ground in client states like Israel and Colombia. As a rule, U.S. taxpayers are kept insulated from these inconvenient and uncomfortable realities, even by such "liberal" news organizations as the Times and the Globe, leaving them profoundly confused about the world and the U.S. government's role in it. I see a couple of possible outcomes - we will either change our government's behavior, or the hypocrisy will become too great for the rest of the world to bear.