More Abuse Charges from Soros' HRW

The details in this morning's New York Times of the brutal beatings and death of Afghan prisoner named Dilawar by a US soldier were stomach-turning to say the least. This being America, two soldiers are on trial because of the beatings, one for manslaughter, and officers and Army doctors are being investigated.

But that's not the focus of Human Rights Watch (HRW), which continues to degrade the US military by showcasing its rare and reprehensible activities. HRW is on a campaign to discredit the US military under George Bush -- hardly its role in its early years, when it spearheaded the drive to push Clinton into Bosnia under the guise of stopping atrocities. Under Bush, it has opposed intervention to stop atrocities, and has worked hard to discredit the US military, as agents of the interventionists.

Who is the HRW money man? George Soros, with help from prominent lefty-foundations including Ford, McArthur and Rockefeller.

Who runs it? George Soros and his friends.

Also on the board, Soros' publisher, Peter Osnos, Chief Executive of Public Affairs, a Soros publication, that traces its roots back to I.F. Stone, Ben Bradlee and Robert Bernstein (also a HRW board member), and chair Jane Olson, a long-time pacifist activist who cut her teeth arguing against nuclear arms while Reagan was using Pershing missiles in Europe as a strategy to crush the Bear.


Mike Farrell hugs up to Alfree Woodard
and HRW Chair Jane Olson. Farell is on
the board of HRW's US Division.

For an interesting view of HRW that is both curious and relevant given HRW's current anti-interventionist posturing in Iraq, read this article by a European who is extremely hostile to American values and American interventionism. Excerpts:

No US citizen, and no US organisation, has any right to impose US values on Europe. No concentration camps or mass graves can justify that imposition. But Human Rights Watch finds it self-evident, that the United States may legitimately restructure any society, where a mass grave is found. ...

In a sense the US was 'pre-programmed' as an interventionist power. Universal human rights, by their nature, tend to justify military intervention to enforce those rights. Expansionists, rather than isolationists, are closest to the spirit of the American Constitution, with its inherently interventionist values. In fact, most US-Americans believe in the universality and superiority of their ethical tradition. Interventionist human-rights organisations are, like the neoconservative warmongers, a logical result. ...

Human Rights Watch operates a number of discriminatory exclusions, to maintain its American character, and that in turn reduces internal criticism of its limited perspective. Although it publishes material in foreign languages to promote its views, the organisation itself is English-only. More seriously, HRW discriminates on grounds of nationality. Non-Americans are systematically excluded at board level - unless they have emigrated to the United States. HRW also recruits its employees in the United States, in English. The backgrounds of the Committee members ... indicate that HRW recruits it decision-makers from the upper class, and upper-middle class. Look at their professions: there are none from middle-income occupations, let alone any poor illegal immigrants, or Somali peasants.

Human Rights Watch can therefore claim no ethical superiority. It is itself involved in practices it condemns elsewhere, such as discrimination in employment, and exclusion from social structures. It can also claim no neutrality. An organisation which will not allow a Serb or Somali to be a board member, can give no neutral assessment of a Serbian or Somali state. It would probably be impossible for this all-American, English-only, elite organisation, to be anything else but paternalistic and arrogant. To the people who run HRW, the non-western world consists of a list of atrocities, and via the media they communicate that attitude to the American public. It can only dehumanise African, Asians, Arabs and eastern Europeans. Combined with a tendency to see the rest of the world as an enemy, that will contribute to new abuses and continuing civilian deaths, during America's crusades.

That's a pretty good rundown of the arrogance and self-exclusion of the elite, but his analysis entirely misses the anti-Republican American artery that flows parallel to the pro-Democrate America vein in HRW's corporate anatomy.