You want others to clean their house but yours is worse!
That's Washington. While scrutinising PM Najib's administration for what it describes as 'severe human rights violation', the US fails to take a peek at its own human rights treatment, which some analysts condemned it as 'worse than that of North Korea'.
What a shame. It all started with George Bush's 'war on terrorism' that gave license to agencies like CIA and FBI to neutralise anybody at their whim and fancy. You want to avert your eyes, as if not seeing atrocity makes it not so.
And as long as its shared-atrocity in the Palestine does not end, the world must stop payinga attention to Washington's propaganda on others.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's five-year review of 6.3 million pages of CIA documents concluded that the intelligence agency failed to disrupt a single plot despite torturing al-Qaeda and other captives in secret facilities worldwide between 2002 and 2006, when George W. Bush was president.
The CIA interrogation programme was devised by two agency contractors to squeeze information from suspects after the September 11, 2001, attacks. The interrogations took place in countries that included Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.
Some captives were deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, at times with their hands shackled above their heads, and the report recorded cases of simulated drowning or “waterboarding” and sexual abuse, including “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” without any documented medical need.
It described one secret CIA prison, its location not identified, as a “dungeon” where detainees were kept in total darkness and shackled in isolated cells, bombarded with loud noise and given only a bucket in which to relieve themselves.
Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, speaking on the Senate floor after releasing the report, said the techniques in some cases amounted to torture and that “the CIA's actions, a decade ago, are a stain on our values, and on our history”.
The UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson, said the report revealed a “clear policy orchestrated at a high level within the Bush administration” and called for prosecution of US officials.
Civil rights advocates also called for accountability.
That's Washington. While scrutinising PM Najib's administration for what it describes as 'severe human rights violation', the US fails to take a peek at its own human rights treatment, which some analysts condemned it as 'worse than that of North Korea'.
What a shame. It all started with George Bush's 'war on terrorism' that gave license to agencies like CIA and FBI to neutralise anybody at their whim and fancy. You want to avert your eyes, as if not seeing atrocity makes it not so.
The newly released report on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s prolific use of torture in the war on terror is a litany of vile acts undertaken in our names, by those entrusted to lead our nation.
Look away? That’s the sin committed by former President George W. Bush, who first explicitly and then tacitly authorized the use of tactics— a polite term for actions that amount to rape, brutal beatings, repeated drownings, in short: torture — that the United States, along with every other peer nation, has pledged not to use.
It’s the sin committed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who continues, unrepentant, to insist the atrocities committed by the U.S. government and its contractors were justified.
It’s the sin committed by some members of the U.S. Congress, who chose for far too long not to look too closely, or who, like Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, argued until the final hours that it was better to bury the records of our shame than to confess, and seek forgiveness.
And, finally, it is the sin committed by all of us, who returned a morally compromised president to office, and failed to hold the men and women charged with representing us in Washington, D.C., and abroad responsible for the atrocities committed in our names.
Giving Malaysia a 'grave violations' rating by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) for its treatment of secularists as well as its fraying race relations, is a plot by Washington to cover its own wrongdoings.
The world should ask Barack Obama on the US-Nato mission to devastate countries like Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Libya and Yemen; and some former Soviet republics.
In its latest edition of Freedom of Thought report published today, the global umbrella body for humanist values also cited Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak's speech in May against secularism and liberalism as a threat towards Islam and the state.The CIA misled the White House and the public about its torture of detainees after the September 11 attacks and acted more brutally and pervasively than it acknowledged, a US Senate report said on Tuesday, drawing calls to prosecute American officials.
Najib had branded humanism, secularism and liberalism as "deviant" and a threat to Islam and the state and had declared the country would not allow any Muslims the right to apostasy.
"This country is found to be declining due to alienating rhetoric against 'atheists' and 'humanists' voiced in 2014 by the prime minister, as well as ongoing legal disputes over the freedoms of religious minorities contributing to inter-religious tension," it said.A rating of “grave violations” is the highest among the five ratings in the report.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's five-year review of 6.3 million pages of CIA documents concluded that the intelligence agency failed to disrupt a single plot despite torturing al-Qaeda and other captives in secret facilities worldwide between 2002 and 2006, when George W. Bush was president.
The CIA interrogation programme was devised by two agency contractors to squeeze information from suspects after the September 11, 2001, attacks. The interrogations took place in countries that included Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.
Some captives were deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, at times with their hands shackled above their heads, and the report recorded cases of simulated drowning or “waterboarding” and sexual abuse, including “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” without any documented medical need.
It described one secret CIA prison, its location not identified, as a “dungeon” where detainees were kept in total darkness and shackled in isolated cells, bombarded with loud noise and given only a bucket in which to relieve themselves.
Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, speaking on the Senate floor after releasing the report, said the techniques in some cases amounted to torture and that “the CIA's actions, a decade ago, are a stain on our values, and on our history”.
The UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson, said the report revealed a “clear policy orchestrated at a high level within the Bush administration” and called for prosecution of US officials.
Civil rights advocates also called for accountability.
“Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of the officials responsible, torture will remain a 'policy option' for future presidents,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch in New York.So, how's that?
The CIA dismissed the findings, saying its interrogations secured valuable information. Many Republicans criticised the decision by Democratic lawmakers to release the report, which was put together by the committee's Democratic majority, saying it would put Americans at risk.