From Tom Paine
By Jim Lobe

The Bush administration’s global war on terrorism continued to set back the cause of human rights in 2005, according to a major U.S. rights group, which said that U.S. and European hypocrisy in carrying out that war led to a global leadership void that had been taken advantage of by more opportunistic powers, particularly Russia and China.

In the latest in its annual series of World Reports, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) singled out the Bush administration’s multiple defenses of its abusive treatment of detainees as both counterproductive to its efforts to defeat Islamist extremism and particularly destructive to its credibility as a global human rights champion.

The U.S. government’s use and defense of torture and inhumane treatment played the largest role in undermining Washington’s ability to promote human rights, the 532-page report argued.

It charged that torture and mistreatment of prisoners has been a deliberate policy choice of the administration’s counterterrorism strategy and that new evidence of widespread abuse that came to light during 2005 made clear that the problem could not be reduced to a few bad apples at the bottom of the barrel.

The White House immediately dismissed that conclusion, calling it politically motivated and insisting that official policy required that detainees be treated humanely. The president made it clear that we do not torture, said spokesman Scott McClellan. The world has seen that we are someone who takes the treatment prisoners very seriously.

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