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Mark · Site Admin Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 1052

I Can't Believe It's Not Human Rights Watch!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/...Elizabeth-Ferrari-080922-709.html

Excerpt:

As Americans, we operate from a position of privileged naivete, a kind of concrete operational thinking: we believe things are what they are called especially when it comes to public life. If someone reads us a bill called “No Child Left Behind”, we go ahead and assume it will help children. If an act named the “Help America Vote Act” passes, we expect that our elections just got better. The Heritage Foundation is surely an organization that has something to do with colonial hardiness and a can-do spirit. There is nothing more sad than we are when we learn, against all reason, that NCLB is a hijacking of our schools by privateers or that HAVA makes our elections vastly more vulnerable or that The Heritage Foundation is a right wing propaganda mill that is every day finding better ways to funnel our tax money into corporate wallets with a nakedness that Lady Godiva could only aspire to.

So, when we read in the American press that two officials from Human Rights Watch have been booted out of Venezuela, our first thought will not be, “what did they do”. It won’t be. We expect people who work for Human Rights Watch to, well, watch human rights. They have a web site and everything, just like Amnesty International and the International Red Cross. And maybe that kind of optimism, that positive expectation, has its value in these difficult days. But it’s misplaced if one is trying to understand what is going on in Venezuela, in Latin America and in our relationships with both as the Bush administration is shaping them. Or, misshaping them.