Before anything, read Austin Bay’s fabulous piece fisking Amnesty International on their bizarre claim that Gitmo and Abu Ghraib are modern day gulags, and that the U.S. is the leader in human rights abuses in the world.

Hahahahahaha. Right.

Anyhow, I received an email with a really good idea: Go to Google News and search for stories about “human rights abuses xxx” where xxx is the name of a country. Let’s see the results as of this moment.

United States: 2,740
Iran: 374
China: 824
Sudan: 400
Zimbabwe: 265
Belarus: 39
Russia: 483
Burma: 68
Saudi Arabia: 142
Nepal: 232
Syria: 90
Cuba: 1,330 — because that’s where Guantanamo is.

So while the press covered 2,740 stories on American “human rights abuses,” it only covered with 2,917 stories combined those of some of the most degenerate regimes on the planet. Where, exactly, do the priorities of Amnesty International and the mainstream press lie? For more, let’s not forget the similar Human Rights Watch report from earlier in the year.

UPDATE: This unleashing of partisan politics has been interesting, something that hasn’t been tried before as of yet. Comments have been both interesting and other things — for the latter, consider this a warning. The most frequent assertion made was that my methodology was wrong when conducting the search results. This may be true in certain circumstances, but I contend that the purpose of the experiment was misunderstood.

As I instructed at the beginning of the post, it is important to read Austin Bay’s piece. One of the important points he makes is that by making such outrageous claims, that Gitmo is the modern gulag and that the U.S. is the leader, no less, in human rights abuses, it cheapens the cause of human rights and takes attention away from malicious dictators.

Regular readers at this blog know that we rarely, if ever, talk U.S. politics. We blog on democracy and human rights where there are neither. What is becoming ever more irritating about organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch is that they are increasingly politicizing their work. They are relatively well-documented with regards to the rest of the world, so their claim itself is unjustifiable when putting the Turkmenistan file against the U.S. file, for example. It’s all rhetoric and politics, and to us, that is an extremely sad thing. It shows that they are under poor management that lacks in vision.

Austin Bay’s point is exactly what the Google News results show. By using the United States to pimp for headlines, Amnesty International is taking the light off of governments that are truly, systematically tearing human rights to shreds. I was not saying, as suggested, that there is a vast media conspiracy. I’m saying that Amnesty International’s report couldn’t keep focus on the context, and because of it, a media storm ensued that has gone completely off rail.