I almost forgot that it’s been exactly one year since Human Rights Watch released it’s year 2005 report on global human rights abuses in which its highlight focus, despite everything else going on in the world, was the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Well, fire up the grill and pop open a beer, because their year 2006 report is out and there’s something very unsurprising about it.

The introduction by Kenneth Roth, while paying some attention to Russia, China, and Sudan toward the end, spends a good 2/3 of the essay focusing on Guantanamo Bay prison and complicity by Western nations in allowing relaxations in the definition of torture. He went as far as to say that, “it is one thing to create an environment in which abuse of detainees flourishes, quite another to order that abuse directly. In 2005 it became disturbingly clear that the abuse of detainees had become a deliberate, central part of the Bush administration????????s strategy for interrogating terrorist suspects.” Justification for this are lots of quotes by unsourced administration officials in the report and “deceptive” public statements by President Bush.

But don’t bother asking for hard evidence — they don’t have any presented. Only token acknowledgement is given to crucial U.S. support for democratic movements in countries like Ukraine and Lebanon, support that otherwise if not given could have resulted in much less favorable outcomes.

The problem with this is that countries where Human Rights Watch has fantastic evidence to support its assertions — such as with the massacre committed by the Uzbek government in May, crackdowns in China due to increased social mobilization, Russia’s well-documented use of hard torture and disappearences in Chechnya, and the persecution of the opposition in Belarus — are completely overshadowed by the inordinate amount of attention given to places like Guantanamo, that don’t even compare in scale to the abuses committed elsewhere. Saying that direct orders to torture detainees are given from the top without providing specific evidence is akin to putting the United States, the country leading the charge for human rights in the world, on the same level as Turkmenistan. Because of it, countries like the latter don’t get the scrutiny they should be getting.

It’s a sad thing to say, because like I noted, the report really does go into some great detail with regards to authoritarian countries where abuses are frequent, daily, and deliberate. But Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International aren’t the same organizations they were in the 1980’s when they led the drive against abuses in the Soviet Union. Their main contributors are subscribers to the anti-American European Left, and their old guard leadership no different. Who can forget in the foreword to AI’s 2005 report when Secretary General Irene Khan called Guantanamo “the gulag of our times” and subsequently called the United States the leader in human rights abuses worldwide? Because of it, they must by will and of necessity posture to this attitude. The result is that, while there is a wealth of information in the reports, the focus inevitably falls to the United States unnecessarily, while truly egregious governments barely get whacked at all.