Human Rights and the United States

The Obama Administration, through its diplomatic surrogates in the Clinton State Department, has recently released a report to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights as part of that organization’s Universal Periodic Review. In that report, the Obama Administration pats itself on the back for restoring American virtue, badly stained by the Bush Administration. The report admits flaws in the human rights record of the United States, like the fact that one of its constituent states, Arizona, actually writes laws intended to protect itself from unlawful invasion by illegal democrat voters from Mexico. The report also admits that the United States actually detains illegal combatants captured on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan in the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Good lord, where will it stop?

What the State Department report does not mention is why a great nation like the United States would even consider contributing any information, let alone a report, to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. While the Commission’s name intones a concern for Human Rights around the world, the actions of the Commission’s member states indicates something quite different. Interestingly, the U.S. State Department also publishes “Country Reports,” (http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/) outlining the conditions that may be expected in various nations of the world, even those who make up the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. A quick trip through the pages of the State Department’s Country Reports on some of the nations on the UN Commission members makes for interesting reading.

The African nation of Angola, a member of the UN Human Rights Commission, is a nation governed by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) since 1979, and is characterized by a “tight, centralized control” by that government. The State Department report indicates that while there are no reports of politically motivated killings, police use of excessive force resulted in at least two deaths in 2009 and as many as 23 in 2008, along with reports of routine police torture and killing of prisoners in custody. Other highlights mentioned in the State Department’s Country Reports on UN Commission members include:

Burkina-Faso: Corrupt security forces, which “continued to abuse prisoners with impunity, including frequent threats, beatings and torture to extract confessions.” Prison condition in the country were “harsh and life-threatening.”

China: “severe cultural and religious repression of ethnic minorities” is commonplace, and “extra-judicial killings, executions without due process, torture, forced confessions and forced labor are routine.

Saudi Arabia: ruled by Islamic Shari’a Law and characterized by "routine disappearances, torture and physical abuse, there is no freedom of speech, assembly, association, movement, or religion" in this nation that condones violence against women and children.

With a membership like the nations listed above, among many others, what possible motivation could the Obama Administration have for condescending to even submit a report on human rights in the United States? Why would that thought even occur to any American, let alone someone living in the White House?

The answer is that the Obama Administration has long held and often expressed the belief that the United States of America is a deeply flawed nation in need of “change” that only a person of Mr Obama's towering intellect and goodness can affect. Mr Obama does not believe in American exceptionalism and sees our country as equivalent to the likes of Burkina-Faso or China or Lybia. In short, Mr Obama and his administration hold a deep loathing of America and a contempt for the American people.

It would have been nice to know how Mr Obama regarded this country before the presidential election of 2008. And we might have known these unpleasant facts if there had been a working, honest press at work in the country instead of a deeply corrupt, derelict media devoted to the election of a man who was completely unqualified and ill-equipped to govern a great nation.