As the BBC offer their well-worn activist platform to the findings of Amnesty International, it's good to notice that the transnationals are coming under a least a little scrutiny, as in this Wall Street Journal article, 'As Bad as the Nazis?: What the Red Cross thinks of the US military.'

What's interesting about the article is that it identifies a pattern of behaviuor, especially concerning the IRC and the media, which demonstrates that it is far from being the 'truly neutral humanitarian body' which many ordinary people feel it must be, and which many in the media would like to pretend it is.

Which brings me to Amnesty, and the Beeb.

According to the Beeb, it is said that '"four years after 9/11, the promise to make the world a safer place remains hollow"'.

But since when was it Amnesty's role to focus its entire approach on the US's presumed 'promises', and to suggest that bringing peace is the responsibility (and therefore the lack of it the failure) of the US and not of the Islamofascists who clearly stoke and have stoked violence at every opportunity?

Or, as Ms Khan puts it, "When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity."

This message is pathetic, suggesting that it is the US that grants a license for violence and not the fact of 9/11 which grants them a license for military action of whatever sort deemed necessary to prevent the future that 9/11 was intended by its perpetrators to presage.

The report goes onto suggest, according to the supine BBC presentation, that 'Many countries used anti-terror rhetoric to justify arbitrary detentions and unfair trials, it said, citing China's arrest of thousands of ethnic Uighurs and similar acts in India, Malaysia, Nepal and Pakistan'

But this is clearly a massive skewing of the data when one considers the patent human rights improvements in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia- and the much greater pressure on those countries to reform- which have directly followed the prosecution of the WoT. The fact is that countries like China have never needed any excuse for human rights abuses, and the only difference now is that they actually need to give an answer to critics because of Bush's pro-human rights stance.

The whole approach of Amnesty is political, and pathetically shallow in its politicking. What I would like to see is direct and sustained criticism of these bodies, to the extent that their activity and their influence, and their presence on BBC soapboxes, is greatly reduced pending proof that they have a reasoning capacity and that they actually do any good.

Meanwhile, speaking of reasoning capacity ...- a nugget of the real thing (er, not) via USS Neverdock.