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May 18, 2004
U.S. Human Rights & Irony Report Issues

You may recall that an expected report from the State Department on what the U.S. was doing to promote human rights was delayed earlier this month to avoid an unfortunate juxtaposition with the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.

Well, now they've released it, and you can imagine how much they really didn't want to.

Guess which country the following excerpt refers to:

Security forces continued to torture and abuse detainees and prisoners, arbitrarily arrest and detain persons and detain them incommunicado.

Hmmmm. Sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it? It's uncanny. But it's our report, they couldn't be talking about us. No, in fact the quote refers to Saudi Arabia, a country whose record on human rights the report rates as "poor."

The report also criticizes many countries for restricting freedom of the press at a time the Coalition Provisional Authority has taken to task such Arabic-language media outlets as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya for what it said were inflammatory, misleading reports against the U.S. military.

The authority sparked outrage in March when it closed for 60 days the Baghdad newspaper Al Hawse, published by followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, accusing it of inciting violence against coalition troops.

Ugh. How embarrassing.

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