Watching the Watchmen: Human-rights groups and the war.

The last six months have not been good ones for leading human-rights groups-but not for the reason they think. From their point of view, America and its allies are paying less attention to human rights now because of the war on terrorism. The latest annual report from Human Rights Watch is full of gloom on this score: "Unfortunately, the coalition's conduct so far has not been auspicious. . . . Its leading members have violated human rights principles at home and overlooked human rights transgressions among their partners. They have substituted expediency for the firm commitment to human rights that alone can defeat the rationale of terrorism. Whatever its success in pursuing particular terrorists, the coalition risks reinforcing the logic of terrorism unless human rights are given a far more central role."

But it is the human-rights organizations-including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Doctors Without Borders-whose conduct so far has been dismal. In episode after episode, they have shown a stunning moral and practical obtuseness about the war. They have issued lofty pronouncements unhinged from reality. Their posture toward America has been unsympathetic, suspicious to the point of paranoia, demanding, implacable. This performance should be no surprise to anyone who has followed these groups over the years. But Americans who know only of their good works-their efforts in behalf of political prisoners, most notably-may be mystified and angered. The war isn't making Americans indifferent to the claims of human rights. It may yet make them indifferent to the claims of the organizations that purport to stand for them.

The human-rights groups were, of course, horrified by the terrorist attacks of September 11. But even in their initial comments on those attacks, the groups showed their failure to take terrorism seriously. As Freedom House executives Adrian Karatnycky and Arch Puddington observed in an excellent essay for Commentary, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch can rarely even bring themselves to use the word "terrorism," at least without quotation marks. Human Rights Watch avoids the word, it says, because "there is no universally accepted definition" of it and "one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter."

Both groups recognized that the attacks were a massive violation of human rights. In the months since, they have occasionally noted atrocities by our enemies in the war on terror, such as the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl. But almost all of their criticism has been directed at America and its allies. If all you knew about the war came from reading the section of Amnesty's website on the subject-titled "Justice Not Revenge"-you would think that the United States had a worse human-rights record than the Taliban.

Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch insist that they take no position on whether the war is justified. But they plainly would have preferred that the September 11 attacks were treated as crimes rather than acts of war. This position led Amnesty to issue pretty strange statements, as when it expressed concern that "a number of suspects . . . have been publicly presumed guilty by senior members of the U.S. government." The officials' comments "have the potential to undermine the possibility of a fair trial in any U.S. court." Not that Amnesty or Human Rights Watch necessarily wants an American trial. They have urged other countries not to extradite terrorist leaders to the United States unless we promise not to seek the death penalty, which they consider a human-rights abuse.

Nearly every American action in the war has drawn condemnation from human-rights groups. When we transferred arms to the Northern Alliance, Amnesty International wanted "independent monitors" there to verify that we weren't giving them to anyone who had violated human rights. It expressed concern that policymakers were discussing an end to the ban on targeted assassinations. Doctors Without Borders dismissed our humanitarian aid to Afghanistan as "propaganda." In October, Oxfam and U.N. human-rights commissioner Mary Robinson urged a bombing halt for humanitarian reasons.

By the end of that month, Amnesty was calling "for an immediate and full investigation into what may have been violations of international humanitarian law such as direct attacks on civilian objects or indiscriminate attacks"-that's by us, of course. Human Rights Watch would later send a team to Afghanistan to look into civilian casualties. Never mind that no military action in history has been as scrupulous about trying to avoid them.

In late November, Taliban fighters who had supposedly surrendered staged an uprising in a prison near Mazar-e-Sharif; they were put down. Amnesty demanded an investigation of American tactics. In a videotape of an interrogation of John Walker Lindh, a CIA agent told the young jihadist that he had to decide whether he wanted "to live or die." Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said the implied threat amounted to torture. Amnesty called for a "full inquiry."

In November, President Bush issued an executive order establishing military tribunals. Although the order made it clear that the tribunal's procedures would be spelled out in detail later, the human- rights groups assumed the worst: that any due-process protections that were not in the order would not in fact be applied. Human Rights Watch said the order "displayed a disturbing indifference to international fair trial standards."

The human-rights groups were disturbed again by conditions at Guantanamo, demanding to be let in to inspect the situation and asserting the rights of all combatants, even the unlawful ones, to the protections of the Geneva Convention.

In most cases, the groups' lobbying has been mercifully ineffectual. By ignoring the demands for a bombing halt, the U.S. government was able to overthrow the Taliban-an achievement that, incidentally, did more for human rights than all these groups have done put together. Not that any of them said a word in praise or gratitude. Indeed, they have not even acknowledged that preventing repeats of September 11, by for instance killing any surviving perpetrators, is a service to human rights.

If the human-rights groups had their way, however, the ability of American policymakers to ignore their counsel would be severely limited. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch are zealous in their support of an International Criminal Court that could try Americans, including soldiers and government officials, for human-rights abuses. Human Rights Watch attributes American opposition to our "resistance to accountability." In fact, the opposition is largely premised on fears that the court would itself be unaccountable. The human-rights groups' enthusiasm for such a court-which would use secret testimony, allow acquittals to be appealed, and dispense with juries-is remarkable, especially in light of their opposition to Bush's military tribunals.

If an international treaty that might limit American power is being discussed, it's a safe bet that the "human-rights community" is for it. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Red Cross want an international ban on landmines. How should we protect South Koreans, and our soldiers stationed among them? That's not the human-rights groups' job.

All of these groups primly maintain that they are non-political. Yet their agenda is often indistinguishable from that of left-liberals. Amnesty issues reports on racial disparities in imprisonment in the United States-another alleged human-rights abuse; it is rarely mentioned that racial disparities in crime rates might be relevant to the situation. Amnesty wants Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of killing two FBI agents but is also a cause celebre of the Left, released. Both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch excoriated Bush for not sending a high-level delegation to the Durban "world conference against racism," Colin Powell having passed up the opportunity to learn about the Syrian government's theories on the Holocaust.

And so it goes: Human Rights Watch is constantly on the lookout for Israeli human-rights abuses, and sporadically concerned about Palestinian ones. It joined a lawsuit against Bush's policy of denying federal aid to groups that perform abortions or advocate the legalization of abortion overseas. Before September 11, Amnesty and the human-rights division of the Ford Foundation were debating whether to put "social rights"-the "rights" to housing, health care, and the like- on their agenda, which would have pretty much made the identification of human rights with left-wing politics complete.

The issue with the most potential to alienate Americans who would otherwise be well disposed to the human-rights lobby is surely the death penalty. There is, of course, a respectable case against the death penalty. But Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch never acknowledge the possibility of reasonable disagreement on capital punishment. America is said to need to abolish it to join the civilized world and to become a decent society.

The groups are quite fixated on the subject. During his February trip to China, President Bush exhorted his hosts to respect the rights of his citizens. How did Amnesty greet his stirring words? Not by adding their voices to his, but by making a snippy observation about his support of execution: "During President Bush's current visit to China, where earlier today he said that 'no nation is exempt from the demands of human dignity,' he should reflect upon the fact that an execution due in his own country next week would be illegal in China."

The groups are also willing to go to extraordinary lengths to oppose capital punishment. The fanaticism of their position on extradition to the United States is a case in point. Another is the case of Napoleon Beazley. He killed a 63-year-old man, tried to kill the man's wife, and stole their car, all in order, he told a friend, "to see what it's like to kill somebody." It would be one thing to oppose Beazley's execution on the theory that the death penalty should never be used, even against a monster. But Amnesty protested because Beazley was "a child" (he was 17 when he committed the murder) and because he had no previous criminal record. By executing him, the State of Texas would be implementing a policy of "one strike and you're out."

Asked about conservatives' perception of Human Rights Watch as liberal, Roth says, "I have a hard time believing that conservatives favor throwing out standards that prohibit torture or killing civilians." Most conservatives don't think that capital punishment is equivalent to those evils. But it is typical of the human-rights groups to retreat to the non-controversial parts of their agenda when pressed to defend themselves.

The moral mistakes of the human-rights establishment cannot simply be dismissed as a result of excessive zeal for human rights. There are also human-rights issues to which that establishment has, historically, turned a blind eye. Leaders of the struggle against religious persecution have long complained that the human-rights groups have not made the issue a priority, partly out of a reluctance to make common cause with evangelical Christians.

Roth's testimony in a February 1998 congressional hearing typified their approach. Religious persecution, he argued, can't be seen in isolation from other forms of repression. He cautioned against "singling out one category of violations." Of course, the human-rights groups do that all the time, issuing special reports on and urging special action against the persecution of journalists, of women, of gays, etc., all of which could be seen in the context of larger problems. But at least the human-rights groups have gotten more active in fighting religious persecution over the last five years.

The human-rights groups still do important and valuable work. For forty years, Amnesty has been keeping many of the world's political prisoners from being forgotten, and thereby gotten many of them released, treated better, or just not killed. But these organizations want to do more than some useful and praiseworthy things. They want to be the world's conscience. Too bad they're not up to the job.