‘Miller Lashes Out’

Re: “Miller Lashes Out at Bloomberg Over Proposed Budget Cuts,” Jill Gardiner, New York, June 3, 2005. Gifford Miller constantly complains about having to run against the self-financed Mayor Bloomberg. But isn’t Mr. Miller’s unnecessary use of taxpayer dollars even more egregious? He has now increased the campaign finance match to 6-1, and though he defends this move by declaring that it is the only way to “even the playing field” with Mr. Bloomberg, it’s no excuse for his gross abuse of taxpayer dollars. Mr. Miller’s recently launched Web site outlining Mr. Bloomberg’s budget cuts by neighborhood is just another example of his flagrant spending. I am tired of hearing complaints about Mr. Bloomberg’s money supply when Mr. Miller’s solution of “Just put it on the taxpayer’s bill” is far more appalling.

ELIZABETH SMITH
Manhattan

Amnesty’s Impartiality

Todd Schwarz’s claims for Amnesty International’s “impartiality … unceasing opposition to human rights abuses … in all regions of the world, concerning all forms of government” [“U.S. Singled Out,” Letters, June 1, 2005] and his declaration that “challenging AI’s impartiality is misguided and ludicrous” are disingenuous, to say the least. Amnesty’s unacknowledged agenda has been apparent to observers for many years. I first became aware of it when I visited Amnesty’s London headquarters in 1982 and found the walls plastered with posters celebrating Che Guevara and the Sandinistas and denouncing U.S. “imperialism.”

I was there as an officer of the Afghanistan Relief Committee, trying to fathom Amnesty’s silence and seeming indifference to the massive atrocities committed in Afghanistan since the Moscow-backed communist takeover in 1978 and the subsequent Soviet invasion. I was hoping to persuade Amnesty to speak out. I failed: by 1982 the communist regimes had acknowledged (by posting names of the victims) more than 27,000 deaths at one Kabul prison alone, and millions of refugees had reported atrocities throughout the country. Yet since 1978, Amnesty had made only quiet inquiries about 13 individuals, most of them pre-communist officials in fact known to be dead.

And at London headquarters, the head of Amnesty’s regional division brushed aside my concern about Afghanistan (and, for that matter, Iran, where the Baha’a community and others were being cruelly persecuted), and informed me that he considered the most serious human rights violator in the region to be Pakistan, where there were, he estimated, at least 200 political prisoners.

By 1986, Amnesty’s silence on Afghanistan had so outraged the many European groups working to alleviate Afghan suffering that Doctors Without Borders and others threatened to go to the press and create a public scandal. Thereupon Amnesty hastily published a short summary report on Afghanistan by Anthony Hyman and obtained the release of several academic political prisoners – but after that fell silent again.

As the New York City area coordinator of Amnesty International, Mr. Schwarz says that the photographs from Abu Ghraib “engendered shock and still do.” But the misconduct there was investigated as soon as it became known to military authorities; even before it became public knowledge the culprits were being brought to justice and are being punished. If Amnesty is indeed impartial, why does it remain silent about the far more brutal torturers and executioners from many countries – some of whom live comfortably in Europe and the Americas today – who go unsanctioned and unpunished?

And now it seems that, after all, Amnesty issued its most recent condemnation of the U.S. “gulags” without hard evidence, on the basis of rumors, unconfirmed reports, speculation, and absent any witnesses. Amnesty is of course entitled to have a political position and to act selectively in accordance with it – but to claim it as a virtuous impartiality is to fly under false colors.

ROSANNE KLASS
Ms. Klass was a co-founder and vice president of the Afghanistan Relief Committee and the director of the Freedom House’s Afghanistan Information Center from 1981-1991.
Manhattan

Talk about “flimsy and baseless.” Not only is the comparison of Guantanamo Bay to the Gulag absurd, but using the criminal behavior of a few soldiers acting outside of U.S. military regulations at Guantanamo as a basis for the indictment of our government’s military actions in Iraq (which they’ve failed to recognize as ending decades of institutionalized human rights violations by Saddam Hussein’s regime) is about as logical as condemning the environmental movement because of the actions of a few eco-terrorists.

BRUCE M. COLWIN
Manhattan

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