Sheryl and I were falling asleep to CSPAN last night … [Should you be admitting this?-ed.]… watching Larry Cox, the executive director of Amnesty International, fulminate against the American administration in front of a sympathetic audience at Johns Hopkins. It was the same litany – Guantanamo, rendition, etc. He didn’t like the idea of our declaring terror prisoners “enemy combatants,” but didn’t seem to have another term to suggest. [The Wretched of the Earth? -ed. Mon Dieu…. you’ve read your Frantz Fanon!] He did, however, acknowledge that some states like Iran or Syria might be a little worse than the US in the way they treat their prisoners. But it was the role of America to be an example to the world. He could have added that it was vastly more enriching to the coffers of organizations like Amnesty to concentrate on US activities, but we all know that. The business of an NGO is NGO business.
Today I wake up in the real world. The Brits are telling us what it’s like to be captured by the Iranians. They were scared they were going to be shot. And well they should have been. Khomeini and Co. shot their opponents (and even many of their semi-allies) with regularity. I wonder if Cox is really aware of the history of the Islamic Regime. It would be for him a… pardon the expression… inconvenient truth.
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