Editorial‚  Daily News

Amnesty International may not be the most credible agency that documents so called human rights violations, but there is no reason at all for the organization to come up with trumped up allegations when it concerns the United States of America which along with other Western powers probably accounts for the major part of the organization’s funding.

So when Amnesty International states that the U.S government drone operation in Pakistan is illegal, and is tantamount to a war crime, that snatches the last fig leaf from Ms. Samantha Power who pretends the U.S is the world’s enforcer against ‘genocide’ and other war crimes.

The drone strikes are a war crime as Amnesty International categorically states, and therefore, inasmuch as they are a war crime they are also by being targeted against a specific type of people — a particular ethnicity if you will – an act of genocide.

The final word is therefore in on the issue of drone strikes; they are reprehensible, they are illegal — and they constitute egregious serial human rights abuses.

The news on Amnesty’s categorical verdict on human rights violations entailed in U.S drone attacks, comes in the wake of the breaking news also rather stunning, that the U.S surveillance apparatus was responsible for snooping in on at least 70 million telephone calls per day in France.

The French justifiably are livid because the numbers are simply mind boggling. It is probably true that the French themselves are guilty of some kind of snooping activity themselves; it is almost as if some of these Western governments can hardly help themselves.

But yet the scale of the NSA surveillance operation in France is mind numbing as it means that a good percentage of the French population came under surveillance each day. Estimates are that at the very least, there were two million calls that were listened in on each day in France, by U.S intelligence, all that being known as a result of the fact that Edward Snowden who worked for a U.S contractor was able to divulge the scope and the extent of the U.S spying operation.

The enormous hypocrisy of the Untied States in prosecuting so called human rights campaigns against countries such as Sri Lanka is seen in the sharpest relief when one considers the extent the U.S is a rouge state, perpetrating drone attacks that are tantamount to genocide — and also subverting friend and foe alike with surveillance programs that are too mind numbing to contemplate.

Is Amnesty International going to stand aside while the world’s most egregious violator of human rights tries to enforce a regimen of rights accountability on nations that repulsed terror attacks on their own soil?

The integrity of the United Nations system would be totally compromised if the declared perpetrators of war crimes in alien territories — those other than their own — tried to persecute countries which did their best to resist subversion from within. In other words, as per Amnesty International, if the U.S was guilty of war crimes abroad — how dare the U.S attempt to raise issues of alleged war crimes in countries that fought terror that was often subverting their territorial integrity from within, in what were also notably campaigns that were often funded from abroad?

The Unites States is so totally compromised by the drone strikes that the very idea that there are those such as Samantha Power asking that there be genocide accountability in other countries is rather risible.

The world is not the preserve of the U.S, and the kind of moral hypocrisy inherent in U.S actions in calling for human rights accountability on other countries is now being so keenly felt that persons such as Samantha Power who have made ‘genocide’ their apparent pet project are the laughing stock of the world. There is nobody that is going to countenance their pet projects of saving their own meager reputations by deflecting the gaze on other countries which have no violations to their name though as in Sri Lanka, there is much that can be cooked up against a country by those who want a narrative they hope will contrast badly with their own record of calumny.