We are all so pleased that the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) has announced, with the usual fanfare reserved in the liberal press for the activities of any left-wing dictator anywhere (like a Hugo Chavez seizing a US oil company, or a Kim Jong Il grabbing a US warship in international waters), the grave concerns about the missing seven dollar stamp on Dick Cheney's hunting license, and the gravitas involving Michael Brown's call to andy Card in the post-Katrina madness, that the activities at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center amount to violence, detainee violations and ill treatment.
We're also glad to find out that somewhere along the line the august term "rapporteur" has come into the effete parlance reserved for the elites at the UNCHR and is now used to describe the hackneyed hucksters pushing the views of those who think that the terrorists who inhabit what is professed to be "torture" cells at the Marine base are immediately deserving of the world's pity, are in need of instantaneous redress, require instant freedom, need a bevy of liberal lawyers schooled in Sharia law, require an outpouring of pity on a grand scale, are in need of better and less restrictive clothing, should be housed in a better climate in far more upscale housing, and should have their facilities closed as soon as possible and be flown home in first class accommodations in the finest of European manufactured airbus jumbo jets.
In turn, these rapporteurs, who are exalted enough throughout the world to design their own titles - like Paul Hunt, the self-styled 'Rapporteur on the right of individuals to attain the highest standard of physical and mental health' - dream up their own reports, which are then forwarded on to the UNCHR. and the current membership on the good old Commission is currently comprised of those vaunted civil rights paragons like China, Cuba, the Congo, Sudan, Eritrea and Zimbabwe among other such notables and stand-outs.
I'd love to see a relatively large percentage of the five "rapporteurs," who penned this latest scurrilous anti-US philippic, written in absentia, of course, and based on the "testimony" of other terrorists, wandering the country-side in "Buffalo" Bob Mugabe's Zimbabwe, chatting it up with the latest batch of farmers who've had their farms forcibly taken from them, seen their live stock slaughtered, their equipment and vehicles expropriated, their wealth stolen at gun point, their grain stocks arrogated, and if they escaped with their lives and had enough breath left in them to talk, to ask them about any similar torture or associated civil rights violations they might have glimpsed as they ran for their lives though the barren and defoliated countryside. But I think they're all gone now, the Commission has missed their chance for a convivial chat and Bob's in the clear with nary a bump in his Stalinist highway to madness.
Of course, Paul Hunt could turn a bit of attention to the Congo, one of his bosses on the UNCHR. His acknowledged expertise on physical and mental health could come in real handy what with the thousands showing up in the camps around Kamina - come on Paul, you remember Kamina - where absolutely no food and water are being provided for them and where it appears the blue berets from the UN seem to be conspicuously absent, which, in hindsight, may be a small relief for the refugees.
Then again, the one could point Ms. asma Jahangir, the 'Rapporteur on freedom of religion and belief' to, oh, say, Saudi arabia, Iran or Syria, for a bit of a look see at the ongoing persecution of Christians, who are routinely beheaded for trumped up crimes, stoned by mobs, lashed to death, laid on the ground with rocks piled on them or seem to disappear with alarming frequency. But this would require a work ethic beyond the rehash of trite and careworn material and might serve to unnerve other members of the Commission — a decided no-no. But Christians abroad, like Christians at home, deserve no better than they get because they should know better and should've stayed at home.
It is always better, like it's more useful for the liberal media, to get by with as little work as possible, to recycle the old mumbo jumbo, to deftly throw mud at Uncle Sam, to call the US the torturer, to cry for the freedom of the murderers and to claim that the enemies of freedom deserve better than three squares a day and a bunk, than it is to go into the field and to find real problems to observe and to try to solve. However places like Kamina and Katanga have little in the way of amenities, no Ritz-Carltons, no Ice Hotels, no household staffs to fawn over you, no telephones to ring with entrees to exclusive dinner parties, no calls for audiences with the magisterial, limited varieties of single malt Scotch, few designer boutiques for those little necessities, no spas or saunas except for the local weather, few security arrangements, spotty transportation, a negligible number of BMW's and the rare dry cleaning shop.
and following the release of the "report," the deftly prehensile or the primarily defensive, take your pick, Kofi annan now wants it both ways, announcing that although the "findings" of the "rapporteurs" of the highly suspect UN Human Rights Commission are, cough, "independent," and do not represent the very United Nations he now claims to represent, he does, however, publicly endorse the majority of their "findings," and tut-tuts at the US for our knavery.
ah, Kofi, you sly trickster. You're catching on to that old triangulation game, and realizing that although many of us may view you as an empty fraud in a suit, provide you with a place to hang your hat, when you wear one, freedom from parking fines when you're shopping uptown and toss you a majority of your legal largesse, you realize that while you'd better dissemble for us, you've also got to cotton up to your old pals on that joke shop of a Human Rights Commission, which you never did get around to reforming, since some of them hold your pension's fundability by their membership on the Security Council. But you do seem to recall that there were a few trouble spots that were never completely ironed out in China, Cuba, Nepal, the Congo, Eritrea, Syria, Libya and Zimbabwe, among its valued members.
ah, when questioned by the New York Sun about the report, however, the poor suffering Mr. annan, while still straddling the fence, made it quite clear that he only answers queries from newspapers which match his own high level of proper endeavours, chastised the paper for their brazenness in questioning him and refused to answer citing the paper's particular journalistic bent. Mr. annan, it appears, while enjoying the rapporteurs of pure fiction, disdains the rapporteurs of fact.
as for Guantanamo Bay? Who better to oversee the closing down of the detention center, as the result of the UN's gentle pressure, and the poor suffering and guilt ridden unfortunates' expatriation to their homelands in the correct means of conveyance but a genteel Guantanamo Bey, like Mr. annan himself.
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