Does Washington retain "the moral standing to lecture anybody about respect for human rights and international law?"

robert parry of consortium news has really been cranking it out lately - which is a very good thing... not only is he articulate, he also does extensive research and puts things together in an in-depth, yet fully understandable way that does not stint on context, a commodity sadly lacking in most journalistic endeavors...

The U.S. news media is experiencing a cognitive meltdown as it tries to hold onto the traditional view of the United States as a beacon for human rights while facing the new reality in which George W. Bush has plunged the nation into the dark arts of torture, assassination and “disappearances” more common in “death-squad” states.

Rarely has that disconnect been more clearly on display than on the Feb. 28 editorial page of the Washington Post.

The lead editorial, entitled “Homicide Unpunished,” criticizes the Bush administration for letting off U.S. interrogators implicated in murder and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the page’s final editorial hails the Bush administration for demanding that the United Nations purge its human rights organization of human rights violators.

That final editorial, entitled “Prodding the U.N.,” reads like something written from the not-so-distant past when the United States could credibly point fingers at nations with poor records for respecting civil liberties and human rights.

“The administration refused to accept a proposed structure for this new (U.N. human rights) body, reasonably fearing that it would protect human rights abusers rather than put pressure on them,” the Post said, listing those offending nations as Zimbabwe, Sudan, China and Cuba.

The Post added that Washington should confront allies, such as Pakistan and Egypt, and tell them “that relations with the United States will be affected if they resist a serious U.N. human rights body.”

Leaving aside the question of whether some of these U.S. allies have appreciably better human rights records than the countries on the Post’s list, the editorial also ignores the bigger elephant in the room, whether Washington retains the moral standing to lecture anybody about respect for human rights and international law.

dontcha get that weird feeling of cognitive dissonance just creeping up your spine even as you're reading this...?

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