O'Reilly used phony evidence to defend Bush's handling of torture
allegations
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly used a recently released State Department
report on human rights around the world to argue that the Bush
administration is adequately addressing allegations of torture by U.S.
interrogators. In fact, the report did not examine alleged human rights
violations by the United States.
During his "Talking Points Memo" on the March 1 edition of Fox News'
The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly attacked the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) for filing a lawsuit against Secretary of Defense Donald
H. Rumsfeld over allegations that he approved illegal interrogation
tactics. O'Reilly opined that "violations of military law -- torture,
executions, false imprisonment -- are unacceptable and should be
vigorously prosecuted, and the Bush administration seems to be doing
that." Referring to the State Department report on human rights,
released on February 28, he added: "Just today, it [the administration]
criticized the interim government in Iraq for some rights violations."
The ACLU's lawsuit charges that Rumsfeld's "policies, patterns,
practices, derelictions of duty and command failures caused Plaintiffs'
[the detainees'] abuse." The complaint focuses exclusively on detainees
held in U.S. military custody. By contrast, the State Department report
did not examine the United States, including the actions of U.S.
military personnel. In the on-the-record briefing accompanying the
release of the report, Michael Kozak, acting assistant secretary for
democracy, human rights, and labor, specifically addressed why the
report did not examine U.S. human rights practices:
KOZAK: This, by the way, is the report on the human rights
situation in a country, what was going on as factually as we can relate
it in each country that's a member of the United Nations, save on the
United States. And the reason we don't do a report on ourselves is the
same reason you wouldn't write investigative reports about your own
finances or something; it wouldn't have any credibility. Someone else
needs to do that. It's not that we're against being scrutinized, and
indeed we are scrutinized by many other organizations -- Human Rights
Watch, Amnesty International. The Chinese do a report on us each year,
have told us that one is in the mail. But it's not -- it wouldn't make
sense for us to do this.
The section of the report about Iraq focuses exclusively on the
policies and practices of the Iraqi interim government; it covers only
"the human rights record of the Interim government from June 28 to
December 31" of 2004.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200503020009
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