The London Evening Standard reports that Amnesty International criticized the UK dossier on Iraqi human rights abuses (which Schramm references just below this entry) by saying:

The human rights situation in Iraq is being invoked with unusual frequency by some western political leaders to justify military action. This selective attention to human rights is nothing but a cold and calculated manipulation of the work of human rights activists.

This quotation is from a statement by Irene Khan, Amnesty’s Secretary General, which you can view in whole here. Elsewhere on Amnesty’s page, the organization claims that the statement was actually made in September in response to other U.S. and UK documents which cited to Amnesty reports, and by implication was not meant to address the current dossier. Even so, the group did not appear to have stepped back from its previously stated position.

I heard it said following the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that the U.S. military had done more for women’s rights in a few weeks than the National Organization for Women had in its entire existence. Of course, we can already say that the U.S. military has done more for human rights than Amnesty International based on WWII--but we may soon be able to add achievements in Iraq to that auspicious list.