Even if they weren't a leftwing organization, I am not a big fan of reports by Human Rights Watch or any of these NGOs. These dry annual reports are put together haphazardly and add nothing we don't already know. They also have a false moral authority, particularly galling when you know what kind of people put these things together: usually pimple—faced straight—out—of—college losers who were nuisances back when they were on campus, too.

These reports have an immunization purpose: to blandly tell the wire—service version of what's going on in the world's dodgy dictatorships, to portray themselves as 'moral authorities' ... and then ... to file the report away and move onto their real agenda.

That agenda is to spend the entire year Blaming America First, and then move on to attacking Colombia and Israel, the other nations they hate. They file sniping, continuous press releases against them ...  all year long about whatever seems opportune.

By contrast, their Venezuela and Cuba coverage will be comparatively abbreviated, as Daniel notes here.

But when we charge them with bias for ignoring the world's obvious tyrants as they obsess about Abu Ghraib, they will point to their trash—compacted annual report repeating the wire reports on all the bad things Castro and Chavez did — and they did nothing about — as 'proof' that they are not biased. They have this all thought out.

These reports get worse, though, when they Blame America First. After all, these reports being assembled in free and unrepressed America, what better way to thank America for letting you assemble them than by attacking America?

Robert Mayer at Publius Pundit has an excellent analysis of this very dynamic against the U.S., citing Human Rights Watch's continuous obsession with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, against all the other atrocities going on in the world.

Their reports also speak in the most mealy—mouthed way possible. For some satisfaction, Alek Boyd has an 'edited' version of the Cuban section of yesterday's Human Rights Watch annual report, calling a spade a spade and exposing HRW's moral blindness, making the report a lot more interesting to read here.

A.M. Mora y Leon 01 19 06