But don't worry bro, I'll make sure you're passed on the left hand side (to honour your socialist values).
Just read an indeapth analysis of the HRW Report "A Decade Under Chavez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela" (9/21/2008 hrw.org), and it is now obvious that my suspision of them being pawns of the US govmnt is true. There's nothing that the Matrix doesn't touch and infect.
The article starts of with putting a light on the background of the reports director José Miguel Vivanco:
History of the HRW:
This is how HRW functions as a propaganda tool of the US when it comes to Venezuela:
The HRW history in Venezuela:
In detail:
The political discrimination claims:
continued below
Just read an indeapth analysis of the HRW Report "A Decade Under Chavez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela" (9/21/2008 hrw.org), and it is now obvious that my suspision of them being pawns of the US govmnt is true. There's nothing that the Matrix doesn't touch and infect.
The same NED who has toghether with USAID and various organizations like the IRI taken over the role to overthrow foreign governments without a US troops invasion.Human Rights Watch, a US-based group claiming to be a non-governmental organization, but which is in fact funded by government-linked quasi-private foundations and a Congressional funded political propaganda organization, the National Endowment for Democracy
A close reading of the "Report" reveals an astonishing number of blatant falsifications and outright fabrications, glaring deletions of essential facts, deliberate omissions of key contextual and comparative considerations and especially a cover-up of systematic long-term, large-scale security threats to Venezuelan democracy posed by Washington.
The article starts of with putting a light on the background of the reports director José Miguel Vivanco:
José Miguel Vivanco served as a diplomatic functionary under the bloody Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet between 1986-1989, serving no less as the butcher's rabid apologist before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. His behavior was particularly egregious during the regime's brutal repression of a mass popular uprising in the squatter settlements of Santiago in 1986-1987. With the return of electoral politics (democracy) in Chile, Vivanco took off to Washington where he set up his own NGO, the Center for Justice and International Law, disguising his right-wing affinities and passing himself off as a ‘human rights' advocate. In 1994 he was recruited by former US federal prosecutor, Kenneth Roth, to head up the ‘Americas Division' of Human Rights Watch.
History of the HRW:
HRW demonstrated a real capacity to provide a ‘human rights' gloss to President Clinton's policy of ‘humanitarian imperialism'. Roth promoted and supported Clinton's two-month bombing, destruction and dismemberment of Yugoslavia. HRW covered up the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Kosovo by the notorious Albanian terrorists and gangsters of the Kosovo Liberation Army and the unprecedented brutal transfer of over 200,000 ethnic Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia. HRW backed Clinton's sanctions against Iraq leading to the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children. Nowhere did the word ‘genocide' ever appear in reference to the US Administrations massive destruction of Iraq causing hundreds of thousands of premature deaths.
HRW supported the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan where Kenneth Roth advised the US generals on how to secure the colonial occupation by avoiding massive civilian deaths. In words and deeds, HRW has played an insidious role as backer and adviser of US imperial intervention, providing the humanitarian ideological cover while issuing harmless and inconsequential reports criticizing ‘ineffective' excesses, which ‘undermine' imperial dominance.
HRW most notorious intervention was its claim that Israel's murderous destruction of the Palestinian city of Jenin was ‘not genocidal' and thus provided the key argument for the US and Israeli blocking of a UN humanitarian mission and investigative report. As in all of its ‘research' their report was deeply colored by selective interviews and observations which understated the brutality and killings of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli state - even while the fanatics who run the major pro-Israel organizations accused HRW of bias for even mentioning a single murdered Palestinian.
This is how HRW functions as a propaganda tool of the US when it comes to Venezuela:
There is no careful, straightforward presentation of the government's elaboration and justification for its actions, no academic critiques of the anti-democratic actions of anti-Chavez mass media; no discussion of the numerous journalists' accounts which expose systematic US intervention. The Report simply records and reproduces uncritically the claims, arguments and charges of the principle publicists of the opposition while dismissing out of hand any documented counter-claims. In other words, Vivanco and company act as lawyers for the opposition rather than as serious and objective investigators pursuing a balanced and convincing evaluation of the status of democracy in Venezuela.
The HRW history in Venezuela:
The political propaganda intent of Vivanco-HRW is evident in the timing of their ‘investigations' and the publication of their propaganda screeds. Each and every previous HRW hostile ‘report' has been publicized just prior to major conflicts threatening Venezuelan democratic institutions. In February 2002, barely two months before the US backed military coup against Chavez, HRW joined the chorus of coup planners in condemning the Chavez regimes for undermining the ‘separation of powers' and calling for the intervention of the Organization of American States.
Following the military coup in 2002 and the bosses' lockout of 2003, HRW published a report condemning efforts to impose constitutional constraints on the mass media's direct involvement in promoting violent actions by opposition groups or terrorists. President Chavez' "Law for Social Responsibility in Radio and Television" provided greater constitutional guarantee for freedom of speech than most Western European capitalist democracies and was far less restrictive than the measures approved and implemented in Bush's US Patriot Act, which HRW has never challenged, let alone mounted any campaign against
Just prior to the political referenda in 2004 and 2007, HRW issued further propaganda broadsides which were almost identical in wording to the opposition (in fact HRW ‘Reports' were widely published and circulated by all the leading opposition mass media). HRW defended the ‘right' of the US National Endowment for Democracy to pour millions of dollars to fund opposition ‘NGO's', such as SUMATE, accusing the Chavez government of undermining ‘civil society' organizations. Needless to say, similar activity in the US by an NGO on behalf of any foreign government (with the unique exception of Israel) would require the NGO to register as a foreign agent under very strict US Federal laws; failure to do so would lead to federal prosecution and a jail term of up to 5 years.
In detail:
The HRW Report on Venezuela focuses on five areas of politics and society to make its case that democracy in Venezuela is being undermined by the Presidency of Hugo Chavez: political discrimination, the courts, the media, organized labor and civil society.
The political discrimination claims:
The political discrimination refutes:1.Political Discrimination
*The Report charges that the government has fired and blacklisted political opponents from some state agencies and from the national oil company.
*Citizen access to social programs is denied based on their political opinions.
*There is discrimination against media outlets, labor unions and civil society in response to legitimate criticism or political activity.
No sane, competent, constitutional lawyer, international human rights lawyer, UN commissioner or the International Court official considered the action of the Venezuelan government in this matter [the firing if the PDVSA senior executives] to constitute ‘political discrimination'. Even the US State Department, at that time, did not object to the firing of their allies engaged in economic sabotage. HRW, on the other hand, is more Pope than the Pope.
Every international organization involved in assessing and developing large social programs, including UNESCO, the World Health Organization and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, have praised the extent and quality of the coverage of the social programs instituted by the Chavez government covering 60% of the population and almost 100% of the poor. Since approximately between 20-30% of the poor still vote for the opposition, it is clear that needy citizens critical of the government have equal access to social programs, including food subsidies, free health care and education.
The opposition controls 95% of the newspapers, a majority of the television and radio outlets and frequencies, with the widest national circulation. The government has ‘broken' the ruling class monopoly on information by funding two major TV stations and a growing number of community based radio stations.
/...../
The entire HRW ‘Report' is based on complaints from the authoritarian CTV(Confederation of Venezuelan Workers/Confederacion de Trabajadores de Venezuela) bureaucrats who have lost most of their supporters and are discredited because of their role in supporting the bloody April 2002 coup. They are universally disdained; militant workers have not forgotten their corruption and gangster tactics when they collaborated with previous rightwing regimes and employers.
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