Responses to KCCF Prisoner Abuses: Update

As frequent readers may know, I've been a bit critical of the apparent hypocricy of human rights groups who have protested in Seattle against suspected human rights abuses in Guantanamo while known abuses occur down the street from their protest site in the King County Jail.

Frequent readers may also know that I wanted to be fair about it so I sent messages to all those groups asking what their official position was in regards to prisoner abuse in the KCCF and if there were any planned demonstrations to defend the human rights of those prisoners as well.

Here are the responses I received from those organizations:

• ACLU of Washington - Replied that they only talk to established media outlets, not bloggers like me.
• NAACP of Seattle - No reply
• The Alliance for Justice - No Reply
• Human Rights First - No Reply
• Human Rights Watch - No Reply
• Amnesty International USA - No Reply
• The City of Seattle Government's Human Rights Committee - No Reply

Given the response I received at the "Close Guantanamo Protest" yesterday and the responses at various message boards and forums, it's pretty clear that if I were a suspected terrorist then I would deserve protection from cruel and unusual punishment, but since I was a suspected criminal who was later found innocent, I deserved to be tortured.

In other words, the human rights organizations like AI and the ACLU agree with what Mr. Sims and Mr. Holgeerts say; prisoners have no rights in the King County Jail.

So, we non-terrorist victims of torture are on our own, as one representative from Amnesty International said to me on another forum, "Go have your own protest." Which is an intersting thing to say to a victim of torture who has every reason to believe he would be abducted and tortured again for demonstrating against the government that tortured him by himself in public. "Go protest and get tortured again, we're not going to help."

It's just more injustice in Seattle, as usual... their silence confirms they believe as the banner up top reads, it's not human rights for all of us, just some of us.