I don’t see how your newspaper headlines are proof us tolerance. People will resist any attempt at authoritarianism, but whether or not it’s tolerated is another thing. Keep in mind that Chavez has most definitely shut down all those newspapers that have butted heads with him throughout the years. Why weren’t Betancourt’s comments in any other papers around the world? While she was definitely a high-profile prisoner, can she really be trusted as a reliable source of information?

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Human Rights Watch!
By Elizabeth Ferrari

As Americans, we operate from a position of privileged naivete, a kind of concrete operational thinking: we believe things are what they are called especially when it comes to public life. If someone reads us a bill called “No Child Left Behind”, we go ahead and assume it will help children. If an act named the “Help America Vote Act” passes, we expect that our elections just got better. The Heritage Foundation is surely an organization that has something to do with colonial hardiness and a can-do spirit. There is nothing more sad than we are when we learn, against all reason, that NCLB is a hijacking of our schools by privateers or that HAVA makes our elections vastly more vulnerable or that The Heritage Foundation is a right wing propaganda mill that is every day finding better ways to funnel our tax money into corporate wallets with a nakedness that Lady Godiva could only aspire to.

So, when we read in the American press that two officials from Human Rights Watch have been booted out of Venezuela, our first thought will not be, “what did they do”. It won’t be. We expect people who work for Human Rights Watch to, well, watch human rights. They have a web site and everything, just like Amnesty International and the International Red Cross. And maybe that kind of optimism, that positive expectation, has its value in these difficult days. But it’s misplaced if one is trying to understand what is going on in Venezuela, in Latin America and in our relationships with both as the Bush administration is shaping them. Or, misshaping them.

Human Rights Watch is not a merely group of concerned citizens monitoring human rights any more than the Heritage Foundation is a think tank that seeks to preserve traditional American values, despite their website’s claim. Their board and donors come from the bedrock of the US political power establishment. So, there’s that.

And then, there’s the matter of our intelligence services hanging out in NGOs. (I suppose, our overseas operatives can’t all work at the local embassy.) A friend of mine from El Salvador reminds me that during the war, a planeful of “humanitarian workers” was shot down and apparently, somehow it was full of US government operatives instead. It was shot down close to the capital and Rolando believes it was the government, not the guerillas, that shot it down. The government had had enough of the “Peace Corps” meddling with their affairs, allies or not. The few survivors of the crash were executed on the spot, it was later determined. Guerillas didn’t operate that close to San Salvador during the war, so this was a terrible case of a US client state sending back a message to Washington.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/I-Can-t-Believe-It-s-Not-H-by-Elizabeth-Ferrari-080922-709.html

typical McCain bs