Amnesty International goes too far in rights report

We have had serious reservations about the Patriot Act from the get-go, and have never accepted the premise that the president of the United States has the right to hold people indefinitely on his word and his alone. We think people ought to be able to buy or borrow books without government agents looking over their shoulders.
That said, Amnesty International, which released its annual report on human rights abuses a few weeks ago, went off the deep end.
Terrorism and attempts by governments to suppress it "have combined to produce the most sustained attack on human rights and international humanitarian law in 50 years" -- with the United States a principal culprit, said the report.
Really? The most sustained attack on human rights in half a century?
In other words, the United States is the worst thing to happen to human rights since Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. How old is the person who wrote that? Twenty-two, maybe? And has he (or she) ever read a history book?
Even though Stalin died in 1953, his murderous brand of repression still held sway over the Soviet empire and its captive nations for decades, although in diluted form in the latter years.
Benchmarks in mayhem
In the '50s and '60s, Mao Tse Tung cleansed China of its "class enemies," bringing death, imprisonment and impoverishment to millions. Hundreds of millions were deprived of basic human rights.
Lined up behind Chairman Mao are a parade of wannabes: Idi Amin, the Kims (father and son) in North Korea, Fidel Castro, to name a few. And there were the Khmer Rouge, genocidal leaders of Rwanda and Burundi, white supremacist regimes in Africa, ethnic cleansers in the Balkans, the Taliban in Afghanistan and hundreds of other movements of one stripe or another that devote their lives to stepping on someone else because of the color of their skin, their ethnic origin or their religion.
To hear Amnesty International tell it, all that pales in comparison to the United States and its efforts to protect itself from another attack from fanatics that could take thousands or tens of thousands of lives.
As we have said before, the United States must show balance in its efforts to curb terrorism. Freedom cannot be traded for security. But if Amnesty International expects to be taken seriously, it needs to bring more than a little balance to its criticism of U.S. efforts -- imperfect though they are -- to make the world a safer place.
The overwrought antiAmericanism found in the Amnesty International report calls into question the validity of everything else in its 339-page report and, potentially, everything it says for years to come.