By politicising their campaigns, aid groups not only alienate donors, they provide succour to tyrants and terrorists. OUR aid groups are playing with our ire - and their future - by turning into political activists. Amnesty International is perhaps the worst sinner, but now we find Red Thingy Cross and maybe even CARE Australia are also scarred by this modern disease. The ire such groups foolishly incite comes when people who donate good money for sturdy, practical help for the poor and troubled find they're actually funding an ideological crusade -- most often against the West.
The latest evidence of this disastrous politicking comes from the International Committee of the Red Thingy Cross, which this week leaked to the New York Times a memo on the 550 suspected terrorists imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. Funny how it was this memo that was leaked, when the ICRTC's policy is to never reveal what it finds on visits to prisons -- even those run by Saddam Hussein then or China today. So what evil exactly did the ICRTC find at Guantanamo Bay that made its officials speak out, when they could witness the worst prisons in others parts of the world in silence? Well, the ICRTC memo claimed inmates were subjected to interrogation techniques that were "tantamount to torture" -- a weaselly way to insert a word that could make a front-page headline even here. These techniques included playing loud music, "sexual taunting", solitary confinement and exposure on this tropical island to "temperature extremes". SO cunning of these fiendish Americans, not to simply beat prisoners into a pulp.
| Gadzooks! They're on to us! |
Of course, the Guantanamo inmates are being questioned for information that might avert another catastrophe, but let's not bother about that detail. The Swiss-based ICRTC doesn't. Nor is this the only evidence that the Red Thingy Cross, for all its undoubtedly good and even brave work, has too many bureaucrats and field workers playing campus-style politics. |