Tim Anderson: We have to understand the role of Amnesty International, and also Human Rights Watch, which is a parallel path in terms of US politics. You know, in US politics there are two broad groups – one we could call liberals, associated with the Democrats, and the other we could call realists, associated with the Republicans.
And the organizations that talk about humanitarian intervention the most strongly are typically on the liberal side. So really we see a very strong alignment now between Amnesty International, which has strong links to the US State Department, and with the Democrats' side of politics.
They are now using President Trump as sort of a lightning rod for dissatisfaction with US policies. In fact, they said hardly anything about the Obama administration in previous eight years.
We should remember that they have not opposed any of the wars in the Middle East in last 15-16 years, actually they have joined with the US in creating the pretext for some of those wars.
Sputnik: The report highlights many of the issues that are happening in various countries, but offers no solution to them, why?
Tim Anderson: They have been very strong on the humanitarian interventions for the last 15 years in particular the arguments were to support the NATO attacks on Libya and support western attacks on Syria, and the arming of terrorist groups in Syria.
Amnesty has not said anything really against the US, the UK and France practice of arming irregular illegal terrorist groups against legitimate government of Syria.
They engaged Amnesty France engaged in supporting France International about the Gaddafi government siding African mercenaries to slaughter civilians. After Gaddafi was murdered, after Libya was destroyed as a state, the head of the French Amnesty said "we are wrong, sorry," as if nothing has happened. I mean the same person that provided Amnesty with their information on Libya went on to do the same thing in Syria.
We have to take Amnesty's declarations on these things with a grain of salt; they become very deeply embedded, in particular with regards to the US Administration.
Sputnik: The Amnesty report also criticized the Syrian government and Russia for bombing Eastern Ghouta. Why didn't the report mention that there are terrorists in Eastern Ghouta who use civilians as shields and who were responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians in Damascus?
Tim Anderson: It's entirely weaponizing the idea of Human Rights and the language of Human Rights, […] they are taking sides and they haven't criticized the use of proxy terrorist armies against Libya, Syria and Iraq.
[…] This doesn't reflect honest volunteers that join Amnesty, but this does reflect on the leadership of this basically undemocratic group.
The views and opinions expressed by Tim Anderson are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.