Human Rights Watch is not credible

HRW is clearly in the pocket of the U.S. government. From a recent tweet, which linked to the article Saudi Arabia: King’s Reform Agenda Unfulfilled (HRW),

“King Abdullah’s reign brought about marginal advances for women but failed to secure the fundamental rights of Saudi citizens to free expression, association, and assembly. […]”

King Abdullah's Twipitaph from HRW

The verb employed here is not accurate. You cannot fail at something without actually trying it. In the main tweet, they do it again, characterizing a purely imaginary “reform agenda” as “unfulfilled”.

I suppose this tweet could be just misconstrued as misguided and uninformed, but isn’t HRW supposed to be on top of exactly the type of regime led by King Abdullah for 14 years? What exactly are they for, if not that?

Let’s take a look at another twipitaph, this one for Hugo Chavez and linking to the article Venezuela: Chávez’s Authoritarian Legacy (HRW)

“After enacting a new constitution with ample human rights protections in 1999 – and surviving a short-lived coup d’état in 2002 – Chávez and his followers moved to concentrate power. They seized control of the Supreme Court and undercut the ability of journalists, human rights defenders, and other Venezuelans to exercise fundamental rights.”

This is a pretty harsh characterization of a regime that made forward strides in many, much more social ways.

Oh right, HRW is a propaganda arm of the U.S. government. So they write hagiographies of official U.S. allies that ignore all manner of anti-democratic policies while denouncing official enemies of the U.S. that emphasize all manner of slanderous and largely unfounded accusations.

The point is to make sure the reader gets the right impression.

Saudi Arabia good; Venezuela bad?

Not exactly.

The lesson instead is what the U.S. says, goes.

And the U.S. wants any country that even think of having an anti-capitalist and pro-socialist component to think again.

And HRW is here to help in whatever way it can.