On April 17, the UN Human Rights Commission narrowly passed a resolution calling for the

commission’s experts on torture, judicial independence and arbitrary detention to investigate

Cuba's jailing of 75 dissidents, sentenced last year for being paid U.S. agents.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque dismissed the resolution as “ridiculous,” and shortly

after the vote, the Cuban delegation said it had filed a resolution claiming widespread human rights abuses by the United States against prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

Just the kind of blame shifting you would expect from the Cuban dictatorship, right?

As it turns out, however, all the time U.S. officials were arm-twisting UN delegates to obtain a condemnation of Cuba, they knew full well that prisoners were being tortured at Camp Delta in Guantanamo, as well as in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan in November, 2001, up to 3,000 Taliban fighters who had surrendered to the Northern Alliance under the supervision of the U.S. military in Kunduz were packed into trucks without air or water to be taken to Shibarghan prison. They never arrived. When they shouted for air, gunmen fired into the trucks. Those who hadn’t died of asphyxiation, dehydration or gunshot wounds were unloaded in the desert and shot in the presence of U.S. Special Forces.

Special Forces are also the subject of a Pentagon inspector general investigation due to torture at a top-secret site near Baghdad’s airport known as BIF. According to officials quoted in an NBC report, it is the scene of the most egregious violations of the Geneva Conventions in all of Iraq. The prisoners there are hooded, kept in tiny dark cells, and Delta Force soldiers routinely drug prisoners, hold them under water to the point of drowning, or suffocate them.

Special Forces aren’t the only common factor in the growing abuse scandal. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey

Miller, who ran Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, was the one requesting approval from Donald Rumsfield of a broad range of interrogation techniques, two-thirds of which the defense secretary approved in April 2003. Between Aug. 31 and Sept. 9, 2003, General Miller was asked to look into interrogation and detention procedures in Iraq, and made suggestions on setting conditions for prisoner interrogation. Many of the abuses now being investigated at Abu Ghraib took place shortly afterward .

The U.S. Administration never made any pretense that the human rights of prisoners at Guantanamo would be respected. Within months of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales reportedly wrote President George W. Bush a memo about prisoners’ rights under the Geneva Convention.

“In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions,” according to Newsweek.

Camp Delta is a concentration camp set up beyond the reach of any law in January of 2002 with the sole purpose of interrogating prisoners, who can be held indefinitely. Last year, it had 660 males from 42 countries, including three children. They were presumed to be guilty of either terrorist acts or terrorist thoughts; or as General Miller put it, “Either they were involved in terrorist activity, or they supported terrorism.” The methods applied under General Miller have driven 31 to attempt suicide.

Honduras, which sponsored the resolution against Cuba, has created a novel way of dealing with its own prison overcrowding that has resulted from a crackdown on gangs: authorities have carried out two massacres of inmates in two years. On April 5 last year, 68 unarmed prisoners were shot, stabbed and burned to death in El Porvenir prison while trying to surrender to authorities. This year on May 18, at San Pedro Sula prison, 103 prisoners died in a fire when guards refused to unlock cells and allow prisoners to escape the flames. “They were laughing at us and saying, ‘Leave the bastards’,” said one survivor.

Another solution to the gang problem that Honduran authorities have come up with is to simply murder youth in the streets. The national press reports that some 2,300 young people have been executed since 1998, according to records.

The UN Commission on Human Rights was created to deal with gross, systematic violations, of which there is no shortage in the world. The resolution against Cuba, in light of what is happening today, is the height of hypocrisy and cynicism, and undermines the credibility of the commission.

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There is no margin for error about a monstrosity that was created for the alleged purpose of preventing wars by uniting the world against any aggressor, but proceeded to unite it against any victim of aggression. The expulsion of a charter member, the Republic of China [Taiwan]—an action forbidden by the U.N.'s own Charter—was a 'moment of truth,' a naked display of the United Nations' soul.

What was Red China's qualification for membership in the U.N.? The fact that her government seized power by force, and has maintained it for twenty-two years by terror. What disqualified Nationalist China [Taiwan]? The fact that she was a friend of the United States.

It was against the United States that all those beneficiaries of our foreign aid were voting at the U.N. It was hatred of the United States and the pleasure of spitting in our face that they were celebrating, as well as their liberation from morality—with savages, appropriately, doing jungle dances in the aisles. — AYN RAND (who ownz u )