Right report slams US war on terror

WASHINGTON -- The US-led war on terror has made the world more dangerous, rather than safer, and has prompted the most sustained erosion of human rights and international law in 50 years, Amnesty International said in an annual report released yesterday.

The report, which examined the state of human rights in 157 countries and alleged abuses committed by 177 armed groups, was followed by unusually scathing criticism of the Bush administration.

''It is clear that the way in which the war on terror is being conducted today is not making us safer. To put it as simply as possible, it is in fact a failure," William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said at a news conference. ''By relying on force alone, the US government has sacrificed one of its major weapons in the struggle against terrorism; namely, its own reputation as an exemplar of human rights."

The release of the report in Washington was accompanied by data indicating that terrorist acts have increased since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the advent of the war on terrorism. Jessica Eve Stern, a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University who has spent six years interviewing members of terrorist organizations, cited statistics indicating that the number of terrorist incidents increased from 2,303 in the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks to 4,422 in the two years after Sept. 11.

''There is no question in my mind that the war in Iraq increased terrorism, in part because the United States created a weak state unable to maintain a monopoly on the use of force," Stern said after the news conference.

Her statistics, included in a database maintained by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank, and funded by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, run contrary to a recent State Department report that indicated a slight decline in terrorist acts from last year. The State Department did not provide details about how the data were collected to a reporter who requested the information.

Amnesty International yesterday also said it had conducted a survey of terrorism specialists at leading universities and prominent think tanks and found that 80 percent do not think the war on terror has made the world safer.

The Amnesty report, which spanned 339 pages, said the US-led war on terror had eroded human rights worldwide and fueled what Schulz said amounted to a ''global street brawl" between governments and armed groups that had taken a heavy toll on civilians.

More than half -- 54 percent -- of the armed groups mentioned in the Amnesty report have killed civilians over the past four years, and 20 percent of the groups committed rape and other sexual violence, Amnesty said. Governments in 36 percent of the countries where armed groups were present used torture in their response, while 28 percent used incommunicado detention, Amnesty said.

''We must resist the backlash against human rights created by the single-minded pursuit of a global security doctrine that has deeply divided the world," says a message from Irene Khan, Amnesty secretary general, in the report.

The report included criticism of the Israeli military forces, who Amnesty said killed more than 600 Palestinians, including 100 children, last year in actions that the human rights group said ''constituted war crimes."

Cuba also was harshly criticized for jailing dozens of dissidents after what Amnesty called ''hasty and unfair" trials, and Russia and China also earned rebuke for human rights violations.

But the United States, embroiled in the Iraq prison-abuse scandal, seemed to be the focus of Amnesty's criticism. The group had warned US officials about abuse taking place in Iraqi prisons, including Abu Ghraib, as early as June 2003 but received no response, Amnesty officials said.

''The shameful prisoner abuse scandal, the unlawful killing of civilians by coalition troops in Iraq, the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and the Patriot Act's attack on civil rights protections demonstrate the Bush administration's blind pursuit of security at all costs," Schulz said in a statement released before the news conference.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan took issue with the report. When questioned about it, he told reporters that ''the war on terrorism has resulted in the liberation of 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the protection of their rights."