This in the
Washington Post this morning.. gave me a good laugh. If he wants to meet with people whose rights have been violated, why doesn't he take a little trip to Gitmo???
more below...
At the end of a private Oval Office meeting this week, President Bush asked a North Korean defector to autograph his book recounting a decade in a North Korean prison camp.
"If Kim Jong Il knew I met you," Bush then asked, referring to the North Korean leader, "don't you think he'd hate this?" "The people in the concentration camps will applaud," the defector, Kang Chol Hwan, responded, according to two people in the room.
I wonder if the prisoners in Gitmo are applauding???
Bush lately has begun meeting personally with prominent dissidents to highlight human rights abuses in select countries, a powerfully symbolic yet potentially risky approach modeled on Ronald Reagan's sessions with Soviet dissidents during the Cold War. Besides Kang, Bush played host to a top government foe from Venezuela at the White House and met Russian human rights activists during a trip to Moscow last month. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met opposition leaders from the former Soviet republic of Belarus.
The sessions -- which come at a time when the Bush administration has itself come under international criticism for abuses at the prison facilities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere -- represent a personal follow-through on Bush's inaugural address in January, when he vowed to activists around the world that "we will stand with you" in battles against repression.
"He likes to talk to people who have experienced these things firsthand," said Michael J. Gerson, Bush's strategic policy adviser, who sat in on the Kang meeting Monday. "But there clearly is a signal here and a symbol that human rights is central to our approach, that there is a kind of moral concern."
A kind of moral concern?? Central to our approach? Who do these idiots think they are kidding?? They not only torture people on their own territory, at Gitmo, but outsource it too!!!
As Bush himself acknowledged to Kang, such meetings, although heartening to activists, will surely aggravate the leaders of repressive countries. In the North Korean case, it could complicate or even derail the latest attempts to coax Kim back to multinational negotiations over his nuclear weapons program. So far, Bush has focused his attentions largely on activists from countries with which he is already openly hostile, while those from allies such as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have not won Oval Office invitations.
So he is picking and choosing who he is going to call on torturing people..not himself, and surely not anyone he wants something from..or anyone who has a deep financial interest in the Bush family fortunes.