Land of the Free?

Not to get too doom-and-gloomy here but a pair of reports seem to be telling us that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. About a month ago Freedom House issued a press release on their recent study of freedom of the press across the world. Care to guess where the US fell in? I'll give you a hint: we beat out Australia, France and the UK BUT Germany, Portugal, Ireland, New Zealand, and all of Scandanavia were ranked above us. In all 28 other countries were deemed to have a freer press then the United States. That's right, the country who's birth was midwived by Thomas Payne's Common Sense is number 29 in the world.

How did we fall from greatness? Freedom House explains in their press release:

While the United States remained one of the strongest performers in the survey, its numerical score declined due to a number of legal cases in which prosecutors sought to compel journalists to reveal sources or turn over notes or other material they had gathered in the course of investigations. Additionally, doubts concerning official influence over media content emerged with the disclosures that several political commentators received grants from federal agencies, and that the Bush administration had significantly increased the practice of distributing government-produced news segments.

Well, we're still considered "free" but it is clear that we've moved in the wrong direction and should expect better of ourselves.

But we're still the standard bearer of human rights in the world, right? Well...once again we see some "slippage". Amnesty International cites a decline of human rights worldwide and the US (perhaps, again, because we have so far to fall) is leading the charge. In a CNN.com article today, AI's Secretary General Irene Khan said in the foreword to their 2005 annual report,
"When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity." Additionally, she noted, "The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law."

According to the CNN.com article, the report declares, "U.S. President George W. Bush often said his country was founded on and dedicated to the cause of human dignity -- but there was a gulf between rhetoric and reality." A gulf between rhetoric and reality? Isn't that the motto of the neo-cons?