Amnesty International reports that the Bush administration has turned a blind eye to human rights abuses around the world in the name of national security.

Amnesty International’s report reveals that the United States, in the context of the war on terror, has been silent on human rights abuses committed by many of its new allies. In the Balochistan province of Pakistan, for example, Amnesty International has documented torture, possible extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings and disappearances. In January, Amnesty International issued an urgent action on behalf of Baloch political leader Akhtar Mengal, currently being held incommunicado in solitary confinement in Karachi without access to needed medical care. The administration has thus far failed to take any effective public action on his case.

In Egypt, the government has arrested and detained hundreds of activists affiliated with the banned-but-tolerated Muslim Brotherhood, generally for periods lasting several weeks. Yet Egypt remains one of the United States’ largest recipients of foreign assistance and a key landing pad for U.S.-sponsored “extraordinary renditions” of terror suspects. Amnesty International has reported that President Hosni Mubarak has expanded Egypt’s emergency laws to suppress freedom of speech and expression. Recently, an Egyptian student was sentenced to four years in prison for expressing his views on his blog. In 2006, the Egyptian government cracked down on NGOs.

The chaos in Iraq has spawned numerous human rights problems, but one group that has suffered particularly has been women. A study by the human rights group, Madre, claims that widespread gender-based violence has been largely overlooked. Iraqi women are enduring unprecedented levels of assault in the public sphere, “honor killings,” torture in detention, and other forms of gender-based violence. Women—in particular those who are perceived to pose a challenge to the political project of their attackers—have increasingly been targeted. The report documents the use of gender-based violence by Iraqi Islamists in the government, brought to power by the US overthrow of Iraq’s secular Ba’ath regime, and highlights the role of the United States in fomenting the human rights crisis confronting Iraqi women today.

Under US occupation, Iraqi women have endured a wave of gender-based violence, including widespread abductions, public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults, “honor killings,” domestic abuse, torture in detention, beheadings, shootings, and public hangings. Much of this violence is systematic—directed by the Islamist militias that mushroomed across Iraq after the US toppled the mostly secular Ba’ath regime.

Attacks on women began within weeks of the US invasion in 2003. US authorities did nothing to stop the violence, and soon the attacks spread.

Women have been systematically attacked by theocratic militias on both sides of the sectarian divide, but the most widespread violence has been committed by the Shiite militias affiliated with the US-backed government—the Badr Brigade and Mahdi Army. These groups have waged their campaign of terror against women with weapons, training, and money provided by the US under a policy called the “Salvador Option.”

Contrary to its rhetoric and its legal obligations under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the Bush Administration has refused to protect women’s human rights in Iraq. In fact, it has decisively traded women’s rights for cooperation from the Islamists whom it boosted to power.

Back in the U.S. President Bush has requested legislation creating a guest worker program for foreign workers to enter the U.S. to work on a temporary basis. But the United States already has a guestworker program for unskilled laborers — one that is largely hidden from view because the workers are typically socially and geographically isolated.

The program allowed about 121,000 guestworkers into the United States in 2005 — approximately 32,000 for agricultural work and another 89,000 for jobs in forestry, seafood processing, landscaping, construction and other non-agricultural industries.

These workers are bound to the employers who “import” them. If guestworkers complain about abuses, they face deportation, blacklisting or other retaliation. Instead, they are bound to the employers who “import” them. If guestworkers complain about abuses, they face deportation, blacklisting or other retaliation. Federal law and U.S. Department of Labor regulations provide some basic protections to H-2 guestworkers — but they exist mainly on paper. Government enforcement of their rights is almost non-existent. Private attorneys typically won’t take up their cause.

Guestworkers are routinely cheated out of wages; forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs; held virtually captive by employers or labor brokers who seize their documents; forced to live in squalid conditions; and,ndenied medical benefits for on-the-job injuries.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel remarked that, “This guestworker program’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center has extensively documented these abuses and argues that the guestworker must be completely overhauled before it is expanded.