...We are being asked by Irene Khan to believe that against the backdrop of forty post-war years of hideous violations of human rights throughout the USSR and its zone of influence, of the auto-genocide in Cambodia, the tortures practised for years in Chile and Argentina, and the 'disappearances' there, ethnic cleansing, torture and murder in former Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda in which nearly a million people died within a few short months, the systematic torture and murder of political opponents for more than two decades in Iraq, including mass slaughters of genocidal proportions against the Kurds and the Shia, the assault against the East Timorese by Indonesia with its thousands upon thousands of victims, the further thousands and thousands gruesomely killed in Algeria, the routine practice of torture in jails in Egypt, Syria, apartheid South Africa, present-day Zimbabwe, and Saudi Arabia, the murderous brutalities of Idi Amin in Uganda, the ferocities of the civil war continuing for years now in Sudan and the practice of slavery there, the nightmare treatment of the populace in the shadowlands of North Korea - we are asked to believe, against this blood-soaked backdrop, that legislative measures taken by America and other liberal democracies since September 2001 in the war against terrorism amount to a greater attack on human rights principles and values than anything we have seen in the last 50 years. The imbalance, the grotesque lack of proportion, in this judgement cries out for explanation itself, which explanation is perhaps to be found in the influence of political considerations which are outwith AI's proper (and irreplaceably important) remit...