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This week, two aid workers from Mèdecins sans Frontières (MSF), an international humanitarian organization that provides emergency medical assistance around the globe, were arrested in Sudan.

Paul Foreman, the head of MSF Holland, was arrested on Monday in response to a report his agency released in March that said 500 rapes had occurred in Darfur over a four month period. MSF Holland, whose doctors are working in the Darfur region of Sudan, collected medical evidence that detailed the rapes, which are associated with the crisis that has forced more than 2 million people from their homes and killed tens of thousands in the region.

On Tuesday, a second MSF worker was arrested—Vince Hoedt, the Darfur coordinator for MSF Holland. The two have been accused of spying, publishing false reports and undermining Sudanese society.

The arrest of humanitarian workers responsible for documenting atrocities is a proverbial case of ‘killing the messenger’ when the message makes the powers-that-be look bad.

Politically motivated attacks on international humanitarian organizations are not confined to non-Western governments that lack the moniker of ‘democracy’, though.

An interesting parallel this week arose when the Bush administration ganged up to verbally lambaste Amnesty International’s 2005 report that condemned the lackluster human rights record by the United States in current years at its detention facilities, such as Guantanamo Bay.

In releasing the report last week, the director of Amnesty International (AI), Irene Khan, said, “Guantanamo has become the gulag our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law.

“If Guantanamo evokes images of Soviet repression, ‘ghost detainees’ – or the incommunicado detention of unregistered detainees - bring back the practice of ‘disappearances’ so popular with Latin American dictators in the past.

“According to US official sources there could be over 100 ghost detainees held by the US. In 2004 thousands of people were held by the US in Iraq, hundreds in Afghanistan and undisclosed numbers in undisclosed locations.

“AI is calling on the US Administration to ‘close Guantanamo and disclose the rest.’ What we mean by this is: either release the prisoners or charge and prosecute them with due process.”

Bush fired back this Tuesday during a press conference where he was asked about the AI report.

“I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd. It's an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that is — promotes freedom around the world. When there's accusations made about certain actions by our people, they're fully investigated in a transparent way. It's just an absurd allegation,” said Bush.

Bush’s remarks were followed up by further attacks on AI by Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

It’s a poetic coincidence that the Bush administration’s attack on AI occurred the same week as the Sudanese government’s actions against MSF. In a democratic nation like the US, rhetorical attacks are the equivalent of outright arrests. The soft power of Orwellian rhetoric replaces the hard power of brute police action. The aim in both cases is to beat down the messenger in an effort to remove the message from public view.

Non-governmental organizations like AI and MSF are crucial checks to governmental abuse of power. Such abuses, unfortunately, are not simply confined to ‘non-democratic’ governments. It is time for the Bush administration to stop hiding behind its rhetoric and reverse the erosion of human rights it has perpetuated in its putative ‘war on terror.’ The Bush administration is blinded by its ends-justifies-the-means mentality and would do more for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ around the world if it recognized the concepts as more than words and actually held them up as standards to live by.

As AI said in response to Bush’s attack, "If President Bush and his administration are serious about freedom and human dignity they should recommit to the rule of law and human rights."

Amnesty International continues to call on the US administration to:

• end all secret and incommunicado detentions;
• grant the International Committee of the Red Cross full access to all detainees including those held in secret locations;
• ensure recourse to the law for all detainees;
• establish a full independent commission of inquiry into all allegations of torture, ill-treatment, arbitrary detentions and ‘disappearances’;
• bring to justice anyone responsible for authorizing or committing human rights violations

Until this is done, Bush’s claim to ‘transparency’ is but an empty hortatory device that lacks substance and credibility.