Amnesty, HRW, PEN, et.al
Excerpts, editing by Carolyn Bennett
Bad Seed
Suzanne Nossel is the executive director of PEN American
Center (one of two, the other in LA, PEN centers located in the USA), the
largest of 144 centers belonging to International PEN, the worldwide
association of writers that defends those who are harassed, imprisoned and
killed for their views). From January 2, 2012 to January 11, 2013, Nossel was Executive
Director of Amnesty International USA.
Journalist and peace activist Chris
Hedges resigned from PEN in protest of Nossel’s appointment. Hedges claimed in
his resignation letter to PEN that ‘Nossel’s relentless championing of
preemptive war—which under international law is illegal—as a State Department
official along with her callous disregard for Israeli mistreatment of the
Palestinians and her refusal as a government official to denounce the use of
torture and use of extra-judicial killings, makes her utterly unfit to lead any
human rights organization, especially one that has global concerns’
Before her Amnesty tenure, Suzanne Nossel was Hillary
Clinton’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization
Affairs (2009) and former Chief Operating Officer of Human Rights Watch; Vice
President of Strategy and Operations for the Wall Street Journal (2005–2007); vice-president
of U.S. Business Development for Bertelsmann (2001–2005); a senior fellow at
the Century Foundation, the Center for American Progress, and the Council on
Foreign Relations.
Protested
A
|
wide variety of prominent
peace activists have doggedly protested Nossel’s positions on the government’s
treatment of U.S. dissidents, her appointments to Amnesty and PEN, and her military-use-of-force
positions as illegal and unjust U.S. aggression. Because of Nossel’s support for
the U.S. war on Afghanistan, Code Pink formed a campaign calling on Amnesty’s
board of directors to remove Nossel.
J
|
ournalist Chris Hedges was for many years a U.S./Middle East
correspondent and Bureau Chief. He had felt “the suffering of Palestinians
under Israeli occupation and the plight of people caught up in [U.S.] imperial
wars in countries such as Iraq” ─ these were not abstractions, he said, in an
email letter in April this year to the PEN American Center withdrawing his name
from its May roster of speakers at the PEN World Voices Festival and resigning
his membership from the organization. Hedges said in the letter, copied at
Truthdig: “I will not participate because of your decision to select Suzanne
Nossel as Executive Director of the PEN American Center.
This appointment makes a mockery of
PEN as a human rights organization and belittles the values PEN purports to
defend.
Nossel’s relentless championing of
preemptive war—which under international law is illegal—as a State Department
official, along with her callous disregard for Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians
and her refusal as a government official to denounce the use of torture and the
use of extra-judicial killings, makes her utterly unfit to lead any human
rights organization, especially one that has global concerns.
By appointing Nossel, PEN American
Center has unwittingly highlighted its own failure to defend and speak out for dissidents.…
Sources and notes
Nossel and PEN
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Nossel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEN_American_Center
“Chris Hedges Resigns from Human Rights Organization PEN, posted
April 1, 2013, http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/chris_hedges_resigns_from_human_rights_organization_pen_20130401/
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