World surprised at US human rights violations: Analyst

Press TV has conducted an interview with Norman Stockwell, a writer and radio host in Madison, about China releasing a report on a "terrible human rights record" in the United States, denouncing the country for its overseas drone attacks, state-sponsored spying, police brutality and gun crimes.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Some interesting issues raised by the Chinese cabinet pointing to the United States as being a major rights violator. Talk to us about this recent comment.  

Stockwell: Well I think this is not any particular new news. I think the United Nations in fact issued a very similar report just about a month ago citing something like 348 different issues that the United States needed to address. So you hear it coming now from the Chinese in response to US report but in fact it has come from other bodies around the world.

I think that we have a number of issues here in this country that have been coming to public awareness recently, particularly with a lot of the coverage of the killings of African American men in various cities across the country and the militarization of the police here in the United States. It is something that the rest of the world I think it is very surprised at in a lot of ways because we have so many deaths in this country due to gun violence and as we have seen recently, disproportionately the number of African Americans that are being killed by police in these confrontations is very high.  

Press TV: The United States considers itself it is the so-called defender of global human rights but the issues that were brought up in this Chinese report, the issue of police brutality, the CIA torture campaign against terror suspects and so on and so forth is usually ignored when the United States is making accusations against other countries?

Stockwell: Well I think the United States has a very proud history of democracy and the founding of this country was based on response to repression and so it is something that the United States does hold very dearly as it values but if you look at the practical application, if you look at what happens now in day to day life, what we are seeing is a greater disparity between rich and poor in this country and I think an increase in racial based violence in the United States that has been growing and it is only exacerbated by this militarization of the police force .

Now the other issues that you mentioned that were mentioned in the Chinese report and also in the UN report in May, the use of drone strikes, apparently extrajudicial killings by the United States that is killings of people without any kind of due process and also as if many other places were, we really need to do some self-examination here in this country and make sure that we live up to the values that we espouse.

AHK/NN

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