Wow. I never thought I’d read something like this.
A senior official at Amnesty International quit the human rights group this month after raising an alarm over its ties to a former Guantanamo Bay detainee and what she describes as his pro-jihad group.
Gita Sahgal, who headed the gender unit at Amnesty’s office in London, said she was especially worried about Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners’ support for “jihad in self-defense” and radicals such as Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Yemeni cleric who is suspected of having ties to al Qaeda.
……Ms. Sahgal said the views of Mr. Begg and Cageprisoners do not trouble Amnesty’s senior leadership. “They have stated that the idea of jihad in self-defense is not antithetical to human rights; and have explained that they meant only the specific form of violent jihad that Moazzam Begg and others in Cageprisoners assert is the individual obligation of every Muslim,” she said in a statement on leaving Amnesty.
In a phone interview from London with The Washington Times, Ms. Sahgal said Mr. Begg had gained “enormous legitimacy” from his association with Amnesty.
Susanna Flood, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, said none of the information provided by Ms. Sahgal persuaded the group to cut its ties with Mr. Begg.
“Nothing that we have heard to date from Gita Sahgal makes us believe that we should have disowned the relationship we have had with Moazzam Begg,” Ms. Flood said.
Mr. Begg, a British citizen, was running a school for girls in Afghanistan during the Taliban regime. He was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and held as an “enemy combatant” at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, between 2003 and 2005.
……Before traveling to Afghanistan, Mr. Begg owned a bookshop, Maktabah al-Ansar in Birmingham, United Kingdom, where a best-selling author was Abdullah Azzam, a mentor of Osama bin Laden. The bookstore also published a jihad manual by Dhiren Barot, a convicted terrorist serving a life sentence in Britain.
Ms. Sahgal first raised a red flag about Amnesty’s ties to Mr. Begg and Cageprisoners in 2008.
“If, in spite of internal opposition, the senior leadership heard nothing to persuade them to cut the link, they seem to have no one who has any analysis of those linked to al Qaeda formations and the violence and discrimination that they are promoting. This is extremely disturbing,” she said.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/22/senior-official-quits-amnesty-international/
Amnesty International’s refusal to cut ties with these terrorists is not surprising. It’s one of the Dhimmi mouthpieces for jihad. Radical lawyer Lynn Stewart, who was convicted for aiding and abetting Shaikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, smuggled coded messages of Islamic violence to outside followers, as well as Amnesty International screeds into GITMO which portrayed America and its allies as waging a ‘campaign of torture against Muslims around the globe’:
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/the-al-qaeda-seven-lawyers-and-subversion-at-gitmo/
The organization has a reputation for supporting some real shitbags in the name of “human rights”.