Freedom House, Rocked

SHORTLY after 9/11, a pair of scholars at Freedom House expressed their dismay with two leading liberal human-rights groups. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch seemed keener to denounce U.S. policies than to condemn terrorism, claimed Adrian Karatnycky and Arch Puddington. Amnesty International, for example, publicly opposed the extradition of Osama bin Laden to the United States-unless he could be guaranteed immunity from the death penalty. “To judge by what [the two groups] have said since September 11, they are far from recognizing the character of the enemy against which the civilized world now finds itself arrayed,” they wrote in Commentary. “Instead, at the core of their response has been a fear not of that enemy but of the United States.”

Karatnycky and Puddington weren’t loose cannons with weak links to Freedom House-they were the organization’s president and vice president for research, respectively. And Freedom House, which fought Communism tirelessly during the Cold War, didn’t exactly have a history of pulling its punches against left-wing radicalism. Yet Karatnycky and Puddington apparently had gone too far: The Freedom House board ordered them not to criticize the behavior of fellow human-rights activists. Their article, once displayed on the group’s website, was expunged. Moreover, anything they wrote in the future would require clearance from the board before publication. “They were gagged,” says a former Freedom House employee.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.

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SHORTLY after 9/11, a pair of scholars at Freedom House expressed their dismay with two leading liberal human-rights groups. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch seemed keener to denounce U.S. policies than to condemn terrorism, claimed Adrian Karatnycky and Arch Puddington. Amnesty International, for example, publicly opposed the extradition of Osama bin Laden to the United States-unless he could be guaranteed immunity from the death penalty. “To judge by what [the two groups] have said since September 11, they are far from recognizing the character of the enemy against which the civilized world now finds itself arrayed,” they wrote in Commentary. “Instead, at the core of their response has been a fear not of that enemy but of the United States.”

Karatnycky and Puddington weren’t loose cannons with weak links to Freedom House-they were the organization’s president and vice president for research, respectively. And Freedom House, which fought Communism tirelessly during the Cold War, didn’t exactly have a history of pulling its punches against left-wing radicalism. Yet Karatnycky and Puddington apparently had gone too far: The Freedom House board ordered them not to criticize the behavior of fellow human-rights activists. Their article, once displayed on the group’s website, was expunged. Moreover, anything they wrote in the future would require clearance from the board before publication. “They were gagged,” says a former Freedom House employee.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.