The editing is a little melodramatic, and the use of the word "massacre," while technically appropriate, does not quite convey what happened. 2,000 Afghans were not lined up and machine-gunned down; they died as a result of being stacked into unventilated steel containers for several hours.
Still, criminals are criminals, and if your neighbour were responsible for something like this - or even involved in it - you would not sympathize with him. The President of the United States should be held to at least that meagre moral standard.
Now before my right-leaning readers (and I apparently have them) roll their eyes and say "Yet another 'human rights NGO' dedicated to bashing the Bush admininstration" let me point out that PHR does not discriminate. The organization has ongoing campaigns to free the Alaei brothers, two physicians who were jailed in Iran without charge (but probably because of their HIV/AIDS advocacy work), and to provide a solution for Zimbabwe's "man-made" health care crisis.
Those problems, however, are not something that North Americans can have much of an impact upon; at the most, we can pressure our governments to pressure their governments. Moreover, they are not controversial - everybody agrees that the Alaei brothers should either be charged or released, and that Robert Mugabe has ruined his country's economy.
The great shame is that the criminality of White House staff, including the U.S. President is controversial; whether our government in Canada is Liberal or Conservative, both Ignatieff and Harper would gladly shake the hand of George W. Bush.
Any other serial killer would be treated differently.
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