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	Stand Up for Your Rights Forty years on, Amnesty International won’t give up the fight. By Nicholas Daniloff "Like Water on Stone: The Story of Amnesty International" by Jonathan Power (Northeastern University Press; Boston; 2001; 352 pages; $30) For sport, prison guards force convicts to battle each other gladiator-style. Youthful offenders, the retarded, the mentally ill are executed for serious crimes. Prisoners are brutalized despite laws that are supposed to protect their rights. This litany does not describe the surreal jungle of a Latin dictatorship. Nor does it blast China’s bid for the 2008 summer Olympics. These are violations that have taken place in contemporary America. At least that’s how Amnesty International sees it. The human-rights watchdog turns 40 this year and, judging by its criticism of the United States, shows little sign of flagging, according to author Jonathan Power. English journalist and former columnist for the International Herald Tribune, Power has done an admirable job of research in Like Water on Stone, just published by Northeastern University Press. He competently traces Amnesty’s rise, along with the origins of the systemic government abuse it seeks to change. Over the past four decades, the Nobel Prize–winning organization has closed 45,000 out of 47,000 cases, seen membership swell to more than a million, and encouraged the birth of a host of human-rights lobby groups around the world. But despite an increase in democracy building worldwide, Power asserts Amnesty’s mission is needed as much as ever. Its agenda, which keeps growing, today includes protecting children from military recruitment, upholding the rights of homosexuals, pursuing the trials of abusive leaders, making wartime rape a human-rights violation, pressuring countries to make political asylum more accessible, and seeking the universal abolition of the death penalty. On the latter score, Power cites the United States as the “loudest contradiction of all” in human rights, especially when it comes to the mentally deficient. He highlights the case of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged Arkansas man convicted of murder. “Rector’s comprehension of his imminent execution was so limited,” he writes, “that he left part of his last meal as he wanted to ‘save it for later.’” Governor Bill Clinton, then on the presidential campaign trail, confirmed Rector’s execution. Power chastises the United States, too, for blatant examples of police abuse of power. Disturbing incidents include the sodomizing of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in a Brooklyn, New York, squad house and matches pitting convict against convict organized by guards at California’s Corcoran State Prison. “The U.S.A. was founded in the name of democracy, political and legal equality, and individual freedom,” Amnesty states in a 1998 document. “However, despite its claims to international leadership in the field of human rights, it is failing to deliver the fundamental promise of human rights for all.” When Amnesty, the dream of an Englishman named Peter Benenson, was launched in 1961, it had a limited mandate. A Catholic lawyer of Jewish descent, Benenson sought simply to offer hope to nonviolent prisoners of conscience by “adopting” them and launching vigorous letter-writing campaigns for their release. He emblazoned the organization’s letterhead with the now-familiar burning candle wrapped in barbed wire. His mission, greeted with skepticism, was immediately dubbed “one of the greater lunacies of our time.” But prisoners deprived of contact with the outside world would soon tell a different story. “Suddenly, I felt as if the sweat drops all over my body were drops from a cool, comforting shower,” one prisoner recalled after receiving his first letter from Amnesty. “The cell was no longer dark and suffocating.” (How well I sympathize with this prisoner’s reaction. In 1986, I was detained in Moscow on false charges of espionage, and held in prison and under house arrest for six weeks.) Power, who comes across as a thoughtful booster for Amnesty, begins the book with an account of his friendship with one of the group’s more renowned adopted prisoners—Nigerian general Olusegun Obasanjo. Now president of Nigeria, Obasanjo inspires the title of the book with his comparison of Amnesty’s work to water dripping on stone: slow, relentless, penetrating. Subsequent sections of the book examine how Amnesty dealt with the Guatemalan “disappearances,” the killing of children in Emperor Bokassa’s Central African Republic, the Augusto Pinochet case, British abuses in Northern Ireland, political terror in China, and police brutality and incarceration in America. Amnesty is not above criticism itself, however, as Power’s chapter on the Baader-Meinhof gang demonstrates. Amnesty policy forbids local chapters from getting involved in cases on their own territory that are related to their own government. Despite this prohibition, in the mid-1970s German Amnesty was drawn into the case of a guerrilla group called the Red Army faction. After several violent episodes, Red Army leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof landed in jail, where, despite solitary confinement, they continued to pass orders to the outside with shocking success, resulting in kidnapping and hijacking. At the time, much of Germany was in social turmoil, and sympathy for the group ran high, especially when the gang went on hunger strikes. Members of German Amnesty lobbied London to intervene. Even as Amnesty got involved, the gang’s violent ways continued unabated. Amnesty was accused of playing favorites, promoting a loose prison atmosphere that allowed the gang to thrive. Though this wouldn’t be the only time Amnesty was accused of making a situation worse, it was one of the few times the evidence seemed irrefutable. Power also examines an internal rift between Benenson and Amnesty leadership. In 1967, Benenson accused Amnesty of collusion with the British Foreign Office on a terrorist matter in Aden, a British colony. He tried to move Amnesty’s headquarters out of London to a more neutral country, such as Switzerland, but found no support. He resigned as president, then reversed his resignation in an attempt to expose the internal corruption. Benenson was later ousted, his behavior and financial reputation called into question. Regrettably, the reader isn’t given this information, or a nuts-and-bolts history of Amnesty, until chapter four, more than a third of the way into the text. In other, smaller matters of narrative clarity, Power is prone to shift historical and geographic perspectives unexpectedly and sometimes assumes more understanding on the reader’s part than is likely to be the case. Some descriptions of atrocities are so graphic they threaten to overshadow the positive role Amnesty played. But these are, for the most part, minor faults. Power captures the state of affairs in a wide variety of conditions around the globe and describes the important bridges Amnesty has patiently helped build between citizens and their rulers. Outgoing Amnesty president Pierre Sane has said, “We can’t call for intervention, or the use of force. All we can do is to try and shame the actors, convince them that their own purpose would be better fulfilled by an adherence to international law.” As Jonathan Power concludes, “Amnesty may not have changed the world, but it has not left it as it found it, either.” Nicholas Daniloff is a professor in the School of Journalism. Fifteen years ago, while working as a magazine correspondent in Moscow, he was imprisoned by the KGB for six weeks on false charges of espionage. "Final Confession" By Brian Wallace and Bill Crowley Northeastern University Press, 2000 With a plot so compelling that film studio Twentieth Century Fox recently snatched up the movie rights, Final Confession recounts the life and times of Boston-area wise guy Phil Cresta, architect of the infamous 1968 Brinks truck heist. Brian Wallace and retired Boston Police detective Bill Crowley grant an inside look at the notorious robberies and scams that ultimately landed Cresta on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. In a diary-like narrative, this true-crime book follows Cresta and cronies as they drain parking meters, empty vaults, and rob rare-coin dealers and jewelers. What emerges is a riveting, often humorous portrait of a meticulous career criminal who once offered James “Whitey” Bulger some advice on evading capture. Be sure to read the book before you see the movie.