The US government loves to pontificate to other countries about human rights and how they should improve their human rights record and increase democracy. As Ivan Eland writes:

Don’t get me wrong: the proliferation of democracy and human rights in the world is a great thing, but the arrogant belief that America should be the aggressive, high-profile guardian of the spread of such laudable beliefs is not. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the attack on Libya, all done at least ostensibly to usher in democracy and human rights, have further sullied the already shaky reputation of America’s forceful push for such causes around the world. In practice, the divergence of U.S. foreign policy from rhetoric promoting democracy and human rights makes other nations and peoples suspicious of American intentions.
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Even in the cases in which the U.S. was genuinely interested in promoting democracy and human rights, foreign countries that meddle constantly in other nations’ business usually don’t get the benefit of the doubt among the locals. And who can blame them? America has restrictions against foreign involvement in U.S. elections, but that doesn’t stop the United States from funding political groups in Russia and other countries. Such hypocrisy doesn’t do America, the local political groups, or the promotion of democracy and human rights any favors.

But it looks like what other countries are doing is following America’s actions rather than its words. For example, here is a report on Americans who were tortured in Mexico, in a manner similar to the way prisoners are treated in Guantanamo and other US military detention centers around the world.

The Americans offer a different account. They say the military planted the marijuana in their vehicle after stopping them. The men say they were then taken to the military base, where they were beaten, subjected to electric shocks and threatened with death.
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More than 5,000 complaints from Mexicans have been filed to Mexico’s human rights commission against the military, many of them alleging torture.

Nik Steinberg of Human Rights Watch says Mr. Huckabee’s account of torture is similar to these. “What Huckabee went through on the military base—electric shocks, beatings, death threats—fits a pattern of torture that we’ve documented in scores of cases across Mexico,” he said.

The decision also raised concerns by officials in Texas concerned for the safety of locals who cross the border. “These abuses are something that at the local level everybody knows is happening,” said Susie Byrd, an El Paso City Councilwoman.

“We’ve been struggling to get our congressmen and federal government to recognize the human rights abuses and act.”

In another case, you may also recall the three Americans who were held in Iran after crossing into it illegally. Glenn Greenwald picked up on an item in the press conference following the release of the two remaining people that the rest of the media downplayed. Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal said that the solitary confinement they endured was the worst part of their ordeal and added,

In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay; they’d remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world; and conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S.

We do not believe that such human rights violation on the part of our government justify what has been done to us: not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments – including the government of Iran – to act in kind. [My emphasis-MS]

Greenwald says that the US media played up the US-is-good/Iran-is-bad narrative while ignoring those parts of the press conference that went against it, such as the following passage.

Fattal then expressed “great thanks to world leaders and individuals” who worked for their release, including Hugo Chavez, the governments of Turkey and Brazil, Sean Penn, Noam Chomsky, Mohammad Ali, Cindy Sheehan, Desmond Tutu, as well as Muslims from around the world and “elements within the Iranian government,” as well as U.S. officials.

Unsurprisingly, one searches in vain for the inclusion of these facts and remarks in American media accounts of their release and subsequent press conference.

This pattern of reporting only part of a story in order to promote a particular point of view is standard practice in the media, since it enables them to serve as obedient servants of their government while avoiding the kinds of outright lies that are easier to expose. As Greenwald says:

An actual watchdog press is, first and foremost, eager to expose the corruption and wrongdoing of their own government. By contrast, a propaganda establishment press is eager to suppress that, and there is no better way of doing so than by obsessing on the sins of nations on the other side of the world while ignoring the ones at home. If only establishment media outlets displayed a fraction of the bravery and integrity of Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, who had a good excuse to focus exclusively on Iran’s sins but — a mere few days after being released from a horrible, unjust ordeal — chose instead to present the full picture.

The deplorable way that the US treats people in its ‘war on terror’ seems to be the same as those adopted by authoritarian regimes for the treatment of their own prisoners. Fortunately for Bauer and Fattal, Iran treated the US prisoners better than the US treats Iranian ones, as this cartoon by Matt Bors suggests.