"The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times," claims Irene Khan, the secretary general of Amnesty International. If Guantanamo Bay is the Gulag of our times, what does this say about our times? We know of 476 camps in the Soviet Gulag; there is but one Guantanamo Bay. The Gulag imprisoned about 18 million people over the course of several decades; Guantanamo Bay has housed fewer than 1,000 prisoners since the start of the war on terrorism. It currently holds less than 550 people. Historians place the number of deaths in the Soviet Gulag in the millions; treatment of the inmates at Guantanamo Bay has led to zero prisoner deaths. "When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights," Amnesty International's Khan maintains, "it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity." A stronger case can be made that when the globe's most famous human rights organization makes such over-the-top statements as the Guantanamo/Gulag comparison, it grants a license to others to lie with impunity and audacity.

Amnesty International does some good work. They should see to it that their officers do not shoot off their mouths like this. It harms their credibility and the appearance that they know what they're doing.

Apparently an estimated 50 million people have died at Gitmo. Because that's the most accepted number for Soviet Gulags.

Strange, never heard a peep out of them when a terrorist cuts a head off some non-combatants. That's ok, I guess, because the headless ones are primarily Americans.

Why don’t we just give up? Pull out of every place that we have troops; Close our bases; Disband our military; deep 6 our weaponry; Open our borders.

Why not? According to many in this country and the rest of the World, we are unworthy animals with no sense of right or wrong.

Why go on when we can rely on the rest of humanity to lead us and show us a better way?

asdf,

Don't despair. Don't fall victim to doubt. This is exactly the effect that the Left is trying to have; to demoralize us, to get us to retreat.

Webster,

That's not "shoot[ing] off their mouths", this is a report, according to the AP.

Somebody needs to force these people to read "The Gulag Archipelago", "Kolyma Tales", and "Koba the Dread".

Sea King,
Would you say that this is deliberate misinformation, as it is the substance of a report, or the product of very limited thought?

By the way, Ben-T, was that you commenting on Huff blog and picking on poor Phil Angelides?

Yeah web that's me.

This appears to be a deliberate attempt by Amnesty International to mislead. They are able to get away with using the term "Gulag" to describe Guantanamo Bay because everyone knows the "Gulag" was bad and our dumbed-down education system means allot of people just don't understand Guantanamo Bay and the Gulags are not comparable.

The foreword refers to the USA as "the unrivaled political, military and economic hyper-power." This piece of propaganda appears to have been copied straight from our enemies. The USA is no "hyper-power." The USA depends on others for the raw materials, mainly oil, that make its economy go. These others often do not have American interests at heart. Because of this the USA is checked both economically and politically. Militarilly and politically the USA is checked by China's huge numbers and Russia's huge nuclear arsenal.

To put this in perspective, at its height the British Empire controlled something like 33% of the earth's pouplation and about 25% of its land. The USA only controls about 5% of the world's population and about the same percentage of its land. This country is a very powerful country but it is no "hyper-power." The Bush administration and the United States government really must do something to counteract this propaganda. Allowing this propaganda to run unchecked creates to basic problems: 1.)It is being used by our enemies to incite hatred against us. 2.) It may delude uninformed Americans into thinking this country is more powerful than it really is. If people think the country is more powerful than it really is, it could cause people not to take threats to national security as seriously as they should.

The foreword mentions Israel by name as a violator of human rights but it does not condmen the dispicable Palestinian practice of using suicide bombers to attack Israeli civilians. Until they condemn this practice, they forfeit their right to be taken seriously as a human rights organization.

Buried in the foreword is a mention of Darfur and at least the report does point out that no action was taken because of Chinese oil interests and Russian military sales. Many people really have died in Darfur. As Dan points out, no one has died in Guantanamo Bay. Darfur should have been the major focus of the report. This another reason why the UN, as it is currently constituted, cannot be effective. Major human rights violators, such as Russia and China, dominate its agenda.

What do you expect from yet another left win NGO. It is reports like this that convince me that groups like AI have lost all credability (and sanity).

They just make themselves look stupid and they give me yet another reason to tell their workers to go away when they hit me up for money.

Jason

B.Poster,
that was a great post.

Flynn has made a point worth noting. Comparing Gitmo to the Gulag can lead to real human rights violations by others who have proved capable of such atrocities. These groups will inevitably say "America does it". We need to hold Amnesty International accountable. We need to speak louder than they do. We know how the left reacts to the smallest possiblity of a conservative "blunder". The comments by AI are no small blunder. Keep blogging and speak up!!! Defend America with common sense and the truth.

I agree and I don’t despair. And as much as the Dark Side would have us leave the planet to them, it ain’t happenin’!!!

Incidences like this just make me want to argue with more diligence against the mind numbing logic of the Leftists.

Having it their way, my initial comments would be guidelines for exactly the way they would choose to act. And then if those guidelines were met, they would then wonder why forces that are aggressive and less than honorable could find their way to their front door and refuse to play fair.

What scares me is that there are some in my party of choice who are starting to bend ever so slightly and take reports like these (and the institutions that produce them) seriously.

It has been said that Amnesty International does some good work. No doubt. But they should pick their shots a little bit more intelligently if they want to maintain credibility.

At least Bush was short, sweet and blunt in his rebuttal to the reports and defense of our agenda.

No word from AI on N Korean gulags? You know that itty bitty one near the Chinese border with 250,000 persons in it? Hmmmmmmm........the silence is deafening AI. By the way B. Poster, excellent post.

Webster,

I think it is a type of hyperbole common on the left. And this recurring theme is why; I find myself with conservatives in the current political struggle, despite lacking a strict definition of conservatism, or a conservative litmus test.

Progressives need some bad words to throw at this. Whether or not this war is about oil, “Blood for Oil” works for a leftist. Whether or not American militarism resembles NAZI-ism, it is enough like it, in the liberal mind, to call it that. Resemblances are played up, differences ignored. Thus it is worth it to their mind to speculate how Gitmo is like a gulag. Not because it is, but because they can make opposing the less-than-ideal operations at Gitmo as a stand in opposing gulags.

But on this subject, I asked my wife, do actual gulags make an "Evil Empire"? If the difference between an “Evil Empire” and a gulag-using empire are marked enough to reject the conclusion of those that would equate the two, then where does a gulag-using pseudo-democratic dictatorship fall into things? And if that falls in a place where we need to be careful of rash categorizations, doesn't "nuance" invite the case that if you do something say, 1/50th as bad as the a decidedly non-Evil Empire, couldn't that be argued to fall within the margin of error that "nuance" might lend things---provided that "nuance" applied to a wider range than how the left uses it.

I mean if we consider gulag-using states as “diverse” in some way, why do we categorically reject that we do not use not only gulags (which they cannot be really said to be) but something that is “like” a gulag in a predominately democratic state. But calling a gulag-using state an “Evil Empire” is thought just as much to be American supremacy as using fraction of gulag-ish methods.

Here's the quality of the much-lauded "nuance" in leftism. We misunderstand the situation because we have made artificial distinctions. The real situation contains much nuance that we rural, inbred, bible-thumping theocrats can hold in our heads. Consequently, they fear the New Inquisition when our reactionary minds encounter any of the subtler truths. See, in a world of nuance, they are always fighting against a raving, foaming, theocratic Inquisition. Oh and I forgot: NAZI death camps (that belongs in there somewhere). So that in every issue, they are beating off the hoard of undead theocrats rushing the tower of progress and enlightenment.

Blood for Oil? At a $52.00 a barrel it still seems pretty scarce so, where's our oil?

Sea King,
You have looked quite minutely into some leftist sophistry. Your characterization of their view of their opposition has the ring of truth to me. The lefty "tower of progress and enlightenment" to which you refer has all the morality, notion of right and wrong, and celebration of diversity and the individual of a beehive.

Note to the observant: Never believe a silly woman wrapped in colorful bedsheets!