05 Jun One Last Word on Amnesty International
05.06.05
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8 Comments
OK, I’m not quite signing off yet. I just wanted to point readers to two more sharp (and in my mind, devastating) attacks on Amnesty International’s attempt to equate Guantanamo with “gulags”. (A comparison that they have not backed away from, as Jon Adler notes here). One is by Kenneth Anderson in the Weekly Standard, and the other is by David Bosco in The New Republic. Both pieces make the points I have been trying to make, more eloquently and powerfully than I can.
I gather the Amnesty report is upsetting because the Gulag comparison is offensive and wrong.
OK, so you find it offensive. Others don’t. Some even agree with it. Deal with it.
That’s a cute poke in the eye. Is it a solid legal argument?
That’s a cute poke in the eye. Is it a solid legal argument?
The problem with the whole Amnesty polemic is that it suffers from the “dictatorships and double standards” charade so articulately pointed out by Jeane Kirkpatrick more than twenty years ago. The Amnesty page now has a banner headline–its first ever, to my recollection–denouncing the USA on Human Rights. This bumper-sticker attack lacks any context or nuance and up-stages the extensive laundry list of greater abusers, including France, which runs an effective police state complete with detentions without charge for terrorist suspects.
AI has literally become a Chomskyite organization:
http://news.amnesty.org/pages/usa-news-eng
it has a video of Chomsky on Guatanamo.
Amnesty International did not invent “gulag” as a metaphor for the US detention scheme. Excerpts from two articles which use the term synonymously, and pre-date the Amnesty statement, appear below. (Use the links to access the full texts.) Google gulag + guantanamo to find more such instances. December 5, 2004 TORONTO SUN By Eric Margolis — Contributing Foreign Editor Uncle Sam Has His Own Gulag The Lubyanka Prison’s heavy oak main door swung open. I went in, the first western journalist to enter the KGB’s notorious Moscow headquarters — a place so dreaded Russians dared not utter its name….I explored the fascinating museum of Soviet intelligence and was briefed on special poisons and assassination weapons that left no traces. I sat transfixed at the desk used by all the directors of Stalin’s secret police, on which the orders were signed to murder 30 million people… I saw some of the KGB’s execution and torture cellars, and special “cold rooms” where naked prisoners were beaten, then doused with ice water and slowly frozen…Other favoured Lubyanka tortures: Psychological terror, psychotropic drugs, prolonged sleep deprivation, dazzling lights, intense noise, days in pitch blackness, isolation, humiliation, constant threats, savage beatings, attacks by guard dogs,… Read more »
Sorry. The link to the Rothschild article (above) doesn’t work. This one does(or should, in any event <:8 ^o )
January 3, 2005
THE PROGRESSIVE
Matthew Rothschild
The Bush Gulag
“President Bush…continues to place the blame for the horrific consequences of his morally obtuse policies on the young privates and corporals and sergeants who may well be culpable as individuals for their actions, but who were certainly not responsible for the policies which set up the Bush Gulag and led to America’s strategic catastrophe in Iraq. “I call on the administration to disclose all its interrogation policies, including those used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and those employed by the CIA at its secret detention centers outside the U.S., as well as all the analyses related to the adoption of those policies.” This is from a speech that former Vice-President Gore gave at Georgetown Law Center on June 26, 2004. (Source: Old Hickory’s Weblog, Torture in the Bush Gulag: How prissy should we be in talking about it?June 5, 2005. The full text of Mr. Gore’s address is at Common Dreams .) Excerpts from Gore’s speech: “[T]here has been no more bizarre or troubling manifestation of how seriously off track this President’s policies have taken America than the two profound shocks to our nation’s conscience during the last month. First came the extremely disturbing pictures that document strange… Read more »