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June 02, 2005

Yep, it's Reuters on the US is the 'new gulag' bandwagon

this from Reuters runs in the WaPo.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Human rights group Amnesty defended its description of Guantanamo prison as a "gulag" Thursday and urged the United States to allow independent investigations of allegations of torture at its detention centers for terrorism suspects.
AI is trying to brazen out its clearly unsupportable analogy.
"The administration's response has been that our report is absurd, that our allegations have no basis, and our answer is very simple: if that is so, open up these detention centers, allow us and others to visit them," Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Zubaida Khan told a news conference.
Ah! Looks like "Gulag" Khan admits that her charge is unfounded, pulled out of her ass for one reason only ... She's pissed because she hasn't been given unfettered access to any place she determines where she wants to go. Hell, why not accuse that the White House itself has secret torture rooms and then demand,

"Well if you don't have anything to hide, let me poke through the Oval Office, test the mattress in the Lincoln bedroom and fondle the White House china."

Then we get to a line in the Reuters report, no scare quotes around it, just a line presented as fact

The United States holds about 520 men at Guantanamo, where they are denied rights accorded under international law to prisoners of war.
Let's make this perfectly clear ... THESE DETAINEES ARE NOT PRISONERS OF WAR.

And the fossils in the MSM still have no clue why they have lost so much credibility with citizens????


Posted by Darleen at June 2, 2005 07:11 AM

Comments

I'm not yet convinced that most of the people in Gitmo did the things that they're being held there for. They were captured under weird circumstances -- sometimes for big cash prizes, which gives the capturers incentives to nab anybody they can plausibly sell. Their trials were conducted by secret military tribunals. So I have no way of knowing whether they're terrorists or not. Given the military's propensity for making stuff up to look good (Pat Tillman is a small but hopefully uncontroversial example) I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt.

If they are terrorists, I'm fine with holding them there. But if most of them are just unlucky goatherds, or even bottom-level Taliban soldiers who had no plans for attacking America and fought because their tribal leader would give them a sheep, we are more or less running a gulag.

Posted by: Neil the Ethical Werewolf at June 3, 2005 05:29 AM

Rooters has friends, too. This, from several sources:

“You people are no better than and no different than the Nazi concentration camp guards,” a Red Cross representative said in April at a U.S. detention facility in Iraq, according to a Pentagon source quoted in a May 23 Wall Street Journal editorial.

I saw Dachau, empty but still there.

Posted by: Mr.Kurtz at June 3, 2005 06:11 AM

But Neil, many many detainees have been released having been found to have been captured in error. Also, war...particularly THIS war or terror is an inexact science. I feel the military is doing a terrific job, given the unenviable tasks they are performing.

Posted by: Jeremy at June 3, 2005 06:56 AM

Guantanamo is a despicable misuse of power. It's a way for the US to escape accountability. It's a possible violation of international law, and at minimum a sneaky way of getting around the law. But it's no Gulag.

That comment from the Amnesty International spokeswoman was totally inappropriate, idiotic and unnecessary. Guantanamo is NO Gulag. The scope and the purpose of Gulag is way beyond what Guantanamo is and will ever be. That comment has led the discussion down the wrong path, and has given the defenders of Guantanamo an easy way out.

"Hell, why not accuse that the White House itself has secret torture rooms and then demand,"

Come on Darleen, that's a moronic argument. We all know that nobody would live to tell about it if that was true. ;)

If I understand it correctly, the allegations about Guantanamo have been made by former detainees who were released. Do you really think that the US military under Bush would let them go if they suspected they had been guilty of anything? I doubt it. So the allegations sound at least credible enough to warrant external investigations.

Plus, before the Iraq war, the White House administration relied, among other things, on Amnesty International reports to make its case for invading Iraq (the only part of the case I found compelling!). Now all of a sudden such reports can be deemed "absurd" just because they don't fit with the administration's strategy? I found that a bit ironic.

/Mike

Posted by: Mike at June 3, 2005 07:47 AM

The one huge Guantanamo-gulag disanalogy is the scale of the thing. We don't have millions of people in there. You could also cite the fact that the people there are foreigners and not our own citizens, but I don't think that makes it any better.

Certainly, a few people have been released. This is in large part because of political pressure from the outside -- several British nationals have gotten out, while those from other countries haven't been so lucky.

Posted by: Neil the Ethical Werewolf at June 3, 2005 02:30 PM

"Plus, before the Iraq war, the White House administration relied, among other things, on Amnesty International reports to make its case for invading Iraq (the only part of the case I found compelling!). Now all of a sudden such reports can be deemed "absurd" just because they don't fit with the administration's strategy? I found that a bit ironic."

I doubt AI's reports on Iraq were made in an attempt to demonize the Bush Administration and were instead focused on reporting abuses in Iraq. Apparently, people were supposed to just cluck disapprovingly at the abuses and not do something about it.

Posted by: Patrick Chester at June 4, 2005 03:23 AM