The American Gulag

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Amnesty International issued a 308 page report calling the base at Guantanamo Bay a human rights failure and "the gulag of our time". Bill at INDC takes a closer look at Gitmo and the conditions there.
TALES OF HORROR FROM THE AMERICAN GULAG
Now that Amnesty International has declared Gitmo the "gulag of our time," the terrible stories are leaking out:

"Americans are very kind people," one English-challenged detainee said in the March 4 paper. "If people say there is mistreatment in Cuba with the detainees, those type speaking are wrong, they treat us like a Muslim not a detainee."

"I�m in good health and have good facilities of eating, drinking, living, and playing," remarked another. "The food is good, the bedrooms are clean and the health care is very good."

In a February 16 Gitmo dispatch, an American Forces Press Service report described the treatment of Camp Delta�s roughly 520 detainees from about 40 nations. Troublemakers wear prison-style orange jumpsuits and mainly are confined to rudimentary accommodations. But those who follow camp rules wear white outfits and exercise seven to nine hours daily, often playing soccer and volleyball. In quieter moments, "chess, checkers and playing cards are the most requested items," Rhem wrote. As for reading, "A security official explained Agatha Christie books in Arabic are very popular and that camp officials are working to get copies of Harry Potter books in Arabic."

Detainees eat culturally sensitive meals and follow arrows painted on dorm floors to face Mecca. "Prayer calls are broadcast over loudspeakers five times a day," Rhem added.
Bill then cites the case of another horribly tortured person and then closes with this:
Now, I'm not stating that Guantanamo - based on either the criteria for continued detention and review, or all individual cases of confinement and interogation - is a paradise or necessarily fair, but when Amnesty International compares the facility to the network of Soviet slave labor camps where millions were worked to death ... well, let's just put it lightly and say that Amnesty International mortally undermines itself as an effective and credible human rights organization.
He then points to a trenchant comparison by John Podhoretz:
Why Gitmo's no gulag
Can it be? Did Amnesty International, which purports to be the world's leading independent monitor of human rights abuses, describe the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of our times"?

Yes, it did. So let's do a few comparisons between Gitmo and the Gulag - the network of Soviet prison camps set up by Stalin in the 1920s.

Number of prisoners at Gitmo: approximately 600.
Number of prisoners in the Gulag: 25 million, according to peerless Gulag historian Anne Applebaum.

Number of camps at Gitmo: 1.
Number of camps in the Gulag: At least 476, according to Applebaum.

Political purpose of Gulag: The suppression of internal dissent inside a totalitarian state.
Political purpose of Gitmo: The suppression of an international terrorist group that had attacked the United States, killing 3,000 people while attempting to decapitate the national government through the hijack of jets.

Financial purpose of Gulag: Providing totalitarian economy with millions of slave laborers.
Financial purpose of Gitmo: None.

Seizure of Gulag prisoners: From apartments, homes, street corners inside the Soviet Union.
Seizure of Gitmo prisoners: From battlefield sites in Afghanistan in the midst of war.

Even the most damaging charge Amnesty International levels against the United States and its conduct at Gitmo, that our government has been guilty of "entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law," bears no relation to the way things worked when it came to the Gulag. Soviet prisoners were charged, tried and convicted in courts of law according to the Soviet legal code.

For this reason, Gulag prisoners like Vladimir Bukovsky and Anatoly Sharansky (later Natan Sharansky) were able to gum up the Soviet legal works by using the letter of Soviet law against their captors and tormentors.

The problem with the Gulag wasn't that the letter of the law wasn't followed, that the prisoners were given "arbitrary and indefinite" sentences. It's that the charges were trumped up and confessions were coerced.

The situation at Gitmo is entirely different. No one argues that the vast majority of those imprisoned there were al-Qaeda personnel. The problem, according to those who scream about unfairness, is that the prisoners aren't being treated as lawful combatants under the terms of the Geneva Convention or as prisoners of war.

They have been handled under special terms because they are stateless with allegiance not to a country but to a terrorist group. Their nations of origin wouldn't have wanted them back, would have killed them or would have foolishly released them to foment further terrorism.

Amnesty International was founded in part to serve as a watchdog of Communist human-rights abuse. They surely know that even though they might consider the American camp at Guantanamo Bay a terrible violation of human rights, it is a speck on a speck of a mote of dust compared to the Everest of horror that was the Soviet Gulag.

Or, maybe not. The people at Amnesty International really do think that the imprisonment of 600 certain or suspected terrorists is tantamount to the imprisonment of 25 million slaves.

The case of Amnesty International proves that well-meaning people can make morality their life's work and still be little more than moral idiots.
Very well said...

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on June 2, 2005 3:30 PM.

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