It's not in the same league. It's not even the same sport. It's a completely different ball of wax. [ed: enough with the mixed metaphors already though I admire your use of Quentin Tarantino style reparte.]
I'll let John Podhoretz summarize the key differences.
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.There's also the fact that the US Supreme Court has ruled that certain aspects of the detentions are subject to court oversight. Seems to me that the Amnesty International is more concerned with obtaining donations than in getting the facts right.
Number of prisoners at Gitmo: approximately 600.
Number of prisoners in the Gulag: as many as 25 million, according to the 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 airplanes.
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.
Interestingly enough, 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.
The headlines may blare that the AI Report slams the US, but here's what most folks don't realize. This was a 308 report covering 148 countries. Sudan, Congo, Haiti,
Angola, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, and Syria were all in there. Yet, North Korea, which actually does have a gulag system set up in the old Soviet model, gets less space accorded to its human rights abuses than the US. The treatment of Iraq serves as yet another critique and criticism of the US War on Terror, instead of placing blame on deaths of civilians on terrorists who could care less about Laws of War or the Geneva Convention.
By the way, those countries don't have niceties like due process. They simply execute political prisoners. Or put known human rights abusers back into power. And could care less about religious freedom, tolerance of minorities, or criminal procedure.
The US treatment in the report is actually mild, despite the MSNBC headline - AI complains about US treatment of detainees, yet they have to note that these individuals even get legal rights as a result of a Supreme Court decision. I don't see Saudi Arabia giving Jews or Christians the right to practice their religion in Saudi Arabia (wait - there aren't any Jews there because they were kicked out years ago, and possessing Christian bibles is a crime, punishable by a jail sentence - so how's that for religious freedom).
AI responds that they cannot get access to places like North Korea to confirm reports. That pure bunk. They know what is going on in those places, yet they do not have the convictions to report the full gory details, because they would actually take up the bulk of reporting.
The list of atrocities in Sudan deserves far more treatment than a few pages in the summary. We're talking about the genocide of hundreds of thousands of people. Yet, AI can only muster a couple of paragraphs?
AI spent more time writing about the legalities of detainees at GitMo.
Does anyone else see a problem with AI's priorities?
Technorati: Human Rights
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