Open Letter To Amnesty International

I am writing to get an answer to a very simple question. Ms. Irene Zubaida Khan, head of the organization has stated that what is ongoing at Gitmo is a gulag.

On further clarifications, she has stated (in news articles):

Khan rejected a suggestion that Amnesty’s use of the emotive term “gulag” had turned the debate into one over semantics, and distracted attention from the situation in the detention centers.

“What we wanted to do was to send a strong message that ... this sort of network of detention centers that has been created as part of this war on terrorism is actually undermining human rights in a dramatic way which can only evoke some of the worst features of human rights scandals of the past,” she said.

My question is thus: Is Gitmo a gulag?

I would remind you that a gulag is not a single facility handling some 500 enemy combatants taken off battlefields in Afghanistan or Iraq who were under arms against US soldiers. A gulag was a systematic prison system that killed millions of people in the former Soviet Union and can best be seen in places like modern-day North Korea and under Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Therefore, if you continue to defend the statement that Gitmo is a gulag, you will have lost whatever credibility your organization had left with people who are genuinely concerned with human rights abuses around the world, not perceived slights and unsubstantiated accusations by those prisoners who are trained to lie and exaggerate treatment at the hands of non Muslims to further their jihadist agenda.

It is indefensible to claim that using terminology like gulag to define, explain, or characterize US treatment of prisoners at Gitmo is acceptable because your organization needs a dramatic way to highlight the crisis. What dramatic steps have you used to highlight the genocide in Dafur? Similarly, what dramatic steps have you taken to highlight the cruel and barbaric regime in North Korea that continues to starve the North Korean population. The fact that you fail to use terms like gulag to characterize a real gulag shows that your political sensibilities trump your actual concern for human rights around the world.

I await your prompt reply.

Technorati: Human Rights