A View To Kill For

James Robbins reports on what it must be like for a prisoner in the North Korean gulag to learn of GitMo. Actually, what it would be like for an average North Korean citizen to learn of GitMo.

At GitMo, you're given fresh clothes, 3 squares daily, and regular medical treatment. In other words, GitMo would be a huge step up from North Korea's abysmal human rights treatment of prisoners and citizens (who are often interchangeable).

Unfortunately there is not as much widely known about the Kwan-li-co. Amnesty’s 2005 country report on North Korea does not go into the camp system, though it does highlight some of the other human rights abuses visited on North Korean citizens — denial of free expression, starvation, torture, extrajudicial executions, and trafficking in women. The non-government U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has put together a comprehensive review entitled “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps,” comprised mainly of testimony from former inmates who escaped the camp system, along with satellite photos of the reputed camps. The Democracy Network against North Korean Gulag is an émigré organization dedicated to — well, the name says it all. Another good source is The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-Hwan. Kang was imprisoned at age nine with his family and after his release a decade later escaped to South Korea. President Bush reportedly has recently been reading the book, recommended by a Christian missionary who has been making Bible runs inside North Korea.

An estimated 200,000 people are being held in the Kwan-li-co and related systems, in conditions of unspeakable brutality. Accounts of life (such as it is) in the camps remind one of Solzhenitsyn’s narratives, or Primo Levi’s, or other firsthand confirmation of the cruelty and viciousness of the total state in dealing with those it has rendered helpless. How many ways can a person be tortured? How many ways can someone be killed? Is no offense against totalitarian order too small to be overlooked? Are there no limits to the depravity of man? Read some of these accounts and compare. To the average North Korean prisoner, Guantanamo, with its wholesome food, hygienic sanitation, medical care, regular religious services, fresh clothes, forgiving climate, trained personnel, and periodic Red Cross visits would be an astonishing land of plenty. The same goes for the average North Korean citizen.

Is this another shot at Amnesty International?

Absolutely.

They're absolutely deserving of my scorn. For if they cannot recognize true evil and write about it, then their pronouncements (made for show and dough, and not based on actual fact) are worth less than the paper it was written upon.

Technorati: Human rights, gulag, Amnesty International, North Korea, and GitMo

UPDATE:
Meanwhile, Ace is reporting that AI will be testifying at a congressional hearing regarding the detention center in Guantanamo Bay. Just exactly what will they be testifying to? Their complete inability to learn from history? Their complete politicization of human rights - foregoing going after real threats to human rights - like North Korea or China - and instead focusing on how the US treats a couple of hundred detainees captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan.

How about moral clarity (and yes - it's another slam AI post). Maybe I should pick on some easier target? Nope! Not gonna happen. AI is too damn self-important not to pick on.