Amnesty International’s Guantanamo Bay Fiasco
Read Austin Bay’s post regarding Amnesty International calling the U.S. anti-terrorism prison at Guantanamo Bay the “gulag of our times.” A few paragraphs from a Dennis Byrne essay that Austin quotes:
Amnesty International might as well have compared the treatment of a few hundred detainees at Guantanamo to the Holocaust. To review the gulag’s history: Millions of political dissenters, victims of police state terror, assorted “undesirables,” ethnic minorities (e.g. Chechens and Crimean Tartars) and others guilty of doing nothing wrong were shipped to the gulag to mine, build railroads, dig canals, toil in factories, clear forests and perform other slave labor. Until they were too sick to continue or just dropped dead, left to become a part of the permafrost. Millions more were shot or died in Holocaust-style cattle cars before getting there.
Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, in her Pulitzer-Prize winning book, “Gulag: A History,” figures that from 1928 through 1953, about 24 million people passed through the various camps, many in brutal Siberia or other remote regions. That’s more than twice Cuba’s entire population. Among them were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of prisoners of World War II. She estimated that 600,000 were Japanese, who were kept in the slave camps for years after the end of the war. Few ever made it home.
Either Amnesty International isn’t aware of this history, or it knows of it but is lying for the sake of a good sound bite. In either case, the group has lost credibility to speak on behalf of the victims of human-rights violations. Moreover, Amnesty International has dishonored millions of gulag victims…
I know that I for one will have a hard time ever again taking anything that Amnesty International says seriously.
This episode illustrates one of the greatest failings of the left. They are “distinction challenged” in that they struggle to properly sort out the primary distinctions when analyzing world events and policies. This inability seems to be driven by some kind of gut emotionalism that distorts facts, in their minds, that are right in front of them.
Amnesty International’s assertions to attract attention to Guantanamo Bay has backfired dramatically. Instead of creating outrage about Guantanamo Bay, they have inadvertently pointed out how minor this prison situation is compared to the unfathomable atrocities of the Soviet gulags.
June 2nd, 2005 at 3:20 pm
I have never taken anything Am-nasty international said seriously. They are nothing more than a collection of spoiled brat Socialist/Communist that will not accept the fact that the tried and failed systems will never work, even with them in charge. They are in the minority of people that look but do not see.
June 11th, 2005 at 1:42 pm
[...] he blogs about Amnesty International comparing Guantanamo Bay to a gulag (I posted on this here). It is interesting to hear his concerns as an outsider that is not reflexively anti-American. He notes that [...]