May 31, 2005

Amnesty International has “Lost its Bearings”

Circulated via email, from Gary Bauer—AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL MELTS DOWN:

Amnesty International has gone from being merely irritating to now making obscene charges. On the eve of Memorial Day weekend the human rights group compared the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet Gulag (prison system.) For good measure they also urged that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Attorney General Gonzales and other U.S. government officials, or “architects of torture” as they referred to them, be brought up for charges of war crimes.

Even the liberal Washington Post was astonished and accused Amnesty of having “lost its bearings.” Actual prisoners who survived the Gulag, like Natan Sharansky, quickly reminded us that the Soviet Gulag brutalized tens of millions of people. Millions of those who entered that Russian government-sanctioned hell on earth died of torture, starvation, exposure or execution. As the Post points out, if Amnesty wants to find something comparable to the Gulag they could look to “the labor camps of North Korea, …China’s Laogai…or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”

Meanwhile at our “gulag” at Guantanamo Bay the “scandal” is about whether a Koran was inappropriately handled – a Koran that was one of hundreds we supplied to the prisoners! Guards who have on occasion violated interrogation guidelines have been charged and punished. Can Amnesty International really be this blind?

One final thought. The inmates of the Soviet Gulag were people who, by and large, simply wanted freedom. For that they suffered horrible torture and death. The prisoners in Cuba were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan in the wake of the vicious Al Qaeda attack on our homeland. It is a testament to the values of Western Civilization that they are still alive.

Gary Bauer

The Washington Post article Bauer quotes is here.