Guantanamo Bay: American Gulag?

Or not? I don't entirely trust the US government, but I don't trust the critics at all. That is a real shame, because their gross overstatements and to me clear anti-American political bias, do not mean that they don't have a good case, just that I am a lot less willing to take them seriously.

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, both DC lawyers and members of the U.N. Sub-commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights comment in NRO :

Amnesty International's 2005 Report on worldwide human rights was released this week, and its contents have justly outraged Americans who support U.S. efforts in the war on terror including the Washington Post...Among other things, the report...compares the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with the [Soviet Union's] Gulag Archipelago. In addition, the executive director of Amnesty International USA has called on foreign governments to seize and prosecute American officials traveling abroad...

What Amnesty is really saying is that, in its view, America's fight against al Qaeda is not an armed conflict, to which the laws of war apply, but a criminal-enforcement matter where the rights to a speedy, civilian trial are applicable. This is evident in the report's description of the Guantanamo detainees as individuals held without charge or trial . . . on the grounds of possible links to al-Qaida or the former Taleban government of Afghanistan. Despite the fact that the vast majority of detainees at Guantanamo were captured on the battlefield, in arms against the United States or its allies, this criminal enforcement view is widely held on the Left. It is also a historical and legally incorrect.

Captured unlawful combatants are not entitled to POW status because such men are associated with groups that do not comply with even the most basic law of war requirements such as the prohibition on targeting civilians...

The Geneva Conventions exist to encourage decent treatment of both POWs and civilians by according protections to those who abide by the laws of war. Therefore, unlawful combatants get few protections reserved for POWs. The reasoning is that according POW status to unlawful combatants discourages them from acting within the rules of war.

Has AI called upon the governments of the world "to seize and prosecute" Kim Jong Il? Robert Mugabe? The people running China? If they have, I've missed the reports.

The Washington Post, no apologist for the Bush Administration, editorialized on Amnesty International's "report" on May 26th:

IT'S ALWAYS SAD when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse. It's particularly sad when the institution is Amnesty International...(L)ately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United States.

That vitriol reached a new level this week when, at a news conference held to mark the publication of Amnesty's annual report, the organization's secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the "gulag of our times." In her written introduction to the report, Ms. Khan also mentionedonly two countries at length: Sudan and the United States, the "unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power," which "thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights."

Imagine that: In her introduction to the Annual report, not a special report on Guantanamo, but a report covering the world, AI's Secretary general has nothing to say about North Korea. Nothing to say about Iran. Nothing to say about Libya. Nothing to say about Russia. Or China. Or Zimbabwe. Yet we are to accept her report as the the production of a serious, respectable organization. Even the Washington Post can't stomach her. The Post editorial continues:

Like Amnesty, we, too, have written extensively about U.S. prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We have done so not only because the phenomenon is disturbing in its own right but also because it gives undemocratic regimes around the world an excuse to justify their own use of torture and indefinite detention and because it damages the U.S. government's ability to promote human rights.

But we draw the line at the use of the word "gulag" or at the implication that the United States has somehow become the modern equivalent of Stalin's Soviet Union. Guantanamo Bay is an ad hoc creation, designed to contain captured enemy combatants in wartime. Abuses there -- including new evidence of desecrating the Koran -- have been investigated and discussed by the FBI, the press and, to a still limited extent, the military. The Soviet gulag, by contrast, was a massive forced labor complex consisting of thousands of concentration camps and hundreds of exile villages through which more than 20 million people passed during Stalin's lifetime and whose existence was not acknowledged until after his death. Its modern equivalent is not Guantanamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on Stalinist lines; or China's laogai , the true size of which isn't even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Worrying about the use of a word may seem like mere semantics, but it is not. Turning a report on prisoner detention into another excuse for Bush-bashing or America-bashing undermines Amnesty's legitimate criticisms of U.S. policies and weakens the force of its investigations of prison systems in closed societies. It also gives the administration another excuse to dismiss valid objections to its policies as "hysterical."

The Washington Post got this one exactly right. They only left one thing out: by handing a major piece of propaganda to the Islamist fascists and their apologists, Amnesty International is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. And they know it.