Amnesty International & the American Gulag at Guantanamo

Very impressive performance, folks. Lori Santos of Reuters reports

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Despite highly publicized charges of U.S. mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the head of the Amnesty International USA said on Sunday the group doesn't "know for sure" that the military is running a "gulag."

Executive Director William Schulz said Amnesty...also had no information about whether...Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved severe torture methods such as beatings and starvation.

Schulz recently dubbed Rumsfeld an "apparent high-level architect of torture" in asserting he approved interrogation methods that violated international law.

"It would be fascinating to find out. I have no idea," Schulz told "Fox News Sunday."

"I have no idea"? The executive director of the most widely known human rights organization in the world called Rumsfeld an architect of torture, handing the enemy a huge propaganda tool, and now he says he has "no idea" if it is true? Called the prison system a gulag, but doesn't "know for sure" that it is true?

What are these people doing? In my book, if this report is true, Schultz, and perhaps others, are guilty of knowingly giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of a declared war.

A weeks-long dispute has raged since Amnesty compared the prison for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the vast, brutal Soviet gulag system of forced labor camps in which millions of prisoners died....

The U.S. military on Friday released details about five cases in which the Koran was kicked, stepped on and soaked in water. Top officials say they were among 10 such cases reported among more than 28,000 prisoner interrogations.

Five in 28,000. Looks like a pattern to me: a pattern totally at odds with the critics' claims. In fact there were ten cases in which the prisoners themselves desecrated Korans, so desecration is 2 to 1 a Muslim thing. Why isn't that in the first two paragraphs of coverage? It was in paragraph 14 in one story I saw yesterday, not at all in others.

Schulz said, "We don't know for sure what all is happening at Guantanamo and our whole point is that the United States ought to allow independent human rights organizations to investigate."

So, it is now Amnesty's position that responsible critics make wild accusations first and then set about looking for evidence?

Schulz noted that it was Amnesty's headquarters in London that issued the annual report on global human rights, which said Guantanamo Bay "has become the gulag of our times."

"Not my department. Move along." How about voicing some criticism of your irresponsible colleagues, Mr. Schultz? You and your cohort have utterly discredited a formerly respectable organization known for good work. You have a long way to go now to rebuild trust, and your lack of self criticism just digs the hole deeper.

Asked about the comparison, Schulz said, "Clearly this is not an exact or a literal analogy."

RatherGate: Fake but Accurate. GulagGate: Fake but Not Exact.

This isn't just a blow to the US effort to beat the Islamists, and a blow against Amnesty International itself. By discrediting themselves they have seriously injured their credibility across the board, and political prisoners around the world now have a far less credible defender.