A weighty response to Amnesty International's "publicity stunt" (Dick Durbin, you should read this...)

This post is a bit late in the game, but the more I've followed this story, the more I felt the need to add my 2 rubles. There has been a lot of blogospheric activity (and sadly little MSM activity) generated by Amnesty International's comparison of Guantanamo Bay to Soviet GULAG's, as well as Sen. Dick Durbin's (D-IL) ignorant, over-the-top comparison of the U.S. military at Guantanamo to Nazi forces, Soviet GULAG's, and Pol Pot's "killing fields" regime. (See Bernard's post for background on the Amnesty flap and Michelle Malkin's round-up for good info on Durbin's "foot-in-mouth" moment)

Amnesty's hyperbolic comparison of Gitmo to Soviet GULAG's has amounted to nothing more than a glorified publicity stunt designed to try and draw attention to the serious issue of America's conduct in the current war on terror. AI has done some noteworthy things on behalf of prisoners of conscience around the world. There is definitely a place and a need for an organization like AI. Unfortunately, that sound you hear is the sound of Amnesty's credibility plummeting and hitting a new low.

Having read Solzhenitsyn's GULAG Archipelago, I am amazed at the ignorance (or blind zeal) required to equate a war-time detention facility (the detainees at Gitmo are not kumbaya-singing protesters) with the forced labor camps that were responsible for the deaths of millions of political prisoners (most of them innocent) in Soviet Russia. Further investigations, which the MSM has undertaken with great gusto have only revealed that, while there are problems at Guantanamo, the prisoners are treated more humanely and are even better cared-for than American citizens in domestic prisons. In a sadly ironic revelation, it seems that there are worse prison abuses and rights violations that have taken place in Dick Durbin's own state! (Hat-tip: John in Carolina). Furthermore, having lived in Russia (not far from Siberia) I've had the chance to talk to Russians about the abuses and horrors of the Soviet era and the significance of the GULAG's in Russia's history and collective consciousness. I'm afraid that no amount of "point-of-view" appeals can spin the situation at Guantanamo into anything resembling what took place here under Stalin and Soviet rule.

In this commentary, Pavel Litvinov, a former Soviet dissident and prisoner of conscience responds intelligently and critically to Amnesty's ignorant ploy. His recollection of the way Christians were treated in the GULAG's stands in stark contrast to the way detained terrorists (who have set off real bombs and taken real lives) are being treated at Guantanamo:

For example, incidents of desecration of the Koran in Guantanamo by U.S. personnel have been widely reported. But those Korans were surely not brought to Guantanamo by the prisoners themselves from Afghanistan. They were supplied by the U.S. administration -- in spite of the obvious fact that most of the prisoners misguidedly found in the Koran the inspiration for their violent hatred of the United States.

By contrast, Russian author Andrei Sinyavsky, who was sentenced in 1966 to seven years' forced labor for his writing, was approached one evening soon after his arrival in a labor camp by a prisoner who quietly asked Sinyavsky whether he wanted to listen to a recital of the biblical account of the apocalypse. (Possession of a Bible was strictly prohibited in the gulag.) The man took Sinyavsky to the furnace room, where a group of people were squatting in the dark recesses. In the light of the furnace flame, one of the men got up and started to recite the biblical passages by heart. When he stopped, the stoker, an old man, said: "And now you, Fyodor, continue." Fyodor got up and recited from the next chapter. The whole text of the Bible was distributed among these prisoners, ordinary Russians who were spending 10 to 25 years in the gulag for their religious beliefs. They knew the texts by heart and met regularly to repeat them so that they would not forget. And this happened in 1967, when the gulag had become smaller and the Soviet regime milder than it had been under Stalin.

Here's another excerpt that makes a pretty condemning statement about Amnesty's accusations.

Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet "prisoner of conscience" adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty's executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the "gulag of our time."
"Don't you think that there's an enormous difference?" I asked him.
"Sure," he said, "but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees."

...

The cruelty and scale of the gulag system are described in numerous books, so there is no need to recount them here. By any standard, Guantanamo and similar American-run prisons elsewhere do not resemble, in their conditions of detention or their scale, the concentration camp system that was at the core of a totalitarian communist system.

(Definitely read the whole thing at Washingtonpost.com)

It seems that Amnesty International and Dick Durbin are simply going over the top to try and make a point. They have "jumped the shark" in order to draw attention to their political cause du jour. Yes, political - these attacks against U.S. military activities is nothing more than an attempt to discredit President Bush, his administration, and the current actions of this president. Their silence on far more atrocious abuses in other places (e.g. Cuba, North Korea) only betray their biases and agendas.

Everyone plays these types of games in the world of hard-ball politics. The unfortunate and even treacherous aspect of this story is the harm being done to America's military forces around the world, the harm being done to the reputation of professional men and women in harm's way, and the harm being done to the memories of those who have honorably fought and paid the ultimate price. No less of a travesty is the way such ignorant comments diminish the horror and significance of past atrocities. We should never minimize what Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and others have done against humanity. Millions of lives have been tragically affected by these despots/tyrants - how can we even fathom a comparison of America's president and her armed forces to these historical horrors? In their zeal to score political points, Amnesty International (and Dick Durbin) have trivialized the very horrors that they work so hard to oppose.

Update:

John Hinderaker at Powerline has a new post (The Real Thing) that pretty much covers this issue in a nutshell. I've taken the liberty of posting it here en toto.
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Marines in western Iraq made a sobering discovery yesterday that highlights the folly of those who decry "torture" at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay:

Marines on an operation to eliminate insurgents that began Friday broke through the outside wall of a building in this small rural village to find a torture center equipped with electric wires, a noose, handcuffs, a 574-page jihad manual - and four beaten and shackled Iraqis.

One way you can distinguish a real torture center from an American detention facility is that in the real thing, people keep dying:

"They kill somebody every day," said Mr. Fathil, whose hands were so swollen he could not open a can of Coke offered to him by a marine. "They've killed a lot of people."

***

His town has always been a good place, he said, but the militants have made it hell.

"These few are destroying it," he said, his face streaked with tears. "Everybody they take, they kill. It's on a daily basis pretty much."

What do you think; do you suppose we need a lot more news stories about how a guard at Gitmo accidentally touched a Koran?

The liberals' public relations campaign against the American military and the Bush administration, based on the overblown Abu Ghraib story and the bogus Guantanamo Bay story, is a disgrace.

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More excellent coverage in this round-up at The Mudville Gazette

Here's a really interesting commentary on some of the legitimate questions that should be asked regarding Guantanamo and Abu Gharib. As Glenn Reynolds says, Dave Kopel at the Volokh Conspiracy offers some "critical reason." (Hat-tip: Instapundit)