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GITMO NO GULAG: AMNESTY
Pavel Litvinov in the Washington Post:
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.”
If Gitmo is the gulag of our time, it’s because our militaries are fighting to shut down the *real* gulags.
Posted by Aaron - Freewill on 2005 06 19 at 01:29 AM • permalinkAnd when was this? Amnesty International was founded in 1961. Josef Goebbels committed suicide in 1945, one day after Hitler bumped himself off.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 06 19 at 02:26 AM • permalinkI withdrew my monthly payments to Amnesty International when they emailed me and asked me for extra funding to investigate Abu Grahib abuses. I emailed them and said that with half the NGO’s in the world focusing on it plus a US goverment investigation already underway, I wanted to find and organisation I could donate to that truly represented the oppressed people of the world and thus want to withdraw my support to AI.
My research for another worthy NGO found that if you happen to be a terrorist there endless NGO’s giving you top priority.” ... Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the ‘gulag of our time’”.
The left’s eagerness to turn the West into the bogeyman at every opportunity debases moral currency.
Any harsh word is an assault, every death genocide, every racial slur a holocaust, every storm a portent of ecological disaster. Except if its happening, really happening elsewhere or perpetrated by non-caucasians.
In these cases your concern and anger must be a disguised form of racism.
Meanwhile Amnesty International, like Greenpeace, is rapidly becoming a joke.
From the Post column:
The most effective way to criticize U.S. behavior is to frankly acknowledge that this country should be held to a higher standard based on its own Constitution, laws and traditions. We cannot fulfill our responsibilities as the world’s only superpower without being perceived as a moral authority. Despite the risks posed by terrorism, the United States cannot indefinitely detain people considered dangerous without appropriate safeguards for their conditions of detention and periodic review of their status.
This is about the best description of many people’s concerns that I’ve seen yet. Myself, I think that there are reasonable safeguards in place. Obviously, other people disagree with my conclusion. But this is one of the few reasonable, rational, and logical comments against Gitmo ever published (IMHO, anyhow).
[snip]
There is ample reason for Amnesty to be critical of certain U.S. actions. But by using hyperbole and muddling the difference between repressive regimes and the imperfections of democracy, Amnesty’s spokesmen put its authority at risk. U.S. human rights violations seem almost trifling in comparison with those committed by Cuba, South Korea, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
Words are important. When Amnesty spokesmen use the word “gulag” to describe U.S. human rights violations, they allow the Bush administration to dismiss justified criticism and undermine Amnesty’s credibility. Amnesty International is too valuable to let it be hijacked by politically biased leaders.
This, ultimately, is why I no longer support many of the leftie groups that I used to (and I did, folks, believe it or not). They undermine their own credibility, developed through many years of hard work, by being so blatantly biased. AI is but the most recent and glaring example of this madness.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that no one institution (government or non-government, religious or secular, educational or business) should be unwatched. Not “unregulated”, but not unchallenged, open to the criticism and influence of outsiders. Competing forces seem to be the most effective means.
Amnesty International filled that void for years, largely by being unbiased. Now they are biased….and against the one nation that ultimately has similar (not identical) aims, in terms of justice and equality. And they are throwing it away because of the irrational “I-Hate-BusHitler” meme dominating the lefties.
AI is doing to the international communinity what Howard Dean and the DNC are doing to the American voters—driving them away. And as a result, we are losing a valuable balancing force.
Thanks, AI, for caring more about your own pet beliefs than your original charter. You do the world a major disservice. But I doubt you’ll care, because of the leftie madness infecting your ranks.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 06 19 at 04:15 AM • permalinkheck, AI just stuck their finger in the air and came to the conclusion that if Bush keeps going this way , AI will be out of business soon.
AI investigators got family, and them kids got to eat.Posted by papertiger on 2005 06 19 at 05:26 AM • permalinkAmnesty International Australia has had a fair few press releases on its web site about Hicks and Habib, but nothing (the last time I looked) on the Indonesian justice system or Schapelle Corby.
Even if you believe that Schapelle is guilty and/or would have been found guilty in an Aussie court, it definitely should be looking into 500 trials leading to 500 convictions.
“I believe there’s some sociological law that all advocacy groups eventually become far-leftist.”
You’re thinking of O’Sullivan’s Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
Posted by Bruce Rheinstein on 2005 06 19 at 01:22 PM • permalinkThe most effective way to criticize U.S. behavior is to frankly acknowledge that this country should be held to a higher standard based on its own Constitution, laws and traditions.
I’m getting really tired of being told that the U.S. (and by extension, the entire West) should be held to a higher standard. We have high standards. What’s lacking are those countries that are continually held to a lower standard by the idiots who keep saying we should be held to a higher standard.
davo, Rebecca, I read that differently. I saw it as not giving a get-out-of-jail-free card to the US, and not a leftie racist comment that the US doesn’t follow those standards.
Read the entire article. Pavel is clear on this matter.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 06 20 at 03:25 AM • permalinkThe bias of AI goes back a long way; at least as far as the early 1990s. I know because I was a member at that time for about 2-3 years.
At the time, I was naïve enough to believe the propaganda that they were politically neutral. We live and learn. Even while I was a member, I started calling it “Anti-democracy International” when I noticed how keen they were to attack Western democracies at every opportunity. Still I persisted in the hope that something good was being achieved.
The end finally came at a group meeting I attended which was chaired by a young English woman. We were discussing the possibility of taking up the human rights situation of the people of Northern Ireland. This young English woman then confided in us all that she would like to do NI because it would enable her to “get at John Major from afar”.
I never bothered to attend any more group meetings or any other AI activity after that, and I allowed my membership to lapse.
Posted by DropDeadUgly on 2005 06 20 at 04:30 AM • permalink
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So would claiming that Guantanamo is a big soylent green factory, and detainees are being processed into food.