Jim Lobe at antiwar.com says there appears to be a growing and concerted attack on Amnesty International, following the right-wing hysteria at their characterization of Gitmo and other US prisons as a "gulag". The actual quote from Amnesty was:
The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law.Sounds just right to me. Of course, the Bush & Co hysteria over the word "gulag" is just a media trick to take attention away from the real substance of the allgations, which they are powerless to defend.
Now here's a little graphic example of US hypocrisy:
The original SoA image above comes from the people who originally set up (or at least financed) Jim Hake's Spirit of America, Cyber Century Forum. Hake has never explained his relationship with the shady thinktank group.
The SoA image seems to be a direct attempt to appropriate Amnesty's feelgood reputation for honesty and integrity, and may be breach of copyright. Similarly, the Bush team is now calling Amnesty all kinds of names, yet they were quite happy to cite Amnesty reports on Iraq five times in a single pre-invasion white paper on Iraqi human rights violations. As blogger Jim Henley points out, one passage is particularly rich:
In August 2001 Amnesty International released a report entitled Iraq — Systematic Torture of Political Prisoners, which detailed the systematic and routine use of torture against suspected political opponents and, occasionally, other prisoners.UPDATE: Now Rumsfeld joins the Team Bush media attack dogs, saying Amnesty's use of the word gulag is "reprehensible".
"Most would define a gulag as where the Soviet Union kept millions in forced labor concentration camps, or I suppose some might say where Saddam Hussein mutilated and murdered untold numbers because they held views unacceptable to his regime. To compare the United States and Guantanamo Bay to such atrocities cannot be excused," Rumsfeld added.So it's OK to call Saddam's prisons a gulag, but not Bush's? And what about Rumsfled's own "outlandish charges" regarding Saddam's WMDs?
Free societies welcome informed criticism, particularly on human rights, but "those who make such outlandish charges lose any claim to objectivity or seriousness," Rumsfeld said.
Well, fact is that Rumsfeld himself lost "any claim to objectivity or seriousness" long ago. As William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, pointed out:
Twenty years ago, Amnesty International was criticizing Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses at the same time Donald Rumsfeld was courting him.Touché!
2 comments:
Yep. The hypocrisy continues. And so does the torture. It's absurd and I'm offended.
I'm wondering whether you've seen this: AP: Gitmo Detainees Say They Were Sold
I quote:
<<<
a wide variety of detainees at the U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, alleged they were sold into capture. Their names and other identifying information were blacked out in the transcripts from the tribunals, which were held to determine whether prisoners were correctly classified as enemy combatants.
One detainee who said he was an Afghan refugee in Pakistan accused the country's intelligence service of trumping up evidence against him to get bounty money from the U.S.
"When I was in jail, they said I needed to pay them money and if I didn't pay them, they'd make up wrong accusations about me and sell me to the Americans and I'd definitely go to Cuba," he told the tribunal. "After that I was held for two months and 20 days in their detention, so they could make wrong accusations about me and my (censored), so they could sell us to you."
Another prisoner said he was on his way to Germany in 2001 when he was captured and sold for "a briefcase full of money" then flown to Afghanistan before being sent to Guantanamo.
"It's obvious. They knew Americans were looking for Arabs, so they captured Arabs and sold them — just like someone catches a fish and sells it," he said. The detainee said he was seized by "mafia" operatives somewhere in Europe and sold to Americans because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time — an Arab in a foreign country.
>>>
endquote
I am not often speechless.
WP
WP, That's an interesting article, I'm going to add that to the long list of articles I need to get through.
Gandhi, I love that final quote. It's just astonishing that the Whitehouse PR machine thinks that it can win this argument by tarnishing the reputation of Amnesty. It's more astonishing that people are buying it.
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