Ramblings' Journal

Amnesty Intl. moonbat describes US prisons as "gulags"

Amnesty International executive director William Schultz described the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as part of an "archipelago" of facilities, implying an old style Russian gulag -- not unlike the series of facilities run by the Soviets in Russia prior to the fall of the old Soviet Union. Those sorts of facilities were described in detail in Nobel Prize-winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn's award winning book, "The Gulag Archipelago."

Once the cat was out of the bag, the Amnesty moonbat tried to clean up his mess.

Schulz was pressed to substantiate Amnesty's claim in a May 25 report that the US prison camp at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba naval base -- where hundreds of foreign terror suspects are being held indefinitely -- represents the "gulag of our times."

The gulag claim, referring to the notorious prison camp system of the Soviet Union, has drawn withering criticism from the US president, who called it "absurd." Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have also slammed the rights group's claim.

Russian 1970 Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the Soviet prison camp system in his best-selling book "The Gulag Archipelago."

Schulz said the gulag reference was not "an exact or a literal analogy."

"But there are some similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared -- held in indefinite incommunicado detention without access to lawyers," Schulz told Fox News Sunday.

Asked how AI could compare the detentions of millions of Soviet citizens in the gulag system to purported anti-US combatants captured on the battlefield, Schulz said some of those held in Guantanamo "happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"We do know that at least some of the 200 some prisoners who have been released from Guantanamo Bay have made pretty persuasive cases that they were imprisoned there, not because they were involved in military conflict but simply because they were enemies of the Northern Alliance," he said.

This, of course, continues to paint the war on terror as an infringement upon the rights of the "downtrodden," even if said "downtrodden" are terrorists, hell-bent on killing as many Westerners as possible.

Posted by mhking at June 6, 2005 07:46 AM