Amnesty Takes Aim at 'Gulag' in Guantanamo
By PAISLEY DODDS, Associated Press Writer

Wednesday, May 25, 2005


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(05-25) 07:44 PDT LONDON, United Kingdom (AP) --


Amnesty International branded the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay a
human rights failure Wednesday, calling it "the gulag of our time" as
it released a report that offers stinging criticism of the United
States and its detention centers around the world.


The 308-page report accused the United States of shirking its
responsibility to set the bar for human rights protections and said
Washington has instead created a new lexicon for abuse and torture.
Amnesty International called for the camp to be closed.


"Attempts to dilute the absolute ban on torture through new policies
and quasi-management speak, such as 'environmental manipulation, stress
positions and sensory manipulation,' was one of the most damaging
assaults on global values," the annual report said.


Some 540 prisoners from about 40 countries are being held at the U.S.
detention center in Cuba. More than 200 others have been released,
though some have been jailed in their countries; many have been held
for three years without charge.


"Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time," Amnesty Secretary
General Irene Khan said.


A spokesman for the Department of Defense declined to comment on the
report, saying he had not seen it. But Navy Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter
said the U.S. government continues to be a leader in human rights,
treating detainees humanely and investigating all claims of abuse.


At least 10 cases of abuse or mistreatment have been documented and
investigated at Guantanamo. Several other cases are pending.


"During the year, released detainees alleged that they had been
tortured or ill-treated while in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and
Guantanamo. Evidence also emerged that others, including Federal Bureau
of Investigation agents and the International Committee of the Red
Cross, had found that such abuses had been committed against
detainees," the report said.


The Geneva-based ICRC is the only independent group to have access to
the Guantanamo detainees. Amnesty has been refused access to the prison
camp, although it was allowed to watch the pretrial hearings for the
military commissions. The commissions, which could try 15 prisoners
facing charges, were stalled by a U.S. court's decision that is under
appeal.


"There's a myth going around that there's some kind of rule of law
being applied," said Rob Freer, an Amnesty official who specializes in
detention issues.


Amnesty acknowledged the human rights deficiencies came with a rash of
terrorist actions, including the televised beheadings of captives in
Iraq.


Still, the group said, governments forgot many victims in the fight
against terrorism.


Khan singled out Sudan as one of the worst human rights violations of
last year, saying that not only had the Sudanese government turned its
back on its own people, but that the United Nations and the African
Union acted too late to help.


She also said the African Union needed to do more about speaking out
against human rights abuses in Africa, singling out Zimbabwe. She
talked about human rights failures being compounded by big business'
complicity.


Amnesty's report also pointed to Haiti, saying human rights violators
were allowed to regain positions of power after armed rebels and former
soldiers ousted former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide last year.


Amnesty said Congo's government offered no effective response to the
systematic rape of tens of thousands of women and children and warned
of a downward spiral of lawlessness and instability in Afghanistan.


In Asia, the report said violence and discrimination against women was
rampant last year, ranging from acid attacks for unpaid dowries in
Bangladesh to forced abortion in China, rape by soldiers in Nepal and
domestic beatings in Australia.


Amnesty also said the ouster of the conservative Islamic Taliban regime
in 2001 by U.S.-led forces did little to bring relief to women.


In the western Herat region, Amnesty reported that hundreds of women
had set fire to themselves to escape violence in the home or forced
marriage.


"Fear of abductions by armed groups forced women to restrict their
movements outside the home," Amnesty said. Even within families,
"extreme restrictions" on women's behavior and high levels of violence
persisted, it said.


While criticizing the detention mission at Guantanamo, Amnesty said one
sign of hope was the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in June that let
prisoners challenge the basis of their detention. It also said it was
encouraging that Britain's high court lords ruled on the indefinite
detention without charge or trial of "terrorist suspects."


"The challenge for the human rights movement is to harness the power of
civil society and push governments to deliver on their human rights
promises," Khan said.

On 25 May 2005 09:17:06 -0700, copied and pasted some trash,
when he should have written:


Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their
lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid
succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term
intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the
political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my
character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense
of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what
it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the
simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed
solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways
Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I
watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly
see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement
are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third
World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept
at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it
directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately,
first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to
Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other
Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own
reflection in the mirror.

Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think Kafka, without the
bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift, without the buzz. Every anomaly that
didn't fit my perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring for so
long ignored. The insistent inner voice I learned to suppress now has my
rapt attention. "Something strange -- something approaching pathological --
something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," the
voice whispers. "How did this happen?" The Iraqi election is my tipping
point. The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I did
many years before.

I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite term for
reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering
in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community,
where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics
and Jews was unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and right,
wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I
have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out
were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and "progressive thought").

The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's
backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed
to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful
that way.

I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of
Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's
misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice,
lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed
up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate
ever to a Democratic convention.

Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In
short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a
card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my
commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect
for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble. To
my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist
dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.

A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously
described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern
world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word
"evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable
sense that we might not make it to dessert.

When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20
million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'"
too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort
you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child
molestation for sport.

My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like
"gulag" to the dinner table.

I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left
already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I
watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a
telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in
Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the
number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the
war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations.

Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was
declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by
Muslim fanatics.

Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots.
Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile
statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White
House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its
most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on
a mediocre day.

All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking
response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people
stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against
fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since
made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of
King's call for equal of opportunity.

These days the postmodern left demands that government and private
institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender
"disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of
factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is
neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a
very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly
ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the
subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this:
pathetic.

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what
now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.

In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden
discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut
has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing
unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or
unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking
"subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).

Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to
explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school
speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson
countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why
not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do
that."

When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who
believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go
upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke
up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are
powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is
misguided."

I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's
political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the
U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not
Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?

He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators.
Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan
is shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice
for "all of God's children."

My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines
at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body
politic.

In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that
prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders'
talk -- and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into
law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.

America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals
committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their
talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral
intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human
condition.

At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of
John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society
(whose] capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A
continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to
"foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give
them room to breathe."

One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I became a liberal in the
first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my
reactionary hometown.

This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the
cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I
departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the
value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human
affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any
point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.

True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain
misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as
morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that
shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's
entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful
external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous
shepherding of caretaker elites.

Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the
rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to
our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental
advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection,
and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self-
determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of
received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and
plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has
pursued with such tenacity for so many years.

All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who
have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a
genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left
has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name
"progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.

Keith Thompson is a Petaluma writer and the author of "Angels and Aliens"
and "To Be a Man." His work is at www.thompsonatlarge.com. Contact us at
.






--
John H
On the 'PocoLoco' out of Deale, MD

"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it."
Rene Descartes (A true binary thinker!)

wrote in message
Amnesty International....

Pffft.

NOYB wrote:
wrote in message
Amnesty International....

Pffft.

Ah, the sound of NOYB's ears touching as his mind narrows even more.

wrote in message
oups.com...


NOYB wrote:
wrote in message
Amnesty International....

Pffft.

Ah, the sound of NOYB's ears touching as his mind narrows even more.


2 posts this morning and 2 insults. Why?

*JimH* wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...


NOYB wrote:
wrote in message
Amnesty International....

Pffft.

Ah, the sound of NOYB's ears touching as his mind narrows even more.


2 posts this morning and 2 insults. Why?

Uh, it's not an insult. Would you not think that someone who simply
poo-poos a piece because a particular group, no matter how much fact is
involved, is narrow minded?

wrote in message
oups.com...


*JimH* wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...


NOYB wrote:
wrote in message
Amnesty International....

Pffft.

Ah, the sound of NOYB's ears touching as his mind narrows even more.


2 posts this morning and 2 insults. Why?

Uh, it's not an insult. Would you not think that someone who simply
poo-poos a piece because a particular group, no matter how much fact is
involved, is narrow minded?


Don't divert from the original question. Why do you find it necessary to
constantly insult folks here?

Prior to your reply you made 2 posts this morning and both were insults.
Why?

I have tried to defend you but found it useless as I see that you just
continue with your behavior. Folks then push back to you exactly what you
give them on a daily basis. Doesn't that bother you? Don't you understand
why? Aren't you tired of being made to look foolish?

You have shown that you can make positive contributions here. Although
rare, they do pop up from time to time. That is the person we want to see.

Change your way and maybe folks will learn to respect you. Until then you
get what you sow Kevin. Don't count on me defending you anymore until that
change happens.

"NOYB" wrote in message
ink.net...

wrote in message
Amnesty International....

Pffft.



Amnesty International's irresponsible charges

Dennis Byrne, a Chicago-area writer and consultant
Published May 30, 2005


By labeling the U.S. anti-terrorism prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the
"gulag of our times," the people of Amnesty International must think we're
stupid or ignorant.

Stupid or ignorant enough to fall for the assertion that whatever is
happening at Guantanamo is the legal and moral equivalent of what happened
in the hundreds of slave labor and concentration camps scattered throughout
the former communist Soviet Union. Equivalent to a system that brutalized
tens of millions, of which untold millions died of starvation, exposure,
exhaustion, torture, illness or execution.

OK, maybe in light of this generation's dismal ignorance of history, we
deserve to be treated like dummies. But Amnesty International, which
purports to speak on behalf of human rights everywhere, ought to know
better. And if we let it get away with this historical obscenity, then we
are stupid.

Amnesty International might as well have compared the treatment of a few
hundred detainees at Guantanamo to the Holocaust. To review the gulag's
history: Millions of political dissenters, victims of police state terror,
assorted "undesirables," ethnic minorities (e.g. Chechens and Crimean
Tartars) and others guilty of doing nothing wrong were shipped to the gulag
to mine, build railroads, dig canals, toil in factories, clear forests and
perform other slave labor. Until they were too sick to continue or just
dropped dead, left to become a part of the permafrost. Millions more were
shot or died in Holocaust-style cattle cars before getting there.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, in her Pulitzer-Prize winning
book, "Gulag: A History," figures that from 1928 through 1953, about 24
million people passed through the various camps, many in brutal Siberia or
other remote regions. That's more than twice Cuba's entire population. Among
them were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of prisoners of World War
II. She estimated that 600,000 were Japanese, who were kept in the slave
camps for years after the end of the war. Few ever made it home.

Either Amnesty International isn't aware of this history, or it knows of it
but is lying for the sake of a good sound bite. In either case, the group
has lost credibility to speak on behalf of the victims of human-rights
violations. Moreover, Amnesty International has dishonored millions of gulag
victims.

Of course, the media took the bait. Mindlessly and without hesitation, they
repeated the gulag charge, as if Amnesty International says it is so, it
must be so. If the media felt compelled to report that kind of remark, at
least in the interests of balance and accuracy, they should have added a
brief sentence noting that the gulag was a network of old Soviet
concentration camps to which millions were sent to suffer and die. An
Associated Press report, found on The New York Times Web site, took that
course, but only made matters worse by asserting that "thousands," not
millions, died in the gulag. Haven't Times editors read the newspaper's own
review of Applebaum's book? No wonder the media deserve such public
contempt.

Amnesty International's reckless use of such a loaded word and the media's
unquestioning acceptance of group's assertion as fact prove to be a useful
insight into the warped mindset of the political left, and its compulsion to
believe that the United States and President Bush are everywhere the enemies
of compassion, justice, freedom and the good. For the political left, the
causing of "offense" is the highest of all civic sins, yet the offense of
equating the treatment of Guantanamo detainees with the gulag millions
passed virtually unnoticed by them. No doubt about the reason: It serves the
left's agenda to discredit an administration and its policies--policies that
have brought to millions of people the prospects of democracy.

Am I making too much of the misuse of a single word? First, the group's use
of gulag wasn't a casual slip of the tongue; it was calculated. As the left
is pleased to often remind everyone, "words have consequences." And the
unacceptable consequence of the gulag comparison is the debasement of the
word "atrocity" and a general desensitizing of moral outrage.

On this Memorial Day, it might be worth a moment to remember that Guantanamo
Bay is run by Americans who do not deserve to be lumped together with a mass
slaughter of historic proportions. Certainly, we must be vigilant to prevent
any human-rights violations committed by all nations, including ours. But,
we need not tolerate this slander against the men and women of the American
military and the citizens who support them.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/o...commentary-hed

THIS IS A REC BOATS FORUM TALK ABOUT BOATS DUMB ASS!