Ya Bass

A couple of weeks ago I was astonished to read Amnesty International describe the prison at Guantanamo Bay as the "gulag of our time". Undoubtedly there are abuses of power occurring in there but a reasoned critique of this should be made, not hysterical statements comparing it to a Gulag. Guantanamo has a few hundred prisoners, the Soviet Gulags held over 2 million following the purges in 1937 alone and cumulatively over 10 million throughout their existence. This is a low end estimate, many respected historians such as Anne Applebaum have put the figure at closer to 25 million. Over a million prisoners are documented to have died between 1934 to 1953 and the actual figures are most probably higher than this (in some camps the death rate was as high as 80% of prisoners in the first months of incarceration).

Guantanamo the Gulag of our times? I don't think so.

Nick Cohen mentions in the Observer today that he has:

an uneasy feeling that it [Amnesty International]is losing universal principles and treating the abuse of rights by the United States as worse than similar or more grotesque abuses by others.

About a month ago I read an interview with the head of Amnesty Internationl Irene Khan (I thought this interview was in the Guardian but I can't find it in their online archive and google hasn't helped me find the original either, so the following should be treated with some scepticism until I can find it) where she stated that Amnesty was intending to focus their resources on abuse in certain key countries - a corollary of which would be Amnesty not having such an universalist focus (even acounting for it's current selection bias where a disproportionate number of AI reports focus on relatively more democratic and open countries).

Links for comment on the report:

Cronaco

Socialism in an Age of Waiting

Shuggy's blogspot

Eric the Unread

Normblog