Moral Clarity

Amnesty International has come out with a report that calls Guantanamo Bay the gulag of our time. I’m glad to say that our executive branch hasn’t wasted any time in reacting to the report.

“I’m aware of the Amnesty International report and it’s absurd… The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world.”
President George W. Bush

“The United States has done more to advance the cause of freedom, has liberated more people from tyranny over the course of the 20th century and up to the present day than any other nation in the history of the world.”
Vice President Richard A. Cheney

AMEN. No, the US isn’t perfect. On a normal day, I’d find plenty to criticize in Mr. Bush’s policies. But as extremists frame the debate so far to the left with arguments like “the Iraq war is about oil and fighting Daddy’s war,” and other nonsense such as “Guantanamo is the gulag of our time,” I find it hard to get to my criticism. As Howard Dean said to Ralph Nader in trying to persuade him to give up his candidacy last fall, “When the house is on fire, don’t worry about changing the furniture.”

Where is Amnesty’s moral clarity? Guantanamo violates US and international law and should be shut down! A valid point perhaps. Yet if you check out Amnesty’s Iraq index, you’ll notice that they haven’t criticized insurgents/terrorists/suicide bombers in half a year. Their last thirteen reports all criticize the new Iraqi government for—guess what!—sentencing terrorists to death (what about the terrorist executions, without trial, of civilians?), detentions without counsel (what about hostages held and beheaded by terrorists?), and their fear for women’s rights in the new regime (with the alternative being what under Bin Laden’s cohorts?). In more than 170 articles about Iraq since the 2003 invasion, only six criticize the terrorist criminals who are the cause of all the murder and violence in Iraq.

And this isn’t an isolated example: it’s a core problem with Amnesty’s current strategy, as I noted in this take on their criticism of the King in Nepal two months ago. You’ll thus excuse me if I have a hard time taking Amnesty seriously on anything.

Perhaps Dr. A. R. Wallace can relate his personal experiences with Amnesty in the comments section or in a guest post. To relate his story second hand, Amnesty’s original mission was lobbying authoritarian dictators with hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the world who wrote letters to the leaders of countries who kept political prisoners. That was a noble mission and an effective strategy that they effectively pursued through the 1970s and 1980s. But today, Amnesty is just another left-leaning NGO that does nothing proactive and hops on the US foreign policy bashing bandwagon at a moments notice. Chest-thumping, self-righteous criticism might make you feel good, but it does not make for an effective policy.

If I said that being a Republican in Hollywood was like being a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, people would call me on that, right? The same should go for Amnesty’s use of “gulag.” They are more than slightly overstating the Gitmo reality, where several hundred are held, dozens have been released, and none have been killed. Need I remind you what the USSR’s gulag was really about:

In 1931”“32, Gulag had approximately 200,000 prisoners in the camps; in 1935 — approximately 800,000 in camps and 300,000 in colonies (annual averages), and in 1939 about 1.3 millions in camps and 350,000 in colonies… During World War II, Gulag populations declined sharply, owing to mass “releases” of hundreds of thousands of prisoners who were conscripted and sent directly to the front lines, but mainly due to a steep rise in mortality in 1942”“43. After WWII the number of inmates in prison camps and colonies rose again sharply and reached the number of approximately 2.5 million people by the early 1950s (about 1.7 millions of whom in camps).

Finally, Amnesty should note that their self-righteous reports don’t do them any good—indeed, it just gives Mr. Bush et al. the right to repeat with more authority what a majority of Americans believe: that the US is a force for good and freedom.