June 07, 2005

Dennis Prager Takes On Amnesty International

Not one to mince words, columinst and talk show host Dennis Prager is letting Amnesty International (AI) have it with both barrels.

The topic is, of course, the comparison made recently of the prison at Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet Gulag. AI's secretary general Irene Khan said in a speech:

Guantanamo has become the gulag our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law.

If Guantanamo evokes images of Soviet repression, "ghost detainees" � or the incommunicado detention of unregistered detainees - bring back the practice of "disappearances" so popular with Latin American dictators in the past.

That, of course, is nonsense, and Prager spells it out for us:

For the record, at Guantanamo there are about 520 prisoners, the vast majority, if not all, of whom have been rounded up in anti-terror warfare. They were non-uniformed terrorists who are not subject to Geneva Convention rules on prisoners. But even if they did wear uniforms, they would await release at the end of hostilities. They are, even according to Schultz, provided with medical care and a fine diet that honors their religious codes, and they are allowed to practice their religion.

Now compare the estimated 20-30 million prisoners sent to the string of camps across the Soviet Union. They obtained no medical care, were served portions of food inadequate to human survival, and were frozen and worked to death by the millions. Moreover, virtually everyone sent there was entirely innocent of any crime. Every prisoner of the Gulag would have given anything to be a prisoner in Guantanamo.

Prager continues to cite just how bad things were for those in Stalin's Gulag. It's not a pretty read. He also points out that hatred of America, and specific hatred of George W. Bush, is a big motivator behind the current AI stand.

I couldn't agree more. When an organization that says it stands for human rights can trivialize the brutality of the Gulag in order to score a meaningless point against President Bush and American policy, that organization loses all credibility.

There's a word for it: pathetic.

Show Comments »