Amnesty from Reason

Yesterday, Amnesty International released its annual international report on human rights. Judging by these comments, Amnesty has now officially filed for moral and intellectual bankruptcy:

"Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time," Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan said as the London-based group issued a 308-page annual report that accused the United States of shirking its responsibility to set the bar for human rights protections.

Yes, that gulag. The barbarous system of Soviet forced labor camps that over 25 million people passed through between 1929-1953, nearly 3 million of whom never came back. One of the most evil systems of mass oppression and enslavement in all of history, eclipsed only by the Nazi extermination camps. This, in Ms. Khan's view, is a valid metaphor for the detention of a few hundred suspected terrorists at Guantanamo.

If Ms. Khan wants to know what a real gulag looks like, she need only turn her attention to North Korea, where an estimated 200,000 people are imprisoned in horrific labor camps. Of course, the inmates of North Korea's gulag, unlike the Guantanamo detainees, are not separated from their loved ones. This is because in North Korea, when you get sent to a labor camp, your whole family goes with you. Kim Jong-Il: the family friendly despot. Of course, as Arthur Chrenkoff points out, the Amnesty report spends 5 and a half pages on the horrors of Guantanamo, and only two and a half on North Korea. Good to know they have their priorities in order.

Another indicator of AI's agenda is the following sentence from their press release:

The “war on terror” appeared more effective in eroding international human rights principles than in countering international “terrorism”.

The quotation marks are from the original. Amnesty International, like so many others, has clearly made delegitimizing America's efforts to combat Islamist barbarism its top priority. In the process, they have forfeited the right to be taken seriously as an objective, credible monitor of human rights abuses.


(Credit to Watch for many of the links)