Amnesty International admits crying wolf, then cries wolf again
The pathetic episode of once-respected human rights watch dog Amnesty International’s attempt to smear American terrorist-detention camps as “Gulags” almost came to an end on Sunday, when the organization’s American spokesman William F. Schulz admitted that the detention facilities obviously aren’t Gulags. Said Schiulz on “Fox News Sunday”:
There’s no question. But what in size and in duration, there are not similarities between U.S. detention facilities and the gulag. People are not being starved in those facilities. They’re not being subjected to forced labor.
But I guess the Gulag meme is too good to give up for AI, so Schulz proceeded:
But there are some similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared — held in indefinite incommunicado detention without access to lawyers or a judicial system or to their families. And in some cases, at least, we know that they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed.
And those are similar at least in character if not in size to what happened in the gulag and in many other prison systems in world history.
With that reasoning it’s a wonder AI didn’t describe the detention facilities as “concentration camps.” Hell, there are some similarities, after all.
Meanwhile, in the real world, where Islamist terrorists and not American soldiers are the bad guys, our guys are doing their best to treat violent detainees with decency. It ain’t easy, as examplified by this Washington Times interview with two Gitmo guards:
“He was extremely aggressive from the moment we went in,” said the 28-year-old guard, whose job it was to “push the detainee back” as another guard quickly handcuffed the prisoner.
Before the cuffs could go on though, things went wrong and the detainee forced his hands up under the first guard’s plexiglass face mask and began digging for the eyeball.
“He tried to insert one finger into my eye socket, then he transitioned into a fishhook maneuver,” the guard said. “He got his finger into my mouth and was trying to rip my cheek off.” After another moment, the detainee’s hands were forced down and into the cuffs.
But at least the detainee didn’t “mishandle” a Koran, an offence comparable to genocide, if I understand mainstream media correctly.
