Political Amnesty

Babble on.

Last night on CBC radio, I heard a clip of some Amnesty International twit calling Guantanamo Bay the "gulag of our time." I made a mental note to blog about what a completely ludicrous statement that was, about how far AI has fallen, yadda, yadda. Fortunately for all of you, a much better writer beat me to it:

The sheer ignorance of that statement is astounding. How many people are being held at Guantanamo? Between 500 and 600. Read the full AI report. Try to ignore the hysterical tone. Compare what is going on in Guantanamo to what happened in the Soviet gulag (I can only assume that is the gulag to which Khan is referring): more than twenty million people were condemned to spend time in the gulag; more than four million died there. Four million. Even if the US had slaughtered every single person who ever passed through the gates of Gitmo, the number wouldn't approach one thousand.

If you read the whole piece, as I would strongly encourage you to, Bob makes mention of his general respect for Amnesty International and its mission. I used to share that respect. I remember being deeply affected in high-school learning of the brutality of the Pinochet regime in Chile through Amnesty International. Exposing that sort of systematic, ongoing, unrepentant abuse is an extremely important task, one at which AI excelled.

That's what makes AI Secretary General Khan's statement so irresponsible. When a trusted organization engages in such obvious hyperbole about such a critically serious subject, it does immeasurable damage to its own credibility. In the case of Amnesty, that loss of credibility eventually hurts the political prisoners and victims of real torture they try to protect. Calling Gitmo the "gulag of our time" cheapens the much greater suffering of state victims in North Korea, to pick one example. How is Amnesty supposed to describe those concentration camps at this point? The "double gulags of our time?" By using this terminology, Amnesty has put an equals sign between groups of prisoners whose situations are wildly different. I believe that can only lessen our sympathy for those whose plight is the most dire.

I find it disgraceful that an organization devoted to alleviating human suffering should dilute our sympathy for true victims through such blind partisanship and incompetence.

I'm not suggesting that Amnesty International ignore the extrajudicial situation in Guantanamo - far from it. Point out loud and long and clear that the U.S. can't have it both ways: the prisoners are either POW's, in which case military protocols apply, or they aren't, in which case civilian ones should. This legal pergatory at Gitmo should shame a country built on the rule of law. But the failure to place this particular American disgrace in its proper context set against state-sanctioned mutilation, mass executions, and the extermination of entire families to stifle dissent is exactly what drives committed, principled liberals from the modern left.

As long as they allow politics, rather than suffering to drive their agenda, they will have forfeited my support. What a crying shame.

Babble off.

Update: It turns out Tarantino isn't the only fine fellow who can write more eloquently on this topic than I can. Read this WaPo editorial, and thank Damian Penny for pointing it out to me:

It's always sad when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse. It's particularly sad when the institution is Amnesty International, which for more than 40 years has been a tough, single-minded defender of political prisoners around the world and a scourge of left- and right-wing dictators alike. True, Amnesty continues to keep track of the world's political prisoners, as it has always done, and its reports remain a vital source of human rights information. But lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United States.
...
Turning a report on prisoner detention into another excuse for Bush-bashing or America-bashing undermines Amnesty's legitimate criticisms of U.S. policies and weakens the force of its investigations of prison systems in closed societies. It also gives the administration another excuse to dismiss valid objections to its policies as "hysterical."

I'll say it again: what a crying shame.