Shamnesty International

theist · June 3, 2005

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By Melana Zyla Vickers Published 06/03/2005

The torture and abuse of terrorist suspects is very much in the news these days, so it's interesting to note the advice on the topic found in an Al Qaeda training manual seized some time ago in the U.K. The manual says that when captured or facing trial, "brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by State Security." Noting the utility of the open U.S. media, the manual also calls "spreading rumors and writing statements that instigate people against the enemy" one of the top-five missions of the terrorist organization.

This is not to say that torture and abuse at the hands of American troops is always a figment of Al Qaeda propaganda: The Abu Ghraib prison scandal proves otherwise. But the manual sure puts Amnesty International's newest annual report, as well as recent claims of torture, Koran desecration, and other abuse, in perspective.

Al Qaeda knows better than any organization that its success depends on peeling both Muslim-world support and U.S. public support away from the Bush administration's war on terrorism. Consider the quasi-reasoned tone Osama bin Laden adopted in a recording he allegedly made last November, calling on the "people of America" to drop their support for the president. The recording was full of contemporary and historical allusions, as is the training manual. If Al Qaeda's savvy enough for that, it's savvy enough to know that civil liberties - even the civil liberties of accused bad guys - are a hot-button issue in the U.S.

In the U.S. alone, there are 65-plus lawsuits claiming abuse of detainees at American hands. There are still more legal demarches overseas. We've seen inaccurate Koran-desecration stories send Muslim crowds raging in protest. We have regular accounts of arrested terrorism suspects being sent to third countries where they face torture-driven interrogation. And, as if on cue, we have Amnesty International calling the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our time."

Naturally, the Bush administration is berating the organization for such a ridiculous comparison. After all, Guantanamo Bay's guards are under the microscope of human-rights lawyers all the time. The inmates are fairly treated. The guard-throws-Koran-in-toilet story was false. And claims that the inmates' detention oversteps the boundaries of international law have been responded to at the highest levels. Besides, the 500-600 Guantanamo detainees wouldn't be there if Al Qaeda hadn't killed 2,948 Americans and others on Sept 11, 2001.

Yet the civil-liberties argument continues. Combine its force with regular bad news out of Iraq, and an unnecessarily large amount of bungling by the Pentagon - such as failing to punish high-level officers for Abu Ghraib, or inadequately vetting the Newsweek report on the Koran when the reporters offered it - and it's quite difficult for the Bush administration to keep hearts and minds on its side.

Which is why it's partly up to the U.S. public to keep some perspective on the torture and abuse issue.

First and foremost, torture, abuse, killing, good guys running amok, these are all standard features of war. They occurred in the past and will again in the future. "War is cruelty," Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman said, and its cruelty is part of the reason the U.S. tries to avoid going to war in the first place. But of course, we are at war.

Second, human-rights watchdogs and lawyers are a veritable cottage industry these days. Whatever the international conflict, there is always a group of them around, wringing their hands, making their names known to newspapers, and pointing out, as if for the first time, that war is hell (another Sherman quotation). They're often well-meaning. But they may be getting wagged by the Al Qaeda training handbook without even knowing - or refusing to believe - it could be so.

Third, it's essential to know the messenger. In this case, Amnesty, the hand-wringer of the week, is no friend of American foreign policy. The group, whose roots lie with early 20th century leftists both here and in Britain, has always bent over backwards to make the capitalist U.S. look bad. Consider that the "Americas Regional Overview" in this 2005 annual report goes on at length about the U.S. and its detention camp, the U.S. and its horrible friend the government of Colombia, the U.S. and its evil counter-narcotics efforts in the region, yet makes not one mention of communist Fidel Castro's abominations in Cuba. Also, the report bends over backwards to blame the human-rights abuses of the quasi-communist Venezuelan government on those trying to unseat President Hugo Chavez.

The report's tone is reminiscent of its Cold War work, when Amnesty rather perversely thought it important to be even-handed in its assessment of Soviet human-rights abuses and our own. Considering Amnesty's fellow-traveler pedigree, perhaps it intended its Stalinist "gulag" comparison as a compliment.

The war against Al Qaeda has led U.S. troops and intelligence personnel to engage in some fairly despicable behavior, sometimes sanctioned, sometimes not. And this latest wave of complaints about the behavior won't be the last. Some of the behavior can be punished and stopped. But the war against terrorism is a real and necessary one, and immunization against its cruelties is necessary if the U.S. is to win.

Kulapavana · June 3, 2005

...are the favourite weapon of not just the Washington officials, but are a perrenial favourite of all kinds of crooks /images/graemlins/wink.gif (well... some "devotees" even claim these can be used in Lord's service too...)

theist · June 3, 2005

Do a search on Google if you are curious to learn what a gulag really is. They were slave labor prisons for disidents and criminals which housed millions set up by the communists just after the Soviet revolution.

Here are some brief comments from one site.

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THE GULAG

The Soviet system of forced labor camps was first established in 1919 under the Cheka, but it was not until the early 1930s that the camp population reached significant numbers. By 1934 the Gulag, or Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps, then under the Cheka's successor organization the NKVD, had several million inmates. Prisoners included murderers, thieves, and other common criminals--along with political and religious dissenters. The Gulag, whose camps were located mainly in remote regions of Siberia and the Far North, made significant contributions to the Soviet economy in the period of Joseph Stalin. Gulag prisoners constructed the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Baikal-Amur main railroad line, numerous hydroelectric stations, and strategic roads and industrial enterprises in remote regions. GULAG manpower was also used for much of the country's lumbering and for the mining of coal, copper, and gold.

Stalin constantly increased the number of projects assigned to the NKVD, which led to an increasing reliance on its labor. The Gulag also served as a source of workers for economic projects independent of the NKVD, which contracted its prisoners out to various economic enterprises.

Conditions in the camps were extremely harsh. Prisoners received inadequate food rations and insufficient clothing, which made it difficult to endure the severe weather and the long working hours; sometimes the inmates were physically abused by camp guards. As a result, the death rate from exhaustion and disease in the camps was high. After Stalin died in 1953, the Gulag population was reduced significantly, and conditions for inmates somewhat improved. Forced labor camps continued to exist, although on a small scale, into the Gorbachev period, and the government even opened some camps to scrutiny by journalists and human rights activists. With the advance of democratization, political prisoners and prisoners of conscience all but disappeared from the camps.

June 3, 2005

<h3>Amnesty International ignored this testimony from inside real gulags</h3>

Patriotism was, in Samuel Johnson’s 18th century world, ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ Johnson did not say patriotism was scandalous, but charged corrupt public figures with using patriotism to excuse their crimes. It appears, early in the 21st century, that ‘human rights’ will be the last refuge of modern scoundrels who twist the truth to suit their political agenda. Amnesty International’s bizarre statements calling America ‘the leading purveyor and practitioner of torture’ and threatening leading Americans with arrest for war crimes if they travel abroad lean that way.

These statements by William Schultz, AI US executive director, are just the latest in a trend. Amnesty has been pushing the envelope of propriety for a long time. It has developed a deserved reputation as a hard-left, anti-American institution more concerned with promotion of its own political agenda than with succor for the oppressed. Its not as if the world suddenly has a dearth of oppressed people for whom AI could legitimately speak. But rather, the organization has cynically ignored those hapless souls in order to aim its venom at America. And make not mistake, Amnesty’s accusations are the most loathsome and despicable imaginable. Especially offensive is Amnesty’s calling the terrorist prison in Guantanamo an American ‘gulag.’

As the Wall Street Journal notes, compared to the Soviet gulag in which millions died, "this is just one more sign of the moral degradation of Amnesty International." It is worse than lack of principle or judgment to use a highly charged word like ‘gulag’ recklessly; a word with such a terrible connotation. It is an intentional distortion of fact. Furthermore, Amnesty’s failure to speak up when such a word fully applies is an immoral, criminal omission for an organization that professes in holier-than-thou terms to be speaking for those with no voice.

In contrast to its incessant attacks on America, for at least the past 10 years Amnesty has give a pass to the world’s worst human rights violator: Kim Jong Il’s North Korea. In 1995 a story broke in the Los Angeles Times about the extent of North Korea’s death camps and the extraordinarily large percentage of the population that was imprisoned in them. (At any given time Kim Jong Il holds an estimated 300,000 prisoners out of a population of approximately 22 million.) Prisoners are sentenced without trial, executions are frequent, human beings are subject to experimentations with poison gasses, slave labor is common, there is no medical attention for the prisoners, and starvation is rampant. Prisoners are worked, often to death, in so-called ‘economic zones’ under slave conditions, and are forced to do extraordinarily heavy labor in mines, roads, and tunnels without proper equipment or adequate food. They die unmourned and lie in unmarked graves.

The LA Times story was based on testimony from two North Korean defectors – both later testified before Congress about their experiences in a real gulag, Kim Jong Il’s prison. One defector, Kang Chol Hwan, authored a book, Aquariums of Pyongyang, that fully described his horrific personal experiences and ultimate escape from the hellhole of North Korea.

Significant in the Times story was a brief note that both of these defectors had described their experiences to Amnesty International. To the shock of those who knew the full story, Amnesty categorically rejected their sworn testimony on the grounds that it was "untrustworthy." How can AI have arrived at such a stunning verdict? Because both Kang and the other defector were then living in South Korea. Amnesty had had South Korea in its sights for years even though the military government had collapsed in 1987 – a full eight years previously – and democracy was blooming there. Such an arbitrary decision to ignore Kim Jong Il’s concentration camps was not unique to this occasion.

Over the next few years a succession of witnesses and escapees including the noted Doctors Without Borders member, Dr. Norbert Vollertsen, testified in several venues about the government-sponsored horrors taking place in North Korea. Vollertsen even brought a series of shocking photos with him showing starving children in striped prison uniforms terrifyingly similar to photos of Nazi death camps. Amnesty ignored and dismissed Dr. Vollertsen’s reports.

Similarly, testimony from Sun Ok Lee, herself a former Party member in North Korea, falsely accused and sentenced to six years in forced labor camps. One would think that her autobiography, Eyes of the Tailless Animals: Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman, along with reams of Congressional testimony detailing her brutal experiences would be sufficient to get at least an expression of interest from Amnesty, but it has not been so.

A bit of background may show some of the reasons why Amnesty International is willing to expose nits in the eye of the United States but overlook logs in communist dictatorships abroad. The US executive director of AI, William Schultz, has been with the organization for several years. He was influential in rejecting the 1995 North Korean defector’s testimony. Schultz is also reported to be affiliated with groups such as the Unitarian Universalist Association that was extreme in its condemnation of South Korea during the 1970s and 1980s but mute in any judgment about the brutality occurring north of the DMZ in the evil twin, North Korea. Many of his colleagues have visited North Korea, celebrating such occasions as Kim Il Sung’s birthday and enthusiastically participating in seminars on the ‘Juche Ideology.’

The blatant hypocrisy displayed by Amnesty International and William Schultz is absolutely unacceptable. To ignore completely as Amnesty has done the hapless situation in North Korea in a real gulag and of escaped refugees who are forcibly repatriated back to North Korea from China to certain imprisonment or execution, is reprehensible and inexcusable. This immoral stance is exacerbated by the crocodile tears the organization sheds over detained terrorists bent on mass killing of innocent held in a detention center.

The Journal summed it perfectly: ‘A "human rights" group that can’t distinguish between…death camps and detention centers for terrorists who kill civilians can’t be taken that seriously." A pox on Amnesty International for abrogating its responsibility to the suffering people of the world in order to further its hard left political agenda. We have seen more than enough hypocrisy and anti-Americanism from Amnesty for us to take counter action: as a start AI ought to have its IRS status investigated for improper behavior by a so-called educational, charitable group. Concomitantly American media needs immediately to pull all Amnesty public service announcement fundraising appeals off the air. Our charity can better go to organizations like the Defense Forum Foundation and the North Korea Freedom Coalition that are legitimately working to free the oppressed peoples of North Korea.

---Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu