In the Washington Post today, Pavel Litvinov says Gitmo is 'No American 'Gulag'

"Don't you think that there's an enormous difference?"

Amnesty International accomplished many good things. For those "prisoners of conscience" dictatorships throughout the world, Amnesty International meant freedom and solace. Somebody cared. Somebody acted on their behalf. Amnesty International once acted as the conscience of the world. Now it has become a pale characture of itself. It's leadership has stooped to inflammatory rhetoric that owes more to the Stalinism AI once opposed than the honesty it advocated. Even a former prisoner of conscience could not abide in silence, as he explains:

Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet "prisoner of conscience" adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty's executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the "gulag of our time."

"Don't you think that there's an enormous difference?" I asked him.


"Sure," he said, "but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees."

What a contemptable lack of integrity. AI's biased leadership compares Gitmo to Gulags to "attract attention." They compare the suffering of Soviet dissidents like Mr. Litvinov to terrorist butchers caught on Afghanistan's battlefields. They equate how the Evil Empire and the Land of the Brave treat their prisoners by damning implication. Mr. Litvinov begs to differ:

By any standard, Guantanamo and similar American-run prisons elsewhere do not resemble, in their conditions of detention or their scale, the concentration camp system that was at the core of a totalitarian communist system.

For example, incidents of desecration of the Koran in Guantanamo by U.S. personnel have been widely reported. But those Korans were surely not brought to Guantanamo by the prisoners themselves from Afghanistan. They were supplied by the U.S. administration -- in spite of the obvious fact that most of the prisoners misguidedly found in the Koran the inspiration for their violent hatred of the United States.

By contrast, Russian author Andrei Sinyavsky, who was sentenced in 1966 to seven years' forced labor for his writing, was approached one evening soon after his arrival in a labor camp by a prisoner who quietly asked Sinyavsky whether he wanted to listen to a recital of the biblical account of the apocalypse. (Possession of a Bible was strictly prohibited in the gulag.) The man took Sinyavsky to the furnace room, where a group of people were squatting in the dark recesses. In the light of the furnace flame, one of the men got up and started to recite the biblical passages by heart. When he stopped, the stoker, an old man, said: "And now you, Fyodor, continue." Fyodor got up and recited from the next chapter. The whole text of the Bible was distributed among these prisoners, ordinary Russians who were spending 10 to 25 years in the gulag for their religious beliefs. They knew the texts by heart and met regularly to repeat them so that they would not forget. And this happened in 1967, when the gulag had become smaller and the Soviet regime milder than it had been under Stalin.

There is no moral equivalence between Gitmo and the Soviet Gulags. To suggest otherwise demeans the ruthless experience of injustice that victims and survivors of the Stalinist terror camps suffered. Worse, as Mr. Litvinov finally points out:

Words are important. When Amnesty spokesmen use the word "gulag" to describe U.S. human rights violations, they allow the Bush administration to dismiss justified criticism and undermine Amnesty's credibility. Amnesty International is too valuable to let it be hijacked by politically biased leaders.

Whether the President dismisses "justified criticism" or not people can debate. His point is still well-taken. If Amnesty International wants to preserve its hard-earned reputation as a voice of legitimate conscience, it must cease it's over-the-top, intellectually dishonest propaganda and stop character-assasinating the United States. It does not serve it's mission of protecting human rights. It does make AI lool like just another irrelevent and hopelessly liberal institution that doesn't get today's world.