Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Does Amnesty International think we are stupid or ignorant?

Dennis Byrne:

By labeling the U.S. anti-terrorism prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the "gulag of our times," the people of Amnesty International must think we're stupid or ignorant.

Stupid or ignorant enough to fall for the assertion that whatever is happening at Guantanamo is the legal and moral equivalent of what happened in the hundreds of slave labor and concentration camps scattered throughout the former communist Soviet Union. Equivalent to a system that brutalized tens of millions, of which untold millions died of starvation, exposure, exhaustion, torture, illness or execution.

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Either Amnesty International isn't aware of this history, or it knows of it but is lying for the sake of a good sound bite. In either case, the group has lost credibility to speak on behalf of the victims of human-rights violations. Moreover, Amnesty International has dishonored millions of gulag victims.

Of course, the media took the bait. Mindlessly and without hesitation, they repeated the gulag charge, as if Amnesty International says it is so, it must be so. If the media felt compelled to report that kind of remark, at least in the interests of balance and accuracy, they should have added a brief sentence noting that the gulag was a network of old Soviet concentration camps to which millions were sent to suffer and die. An Associated Press report, found on The New York Times Web site, took that course, but only made matters worse by asserting that "thousands," not millions, died in the gulag. Haven't Times editors read the newspaper's own review of Applebaum's book? No wonder the media deserve such public contempt.

Amnesty International's reckless use of such a loaded word and the media's unquestioning acceptance of group's assertion as fact prove to be a useful insight into the warped mindset of the political left, and its compulsion to believe that the United States and President Bush are everywhere the enemies of compassion, justice, freedom and the good. For the political left, the causing of "offense" is the highest of all civic sins, yet the offense of equating the treatment of Guantanamo detainees with the gulag millions passed virtually unnoticed by them. No doubt about the reason: It serves the left's agenda to discredit an administration and its policies--policies that have brought to millions of people the prospects of democracy.

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It is actually the left that is so ignornat of history as to believe the nonsense about Gitmo being a Gulag. It is as mindless as the Bush/Hilter comparisons which also demonstrate that the left doesn't know much about history.