Don't know much about history--Amnesty International edition

Washington Times:

Gen. Richard B. Myers yesterday condemned as "absolutely irresponsible" an Amnesty International report that compared prisoner treatment at Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet gulag, adding that 100 out of 68,000 detainees held in the war against terrorism were abused.
"It's very small compared to the population of detainees we've handled," said Gen. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also noted that many of the abuses have produced courts-martial and other punishments.
The London-based human rights organization called the U.S. facility in Guantanamo Bay "the gulag of our time," comparing it to the Soviet Union's slave-labor camps where millions of people died.
Amnesty International also suggested that foreign governments investigate senior U.S. officials involved in "torture scandals" and arrest and question Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, former CIA Director William Tenet, and Vice President Dick Cheney.
"I think it's irresponsible. I think it's absolutely irresponsible," Gen. Myers told "Fox News Sunday."
"I think I'd ask them to go look up the definition of gulag as commonly understood. We've had 68,000 detainees since this conflict against violent extremism started. We've had 325 investigations into alleged abuse. We've had 100 cases of substantiated abuse and there are 100 individuals that have had some sort of action taken, either court-martial or administrative action," Gen. Myers said.

...

Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident sentenced to the gulag, also criticized the Guantanamo comparison, telling Time magazine this week that the Amnesty report lacks credibility.
"I have very serious criticisms of Amnesty. There is no moral clarity. It doesn't differentiate between what I call fear societies and free societies," Mr. Sharansky said.
"In the democratic world, there are violations of human rights, but they are revealed and dealt with. In a fear society, there are no violations of human rights because human rights just don't exist," said Mr. Sharansky, who now lives in Israel and has served in its parliament and Cabinet. "Amnesty International says it doesn't support or oppose any political system, so it ends up with reports that show a moral equivalence" among regimes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more