Multiple choice: The "Gulag of our times" is a Chinese labor camps; b Castro's dungeons; or c North Korean prisons

National Review, June 20, 2005

Multiple choice: The "Gulag of our times" is a) Chinese labor camps; b) Castro's dungeons; or c) North Korean prisons. Amnesty International has an answer: d) none of the above. Their 2005 report on human rights compares the American detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to the notorious Soviet penal colonies.

It also accuses U.S. leaders of war crimes, and the executive director of Amnesty International USA wants foreign governments to seize and prosecute American leaders traveling abroad. Amnesty is apparently of one mind with the International Committee of the Red Cross, an inspector of which, while visiting a U.S. detention center in Iraq, said, "You people are no better than and no different than the Nazi concentration camp guards." (Remember that statement next time you hear someone mocking Bush's desire for moral clarity.) It may be pointless to respond to allegations so unhinged, but one should remember that the detainees in question are captured enemy combatants, and as such may be held until the cessation of hostilities; that approved U.S. interrogation techniques violate neither American law nor the U.N. Convention Against Torture; that cases of interrogators' going beyond approved limits--as at Abu Ghraib--are aberrations; and that these perpetrators have been swiftly punished. What the U.S. is guilty of is running afoul of Amnesty International and the Red Cross's political agenda.