Last week, Amnesty International called the detention center at Guantanamo Bay a "gulag," comparing it to the network of Soviet prison camps where tens of thousands of people were held under extremely harsh conditions for decades for alleged political crimes. AI’s Secretary General Irene Khan in a recent speech: Guantanamo has become the gulag [of] our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law. … In 2004 thousands of people were held by the US in Iraq, hundreds in Afghanistan and undisclosed numbers in undisclosed locations.
AI is calling on the US Administration to "close Guantanamo and disclose the rest". What we mean by this is: either release the prisoners or charge and prosecute them with due process. … In 2004 our Report recorded incidents of religious humiliation of detainees in US custody, growing anti-Semitism in western Europe, including France and Belgium, and Islamophobia in Europe and North America. Ironic that this should happen as we mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
This is the sort of hogwash that destroys any credibility AI might actually be able to induce and maintain. The detainees at Gitmo need to be there because they are a danger to society anywhere else. Send them back to Afghanistan and turn them loose to kill and maim Afghanis and Americans again…or enslave women and prohibit girls from attending school? As Gen. McAuliffe told the Nazis at Bastogne in December 1944 when he was offered the opportunity to surrender – NUTS!
Gulag indeed! Ms. Kahn apparently has no conception whatever of what inhumane prison conditions are. Ask the American survivors of the Bataan death march who actually survived their enslavement in Japan’s coal mines 1942-45, starved almost to death. Ask the American POWs who spent months or years in the German stalags and/or concentration camps, while German and Italian prisoners in this country never had it so good, many of them working the farms in the Bluegrass and eating high on the hog…and being paid for it. The Afghan thugs at Gitmo are probably living better than they ever have, studying their Korans and remarking the parts that order them to “kill the infidel (Americans)” whenever it is possible to do so. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has made it abundantly clear that the Gitmo inmates have their Korans and are availed of special provisions for their religious beliefs, including the proper food and the opportunity to pray. Prisoners in other places are lucky to get weak soup and a slice of bread per day…or unlucky enough to have their heads chopped off.
Is it any wonder that there’s some Islamophobia in Europe and North America? In the first place, the Koran DOES approve – even demand – the killing of infidels. Using four planes as ballistic missiles and killing 3,000 people in a matter of minutes in the name of Allah is not exactly obeying the Golden Rule, found in the Holy Bible. Olde Europe is gradually becoming Muslim, since the native birth rates in countries such as France and Germany are below sustainable native levels while the rates among the Muslims are much higher. Europeans need to worry – big-time.
Kahn and her gang need to realize that the rank and file are not much concerned with Gitmo or Abu Ghraib (Saddam’s little gang), knowing full well that people are not being tortured in these places. If they get their feelings hurt over a few things, so what! They haven’t minded killing innocent people by the thousands. The Holy Bible could be flushed into sewers all over the world and AI would not likely have anything to say. Nor would most Americans because they have better sense than to believe their destiny is tied up in documents, sacred or secular.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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