Amnesty Can't Call A Gulag A Gulag

Let's take a look at the "Gulag" testimony by Chip Pitts, Pres. of Amnesty International, that so inflamed Rep. Sensenbrenner that he shut down the hearing. Then let's look at what they're not calling a gulag. (The following quotes are from WashTimes)

"It's the government's own reports, it's the reams of government memos that show we created a black hole, and the same principles or practices that were at play in the gulag -- disappearances, putting people in the gulag, stripping them, beating them -- these were practices that people that were there, we are now seeing in Guantanamo." [Governments that run gulags do not keep records, and do not have laws like the Freedom of Information Act, which AI and ACLU exploit. If we were a nation that ran gulags, they would not know about it.]

"It's not Amnesty that is putting the United States in this position, and it's not just Amnesty's reports. ... I think [the increase in reported terrorism is] more than just a correlation, it's causation." [Back to "We caused 9/11" thinking, which is false. You have a radical Islamic core that needs an issue to expand its base, and they are using the U.S. Also, spreading false stories of gulags and Koran flushings and the like fuels the flame, and AI is guilty of that.]

"I think it's absurd for the United States to create a legal black hole, and it's time to fill in that legal black hole and shut Guantanamo." [And do what? This reminds me of the "War is not the Answer" bumper stickers. I want a sign that says, "What is the Question?" because war often is the answer, just as Guantanamo is an answer. Without it, what would we do with these people who want to kill us, and who have information about others who would kill us?]

If AI were to call a true gulag a gulag, its stand would be more credible -- still not credible, but more credible. North Korea runs gulags, where generations are imprisoned gulags because of the perceived sins of a grandfather, and summary executions are common. AI is concerned about these camps, but here's the language it uses, from a 2004 AI report:

Three members of the same family, imprisoned for leaving North Korea without authorization, are reportedly at imminent risk of transfer to one of the country's political penal labour camps. Conditions in these camps are notoriously harsh and would further endanger their health, already thought to have been weakened by months of torture and ill-treatment in detention. ...

The three family members face imminent transfer to political penal labour camps, which are said to be severely overcrowded, with poor hygiene, grossly inadequate healthcare and crippling food shortages. Reports of beatings are common, and a combination of torture, disease and malnutrition leads to the deaths of many people.

Why are these "political penal labour camps," a phrase that implies there might be a political justification for the imprisonment, and not gulags? The word gulag does not appear in the report because it would serve no political purpose for AI. They aren't looking to drag down the North Korean government or start riots in the streets of South Korea, demanding accountability from Kim Il Jung.

No, they want to tear down America, so instead of doing something positive -- drawing attention to the real suffering of innocent people -- they draw attention to the imprisonment, in conditions a NoKo gulag prisoner would find heavenly, of known terrorists, persons captured on battlefields, and suspected accomplices of the al Qaeda international terror machine.

AI's gulag comparison is ridiciuloulsy overwrought. Here's a look at what Soviet Gulags were really all about, from a NYT review of Anne Applebaum's book, Gulag, A History:

Applebaum estimates that from 1929 through 1953 -- the years of high Stalinism -- more than 18 million people coursed through the camps, with a further six million being exiled to remote regions of the Soviet Union. The vast majority of these people were guilty of nothing. An Orwellian logic underlay the whole enterprise. As one police investigator explained to his victim: ''We never arrest anyone who is not guilty. And even if you weren't guilty, we can't release you, because then people would say that we are picking up innocent people.''

Particularly useful is Applebaum's account of the camps during World War II. It was precisely at this time that the system reached its peak of lethality. Fully a quarter of the inmates perished during 1942, but the appetite of the security forces was so insatiable that the gulag's population dropped less than 20 percent. Following the war, whole new categories of inmates flooded into the camps: German P.O.W.'s, anti-Communists from the western borderlands or from the new Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. Little known in the West, some 600,000 Japanese troops fell into Soviet hands, forced to labor for years after the cessation of hostilities; only a fraction ever returned home. Stalin also punished with deportation entire nationalities -- Chechens, Ingush and Crimean Tatars notably -- ostensibly for collaboration with the Nazis but, in fact, Applebaum argues persuasively, to eliminate nationalist resistance to Moscow.

That's what gulags are about -- massive imprisonment with negilible cause other than the suppression of internal threats, and the maintenance of the state of fear that a police state requires. That is not Guantanamo.