With friends like these...

[Kevin Mackie]

I also find it interesting that the same Left that supports fileing lawsuits over the use of a christain cross on 150 year old city seal is so angered at the possible abuse of book.

You mean the same liberal left who gawk in wonder at works of art such as "Piss Christ" and "Dung Mary"??? No problem there.

[IJ]

Seems like the liberals are saying, "America could be doing better and isn't living up to its standdards and potential." And the conservatives are saying, "she's doing a lot better than most of the world and we should take that accomplisment seriously."

Can't we all get along? The prisoners and the guards desecrated the Koran, to me that sounds like two problems, not evidence that America is either garbage (supposed liberal view) or blameless (supposed conservative view).

Meanwhile, implying that the whole liberal left is somehow infatuated with the destruction of religion (for the sheer fun of being contrary, I suppose?) is entertaining but not enlightening.

[cxt]

IJ

Not saying the whole liberal left is trying to stamp out christianity--despite the recent remarks of Howard Dean.

(in which he publically cast/implied that to be a christain was a "bad" thing--thats not "me" that is the DNC head spinning it that way.)

What I am suggesting is that (to me at least) it stinks to get hysterical about the potential/possible desacration of one groups religious symbols and iconic material while refusing to do the same for another groups.
Or in the case of christainity---doing everything possible to remove ITS symbols and iconagraphic material.

(For the record I am not a practicing christain.)

Respect for one religon/group should require respect for all--or none.

Personally I am wavering between "dude its just paper, get over it" and "thats shameful and never should have happened but lets put it into proper perspective."

[Bill Glasheen]

Problems abound.

When you have groups like Amnesty International using terms such as "Gulag" to describe American treatment of POWs and Gitmo detainees, it does EVERYONE a disservice.

* It disrespects those who actually were tortured and/or killed in the past in truly horrifying circumstances. I have heard stories of Auschewitz. I have heard stories of the treatment of POWs by the Viet Cong. Imagine what people who actually went through such abuse think. It disrespects them and what they had to put up with.

* It acts as a red herring to actual abuse going on TODAY across the world.

* It makes our current members of the armed forces ill-prepared for the treatment they will get if captured today say by insurgents in Iraq.

* Such ridiculous, extreme language and tactics just closes minds, removes access to vital information, and impedes progress.

Double standards and hidden agendas abound. Usually I accept the hipocracy as a fact of modern life in a propaganda-filled world. But some days it gets a bit much.

- Bill

[Bill Glasheen]

June 11, 2005

GUANTANAMO

Amnesty International suffers from amnesia

BY ANNE APPLEBAUM

www.anneapplebaum.com

Amnesty International once knew the meaning of the word gulag and the importance of political neutrality. On its website, the organization still describes itself as ''independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion.'' In the Cold War era, this neutrality was important, because it prevented the organization's publications, whether on prison food or prison deaths, from being seen as propaganda for one side or another.

I don't know when Amnesty ceased to be politically neutral or at what point its leaders' views morphed into ordinary anti-Americanism. But surely Amnesty's recent misuse of the word ''gulag'' marks some kind of turning point. In the past few days, not only has Amnesty's secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. prison for enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, ''the gulag of our times,'' but Amnesty's U.S. director, William Schulz, has agreed that U.S. prisons for enemy combatants are ''similar at least in character, if not in size, to what happened in the gulag.'' In an interview, Schulz also said that foreign governments should prosecute U.S. officials, as if they were the equivalent of the Soviet Union's criminal leadership.

Thus Guantánamo is the gulag, President Bush is Stalin and the United States, in Khan's words, is a ''hyper-power'' that ''thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights'' just like the Soviet Union. In part, I find this comparison infuriating because in the Soviet Union it would have been impossible for the Supreme Court to order the administration to change its policies in Guántanamo Bay, as it has done, or for the media to investigate Abu Ghraib, as it has done, or for Khan to publish an independent report about anything at all.

Like Khan and Schulz, I am appalled by this administration's detention practices and interrogation policies, by the lack of a legal mechanism to judge the guilt of alleged terrorists, and by the absence of any outside investigation into reports of prison abuse. But I loathe these things precisely because the United States is not the Soviet Union, because our detention centers are not intrinsic to our political system and because they are therefore not ''similar in character'' to the gulag at all.

Most of all, though, I hate them because they are counterproductive. Like the Cold War, the war on terrorism is an ideological war, one that we will ''win'' when our opponents give up and join us, just like the East Germans who streamed over the Berlin Wall. But if the young people of the Arab world are to reject radical Islam and climb that wall, they will have to admire what they see on the other side. Almost never before have we so badly needed neutral, credible human-rights advocates who can investigate the U.S. detention policy in context, remembering that we live in a system whose courts, legislature and media can all effect change.

Amnesty, by misusing language, by discarding its former neutrality and by handing the administration an easy way to brush off ''ridiculous'' accusations, also deprives itself of what should be its best ally. The United States, as the world's largest and most powerful democracy, remains, for all its flaws, the world's best hope for the promotion of human rights. If Amnesty still believes in its stated mission, its leaders should push American democratic institutions to influence U.S. policy for the good of the world and not attack the American government for the satisfaction of its own political faction.

Anne Applebaum is a member of The Washington Post's editorial page staff.