US detainees

The Christian Science Monitor has a commentary on the issues related to Guantanamo Bay and Amnesty International. Amnesty called Guantanamo the "gulag of our times" and the Bush Administration flipped their lids. Here's the bottom line, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

Yet beneath this struggle over spin, the two sides appeared to be making different points. The word "gulag" is ugly on several levels - harsh on the ear, harsher in meaning. The administration focused on the Soviet gulag's human cost, making the point that whatever abuses have occurred at US detention centers are a grain of sand compared with the hundreds of thousands of casualties suffered by those who disappeared into Soviet prisons. Amnesty International was trying to make a point about the mystery and injustice it believes is inherent in the US approach to detainees - that many are being held indefinitely without trial, in unknown locations.

Leaders of the human rights group have conceded that their language may have overreached: On Sunday William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a broadcast interview that the gulag comparison "is not an exact or literal analogy."

But he noted that his group is far from alone in criticizing the underlying tenets of the US detention system. US courts have ruled against certain aspects; internal military investigations have found disturbing incidents of abuse, even murder, from Abu Ghraib to Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld offered to resign in April 2004, when pictures of Abu Ghraib practices first surfaced. The US government has undertaken some 370 military investigations into the charges, with some 130 personnel facing some degree of punishment.

While the Bush administration has trumpeted the cause of freedom around the world, it has said much less about the corresponding value of justice, says George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment. Yet to advance its interests, mollify its friends, and quiet its adversaries, it must be concerned not only that justice be done, but be seen to be done, in its actions.

If nothing else, Amnesty International's use of "gulag" in relation to US actions may bring home to the administration just how much other nations' perceptions of US morality have declined.

"They're trying to jar the [US] system and say, 'You're doing what the Soviets did, remember them?' " says Perkovich.