A gulag by any other name would be just as bad

June 11, 2005

Guest Post by Morbo

I wish Amnesty International had not called the Guantanamo Bay detention center a “gulag.”

It’s not because I think conditions there are cushy. The existence of this camp, where detainees are housed without access to attorneys and with no charges being filed against them, is a stain on our Constitution. It’s no gulag, but it’s nothing to brag about.

The use of that unfortunate term played right into the Bush Administration’s hands. Suddenly the debate is about whether we’re running a gulag when the debate should be about whether this camp, and others like it, should exist at all. I say no, because they offend American values.

Numerous horror stories have come out of Guantanamo and the other camps. Last week, as the Carpetbagger noted, the administration pulled a “Friday night shuffle” and admitted that copies of the Koran had been mishandled at Guantanamo. In other cases, suspected terrorists have been subjected to “extraordinary rendition” — pulled out of the camps and shipped off to allied governments that have reputations for not respecting human rights. There they are tortured. American justice once set the gold standard. Under Bush, it has become a system of iron and rust.

A recent New York Times editorial called on Americans to get back to the basic values of our legal system.

If legitimate legal cases can be made under American law against any of the more than 500 remaining in Guantanamo detainees, they should be made in American courts, as they should have been all along. If, as the administration says, some of these prisoners are active, dangerous members of a conspiracy to commit terrorism against the United States, there must be legitimate charges to file against them.

Once we return to core legal values of our Constitution, there will be no more need for debates over whether place like Guantanamo are called gulags, detention camps or something else. We’ll just call them what they are: mistakes.

I ususally agree with you, Morbo, but respectfully not this time. Last Sunday, Chris Wallace on FNN tried to bully the International spokesman for Amnesty International and, as to your very point, this spokesman said, “If we hadn’t used the term ‘gulag,’ Chris, I don’t think you would have had us on your show, even if we had asked to appear.”

The Amnesty International spokesman clearly articulated that while there is not a direct correlation between the U.S. practices and the Soviet gulag, the CHARACTER is the same: of disapperaring people, secret detention camps, no visits or contact with family or lawyers, no changes or trials, physical abuse and officially-condoned torture, and even deaths and murders of detainees. THAT was the overall thrust of the Amnesty report, and it DOES fit — the fact that the U.S. administration does not want to hear it about itself when it has consistently used Amnesty International in the past against regimes the U.S. thinks are despotic — does not change the underlying findings, all of which are thoroughly documented and verified.

The Soviet gulags lasted more than 70 years; the U.S. actions only 3 1/2 years so far — what will we look like in another 66 years, with the entire Muslim world at war with us because of our outrageous actions IN THEIR LANDS? Consider what the Bushies are doing and/or trying to do: reauthorize and expand the civil liberties-destroying USA PATRIOT Act; defiance of court (even Supreme Court) rulings; continuing secrecy of government actions like Cheney’s enegy task force; massive losses and hacking of conficential personal data with no action taken to force private entities to protect it (quere: is someone inside OUR government creating a “big brother” database on each of us?); the new REAL ID Act, that will require we take birth certificates and another form of I.D. just to get or renew our driver’s licenses; forced reliance on electronic voting that can be hacked without any vote-by-vote counting or verification; over 68,000 detentions so far on the “War on Terror” that we know of. I could go on and on, but in 66 years I wonder whether America will not only have a gulag fully equal in all its depravity to that of the U.S.S.R., but whether we will have our own form of totalitarian gaggle of nations akin to the old Soviet Bolc: we already have the U.S., Afghanistan and Iraq; who’s next? North Korea? Iran? Syria? Turkey (which keeps getting closed out of the E.U.)? Africa?

BushCo’s reaction to the hard truth from an independent source is the explantion of why there have been no truly independent investigations into any of the fraud, deceit, and crimes this administration is continuing to perpetrate on America. How else to explain Sensenbrenner’s abominable behavior yesterday during the House Judiciary Committee Hearing on the USA PATRIAOT Act? These Rethugs have no desire for transparency, to honest debate, to open dialogue, to protecting minority rights and civil liberties.

Bottom line: if the word “gulag” had been omitted, then this report would have been entirely ignored by the media, thanks to the spinning that the Bushies do on all bad news. No, the word “gulag” finally got this on the radar screen of both the media and the American people. I for one am glad of it.

  • Its irrelevant what they are called, since the bottom line is that these detention centers are an affront to all that the USA holds near and dear.

  • Every time the Bush administration has to explain why Guantanamo is NOT a gulag is one more reminder of the fact that the US is holding prisoners under questionable circumstances–and one more opportunity to get the media interested in covering what actually is happening. I agree with Analytical Liberal. This debate over semantics also speaks to the Howard Dean “controversy.” No matter what, at least people are talking about Guantanamo and about the Democratic party…

  • Morbo, I agree with you. It would have been more appropriate to call it Bushs’ Dachau. Hitlers first concentration camp was set up as a prison camp for people he didn’t like because he had filled all the existing prisons. Although by the wars end thousands had died in the camp, it was never designated for that purpose. In fact, in the years prior to the war people were occasionally released from Dachau. Just like at Guantanamo. But Dachau, like any successful government program, grew and spawned more camps that morphed into a greater evil than good people can imagine. Guantanamo, that ugly repudiation of American values, is still only the beginning. And before it can grow, it must be the end.

  • Amnesty called Guantanamo “the gulag of our times”, which is perfectly defensible. If someone were to be called “the Churchill of our times”, it would be nonsense to protest that Churchill is dead. As Amnesty said in one of their follow-ups, and as the first commenter wrote above, there are similarities with the Soviet gulag that are shocking. The Soviet Union was a known “evil”, the USA was not – before it began running the torture camps.

    Barnacle Bill

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