Amnesty International
Irrelevant?
JoeUser Forums
I know you can google it, but to be fair, guess who said the following first before Googling it:
I draw the line at Amnesty's use of the word "gulag" to describe these policies, as well as the implication that the United States has somehow become the modern equivalent of Stalin's Soviet Union. Guantanamo Bay was a flawed response to an unprecedented situation: A war in which the enemy were not soldiers, but stateless terrorists. Early abuses there have been investigated and discussed by the FBI, the press and, to a still limited extent, the military. There is evidence that the situation is changing.
The Soviet gulag, by contrast, was a massive forced labor complex consisting of thousands of concentration camps and hundreds of exile villages. More than 18 million prisoners, and some 6 million exiles pass through the system during Stalin's lifetime, although their fate was never publicly acknowledged during his lifetime, and only limited information was ever published by Soviet authorities after his death. Soviet camps and political prisons were in existence from the time of the revolution to the time of Gorbachev, more than eighty years. They were a major part of the Soviet economy, and helped create the atmosphere of generalized terror and fear of state authorities which persists in Russia today.
Their true modern equivalent is not Guantanamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on Stalinist lines; or China's laogai , the true size of which isn't even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Hint it is not Dick Chenney, George W Bush or Don Rumsfeld. And they are correct!
