Executive Director of Amnesty International, William Schulz, is not backing down in the face of criticism from U.S. government officials over his use of the term "gulag" in reference to the U.S. government detention center at Guatanamo Bay.
This, from Reuters:
Schulz noted that it was Amnesty's headquarters in London that issued the annual report on global human rights, which said Guantanamo Bay "has become the gulag of our times."
Asked about the comparison, Schulz said, "Clearly this is not an exact or a literal analogy."
"... But there are some similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared ... And in some cases, at least, we know that they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed."
"And whether the Americans like it or not, it does reflect how the more than 2 million Amnesty members in a hundred countries around the world and indeed the vast majority of those countries feel about the United States' detention policy," he said.
How can Americans, Republican or Democrat, bear the idea that people are being "disappeared" by our government?
This concept follows neither conservative nor liberal values.
Why is the Republican Party allowing itself to be so illegally and destructively used to cover this type of activity by their leaders in power?
Where are the Democratic leaders in the legislature who will stand up to these bullies and this illegal thuggery?
Less important, but still of great concern to me, is the fact that this archipelago of prisons is part of the ruination of our national reputation and a bad model for other countries, who will excuse their own human rights violations by using U.S. detention at Guantanamo and other secret prisons as their standard of legality and behavior.