The folks at Amnesty International have gone off the deep end. Paisley Dodds of the AP opens her report [news.yahoo.com]

Amnesty International castigated the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay as a failure Wednesday, calling it "the gulag of our time" in the human rights group's harshest rebuke yet of American detention policies.

While we know the folks at Amnesty International are political ideologues, this report should be seen for what it is -- a deliberate smear of the United States.

"Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time," Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan said as the London-based group issued a 308-page annual report that accused the United States of shirking its responsibility to set the bar for human rights protections.

The use of the term gulag refers to the extensive system of prison camps in the former Soviet Union, many in remote regions of Siberia and specifically designed to hold political prisoners. The Soviets took over the system from the czarist government and expanded it after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Untold thousands of prisoners of the so-called gulags died from hunger, cold, harsh treatment and overwork.

The prison camp at Guantanamo has been in the spotlight over the past year since the FBI cited cases of aggressive interrogation techniques and detainee mistreatment. The U.S. government has also been criticized for not charging or trying prisoners who are classified as enemy combatants, a vague distinction with fewer legal protections than prisoners of war get under the Geneva Conventions.

How can anyone, regardless of ideology, seriously compare Guantanamo to the horrid gulags of the former Soviet Union? A place where "[u]ntold thousands of prisoners . . . died from hunger, cold, harsh treatment and overwork." It'd be laughable if it didn't come from such a highly visible and -- unfortunately -- respected organization.

While I think Ms. Dodds is relatively fair, she does call up the recently declassified FBI documents which cite complaints by detainees -- a very tired story.

Declassified FBI records released Wednesday showed that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay told U.S. interrogators as early as April 2002, just four months after the first detainees arrived from Afghanistan, that U.S. military guards abused them and desecrated the Quran.

Another detainee stated he had been beaten unconscious at Guantanamo Bay early in 2002, a period in which U.S. interrogators were pressing hard for information on al-Qaida.

According to Amnesty International, the U.S. is the worst human rights violator. Worse than the Sudan. Worse than China. Worse than Malaysia. Ridiculous

Update (Wed Jun 08 01:25:31 JST 2005): Check out this post at Powerline. Apparently, Amnesty International's Executive Director William Schulz all but admitted that the comparison of Gitmo to a gulag was only a publicity stunt. Ridiculous.