Good. Now tell me how many places we have around the world where we are hold people without charges and torturing them? Is it three, four, five. Just what is the number?

You complain about the word but without any knowledge of the extend of the system we have created and the number of people being held, tortured and killed.

Do we count the idea of shipping people off to countries that are a little better at torture than we are? If so how many have been so shipped? Or does that preclude the use of “gulag?”

How many times are we going to get caught up in the White House trap of playing the word game or in Newsweeks case how they caused the death of 17 because they reported on the mishandling the Koran?

We don’t know what our government is doing but I do know this, they are doing it in our name and we are responsible. To quote Camus on the death penalty it makes us all murders. Yes and tortures too in this case.

Google gulag + guantanamo to find more such instances.

December 5, 2004
TORONTO SUN

By Eric Margolis—Contributing Foreign Editor

Uncle Sam Has His Own Gulag

The Lubyanka Prison’s heavy oak main door swung open. I went in, the first western journalist to enter the KGB’s notorious Moscow headquarters—a place so dreaded Russians dared not utter its name….I explored the fascinating museum of Soviet intelligence and was briefed on special poisons and assassination weapons that left no traces. I sat transfixed at the desk used by all the directors of Stalin’s secret police, on which the orders were signed to murder 30 million people…

I saw some of the KGB’s execution and torture cellars, and special “cold rooms” where naked prisoners were beaten, then doused with ice water and slowly frozen…Other favoured Lubyanka tortures: Psychological terror, psychotropic drugs, prolonged sleep deprivation, dazzling lights, intense noise, days in pitch blackness, isolation, humiliation, constant threats, savage beatings, attacks by guard dogs, near drowning.

Nightmares from the past—but the past has returned.

According to a report leaked to the New York Times, the … International Red Cross has accused the Bush administration for a second time of employing systematic, medically supervised torture against suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay, and at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The second Red Cross report was delivered to the White House last summer while it was trying to dismiss the Abu Ghraib prison torture horrors as the crimes of a few rogue jailers. According to the report’s allegations, many tortures perfected by the Cheka (Soviet secret police)—notably beating, freezing, sensory disorientation, and sleep deprivation—are now routinely being used by U.S. interrogators.

[...]
All of these practices flagrantly violate the Geneva Conventions, international, and American law. The Pentagon and CIA gulags in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan have become a sort of Enron-style, off-the-books operation, immune from American law or Congressional oversight.

Suspects reportedly disappear into a black hole, recalling Latin America’s torture camps and “disappearings” of the 1970s and ‘80s, or the Arab world’s sinister secret police prisons.

The U.S. has been sending high-level anti-American suspects to Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and, reportedly, Pakistan, where it’s alleged they are brutally tortured with violent electric shocks, savage beatings, drowning, acid baths, and blowtorching—the same tortures, ironically, ascribed to Saddam Hussein.

Protests over this by members of Congress, respected human rights groups, and the public have been ignored. President George W. Bush just named Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general, his nation’s highest law officer. As White House counsel, Gonzales wrote briefs justifying torture and advised the White House on ways to evade or ignore the Geneva Conventions.

Grossly violating the Geneva Conventions undermines international law and endangers U.S. troops abroad. Anyone who has served in the U.S. armed forces, as I have, should be outraged that this painfully won tenet of international law and civilized behaviour is being trashed by members of the Bush administration.

Un-American behaviour

If, as Bush asserts, terrorism suspects, Taliban, and Muslim mujahedeen fighters not in uniform deserve no protection under the laws of war and may be jailed and tortured at presidential whim, then what law protects from abuse or torture all the un-uniformed U.S. Special Forces, CIA field teams, and those 40,000 or more U.S. and British mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan euphemistically called “civilian contractors”?

Behaving like the 1930s Soviet secret police will not make America safer. Such illegal, immoral and totally un-American behaviour corrupts democracy and makes them no better than the criminals they detest.

The 20th century has shown repeatedly that when security forces use torture abroad, they soon begin using it at home, first on suspected “terrorists,” then dissidents, then on ordinary suspects.

It’s time for Congress and the courts to wake up and end this shameful and dangerous episode in America’s history.

January 3, 2005

THE PROGRESSIVE
Matthew Rothschild
The Bush Gulag

Welcome to the Bush Gulag.

Unconstrained by a Supreme Court decision last June that required at least some semblance of due process for detainees, the Bush Administration is now contemplating lifetime detentions for suspected terrorists without granting them access to any courts, according to an article by Dana Priest in The Washington Post. So Bush will be sending detainees to some modern-day Siberia to rot for the rest of their lives.
[...]

The point is: what happens to people who object publicly and strenuously to the US government and its actions outside the US? In Iraq, for example, or Afghanistan. They are tortured. Disappeared. Journalists killed. Newspapers raided and banned.

What happens to people in Iraq or Afghanistan who object publicly and strenuously to the Uzbekistan government and its actions? Nothing, they’re safe, they feel fine.

There you go again, james. Can you honestly assure me that the Dan’s of the world didn’t feel exactly that way before they said AI gave them an excuse to get upset. Meaning no offense to the Dan’s of the world, but because so many of them show up in blog threads, I’m beginning to smell a fix. The blogosphere and those people it riles up are a notoriously poor group to consider representative of anything that actually approximates The Voters.

I’m learning that sometimes, just sometimes, Senators, their aides, a Carville, a Klein, a Peretz and yes, even a Moose have poorer political instincts than those of we mere citizens. Group think is great when it’s correct, but what’s to do when it might be a continuation of the lemming parade? Hey since I’m not getting paid for saying “feh” it doesn’t cost me anything to be wrong; it doesn’t cost me anything but frustration if I’m right.

Other than anecdotal complaints, I’m not seeing it. In order for what you are saying to be true, it must follow that the same Americans who are offended enough by an AI “gulag” or two to run into the arms of the Republican Party ARE NOT offended enough by the bumper sticker beneath the W2004 sticker that says “Democrats & Terrorists support Kerry” to immediately send Howard Dean a check. And that’s just not happening, wouldn’t you agree?

If your claim is that the out-of-power party must play nicer or by a different set of rules, I will go against that CW and say the out-of-party should do anything but.

Everyone keeps quoting this idea that Democrats talking trash is losing them voters. I say it’s an urban myth.

To convince those with a different system of mores, you need to use the imagery and language that reaches them. Amnesty International’s comments only appeal to their constituency. The excessive and inaccurate comparison degrades their position as a believable entity with everyone else. If AI wanted to reach the middle and right it should have gone with the ideas of “The US needs to meet a higher standard” and “This is a threat to individual freedoms in the US.”

Do you think the USSR refused to sign the 1948 UN Declaration on Human Rights? Or were the Communists there insufficiently “doctrinaire” for your tastes? (I know you love using that phrase because it allows you to pretend you are still fighting the Evil Empire.) Or do you think signing a treaty is consistent with “explicitly rejecting” its terms?

Are you trying to say that people in the West haven’t criticised and don’t criticise Stalinist Russia on human rights grounds? For someone with a clearly unhealthy obsession with the Red Menace your knowledge of Cold War history seems remarkably sketchy. Do you think Amnesty International has no business concerning itself with torture and lack of due process? WHY?

And please stop droning on about how Amnesty has gone down in your estimation since the start of the Iraq War. Amnesty is an international organisation with a proud history of fighting human rights abuses wherever they occurred. You are an ignorant fool. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about your estimation of them.

Well, what happens to people who object publicly and strenuously to the government and its actions in the US? What happens to people who do the same thing in Uzbekistan? Is this really such a difficult question? And what on earth does this have to do with a US government program to round up members of a terrorist network?

I have to say, I’m slightly surprised by your denials. I thought you’d be defending the Uzbekistan-style methods

But Abb1, you know less than nothing about me. (Not that it stopped you from casually comparing me with Hermann Goering at one point, mind you.) What would it have contributed to the discussion to bring up your ignorant idle speculations regarding my off-topic opinions—even in the unlikely event that you’d been correct?

Here’s an idea: why not stop the filthy ad hominem insults against people you believe you disagree with, and instead actually engage the issues being discussed? You might just find that the conversation becomes both more civil and more productive as a result.

The conventional take, ala Steve et al., is that saying mean and over-the-top things sends the moderates trampeding over each other at the polls in a frenzy to vote for the Republicans, any Republican, hell, just someone who isn’t a mean ol’ Democrat who said mean ol’ things about those abused Republicans. The conventional take holds that if we’d just learn to desist and talk nice, the moderates would go into those booths and calmly and firmly vote Democratic.

I say feh. I say prove it.

And I mean a proof that goes beyond (1) Steve et al. claiming it is so because of the results of recent elections without providing any actual linkage or (2) Steve et al. claiming here or in any other blog that it is so because a close confidante who also happens to be a moderate, an independent, or heaven forfend, a Republican fed up with the current government told them that they would have voted for the Democrat if only they hadn’t said those mean things.

Again, I say prove it.

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, personally authorised the expansion of a special programme which ultimately led to the abuses in Abu Ghraib prison, the New Yorker magazine claims today.

The operation, which encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation to obtain intelligence, was known to President George Bush and fewer than 200 operatives. It was approved by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, according to the report. The programme was governed by the rules: “Grab who you must. Do what you want,” a former intelligence officer told the magazine.

How’s this so different from Uzbekistan?

I have to say, I’m slightly surprised by your denials. I thought you’d be defending the Uzbekistan-style methods – after all it’s for a good cause…