Shameless

by Chris Bertram on June 24, 2005

I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked by any of the garbage that appears on TechCentralStation. Nevertheless, the shameless gall of some of their writers continues to astonish. One of their latest offerings is “My Grandfather and the Gulag”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/062405.html by Ariel Cohen, which – surprise, surprise – is an attack on Amnesty and Senator Durbin for the Guantanamo/Gulag comparison. Cohen’s article can stand as an exemplar of a whole genre of Amnesty-bashing that has been flourishing recently. Since the whole point of the piece is to insist on the virtues of truth and accuracy and to rubbish Amnesty and Durbin for the alleged betrayal of those standards, one might expect Cohen to exhibit at least a minimal level of concern for the correctness of his own claims. But such expectations would be misplaced.

Cohen tells us that

bq. Guantanamo Bay inmates are fed lemon-glazed chicken lunches and rice pilaf-and-salmon dinners. No one has died from alleged abuses, no one is starving or freezing. Inmates have access to the Koran and religious services five times a day.

“No one has died…” But that is only true of Guantanamo and is plainly false of the wider system of US adminstered prisons and detention camps where prisoners have indeed died, “some as a result of having been beaten to death”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,909294,00.html .

But let’s allow Cohen his narrow focus, since elsewhere in his piece there are plain untruths.

bq. While Amnesty’s annual write-up of North Korea is 972 words, its Israel-bashing report is 2,600 words, with barely a mention of Palestinian terrorism or the brainwashing of children to hate Jews and Americans and strive to be suicide bombers. … By ignoring the real threat to human rights — including those of women in the Islamic world, and the children and women raped and enslaved in Darfur — Amnesty and Ms. Khan are playing into the hands of terrorists hell-bent on destroying the West.

Let’s take the “Amnesty report on Israel”:http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/isr-summary-eng first, which is indeed about 2600 words. Some sample quotes:

bq. The deliberate targeting of civilians by Palestinian armed groups constituted crimes against humanity.

bq. Sixty-seven Israeli civilians, including eight children, were killed by Palestinian armed groups in Israel and in the Occupied Territories. Forty-seven of the victims were killed in suicide bombings, the others were killed in shooting or mortar attacks. Most of the attacks were claimed by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Fatah, and by the armed wing of Hamas. Forty-two Israeli soldiers were also killed by Palestinian armed groups, most of them in the Occupied Territories.

* Chana Anya Bunders, Natalia Gamril, Dana Itach, Rose Bona and Anat Darom and six other Israelis were killed on 29 January when a Palestinian man blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem. More than 50 other people were wounded in the attack. The suicide bombing was claimed by both the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and the armed wing of Hamas.
* Tali Hatuel, who was eight months pregnant, and her four young daughters, Hila, Hadar, Roni and Meirav, aged between two and 11, were shot dead in the Gaza Strip while travelling by car near the Gush Katif settlement block where they lived. They were shot at close range by Palestinian gunmen who had opened fire on their car and caused it to career off the road.
* On 28 June, three-year-old Afik Zahavi and 49-year-old Mordechai Yosepov were the first victims of a rocket fired by Palestinian armed groups from the Gaza Strip into the nearby Israeli city of Sderot. On 29 September, four-year-old Yuval Abebeh and two-year-old Dorit Aniso were killed by another Palestinian rocket while playing outside their relatives’ home in Sderot.

And Cohen clearly entirely failed to read the section of the Amnesty Report entitled “Palestinian Authority”:http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/pse-summary-eng , which has a section on the use of children by armed groups.

What about Darfur, also supposedly “ignored” by Amnesty. Cohen could have consulted the secion of the “Amnesty report on Sudan”:http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/sdn-summary-eng which begins:

bq. In Darfur in western Sudan government forces and allied militias continued to kill thousands and displace tens of thousands of people living in rural areas, especially during the first three months of 2004. Hundreds of those killed were extrajudicially executed by armed forces, military intelligence or militias. A ceasefire signed in April by the government and armed groups based in Darfur — the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) — was violated by all sides. By December about 1.8 million displaced people remained in camps within Darfur or elsewhere in Sudan and more than 200,000 Darfur refugees remained in Chad.

The Amnesty account continues:

bq. The conflict in Darfur intensified at the start of the year. Attacks were carried out by government forces, sometimes using Antonov bomber planes and helicopter gunships, and by nomad militias known as the Janjawid, armed and supported by the government. Thousands of civilians were killed and tens of thousands made homeless. Others were abducted. Hundreds of villages were destroyed or looted. Thousands of women were raped, sometimes in public, and many were taken as sexual slaves by soldiers or Janjawid militiamen.

How about North Korea? Cohen claims that the “Amnesty report”:http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/prk-summary-eng is a mere 972 words long (in fact it is 1358, he couldn’t even get that right!) According to him, Amnesty “prefers U.S.-bashing to criticizing the real North Korean Gulag”. I don’t know what Amnesty “prefers” , but I do know that their report details

bq. Chronic malnutrition among children and urban populations, especially in the northern provinces, was widespread. Fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, association and movement, continued to be denied. Access by independent monitors continued to be severely restricted. There were reports of widespread political imprisonment, torture and ill-treatment, and of executions.

Of course that isn’t all that Amnesty has to say on North Korea or any of these countries. Click the “All AI Documents on North Korea” link and you get directed to 35 further documents. But presumably Cohen couldn’t be bothered.

{ 40 comments }

1

abb1 06.24.05 at 5:18 am

Slime And Defend by Tom Tomorrow.

2

Brendan 06.24.05 at 5:30 am

The last time I read TechCentralStation they were showing their high regard for democracy by dropping heavy hints that a American backed Pinochet style coup against Chavez would really be the best thing to sort out that Venezuela’s ‘problems’.

However could I be even more politically incorrect and state that I think that Amnesty’s description of the whole US war in terror ‘system’ as a Gulag is not actually a bad one? It’s true that in terms of raw numbers the US’ system is not nearly on the same scale as the Gulag system. (Although the disparity is not as great as is widely believed. The US currently holds about 10,000 people and have ‘extradited’ at least 70,000). However, consider the similarities:

1: Guilty people. Some of the people in Abu Ghraib etc. were (and presumably are) guilty. But of course some of the people in the Gulag were guilty as well. Everyone forgets this but not everyone in the Gulag was a political prisoner. Rapists, paedophiles, murderers and thieves (some of them extraordinarily brutal and unpleasant individuals) were also kept there.

2: ‘Vanishing’. As dramatised most frighteningly in Orwell’s ‘1984’ one of the most frightening things about the system in the USSR was that people simply ‘vanished’ and were never heard of again.
But that happens with the US system as well. But of course in the case of the ‘Ghost Detainees’ that happens in the US system as well, either by the US itself of by its client states: Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi.

http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=25819

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/03/09/pakist10278.htm

http://www.sevenstories.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=58322100617850

3: Geographical reach.

Again, one of the horrors of the Gulag was that one vanished, and might end up anywhere, Siberia or any other part of the USSR. This has not only been matched but exceeded by the US, where, with the ‘torture plane’ you might vanish at any point and then turn up anywhere in the world.

http://norightturn.blogspot.com/2004/12/synchronicity.html

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/03/12/us_must_stop_outsourcing_torture/

4: Purpose of ‘rendition’. Like the USSR, and unlike the Nazis, the US does not actually intend to murder people. However, again like the USSR, they don’t seem to care too much if people live or die.

There are serious differences between the US and the USSR. As Anne Applebaum’s excellent history makes clear, Stalin considered the Gulags to be a money spinner (it was mainly because they never made a cent that they were shut down). Moreover there is a difference between a forced labour camp (the gulag) and the American system which is a prison pure and simple. So there are clear differences (a much better comparison would be with the concentration camps in which the Boers were kept by the British in South Africa). Whether this actually constitutes a major MORAL difference on the other hand, is a whole other question.

3

abb1 06.24.05 at 5:52 am

4

Ray 06.24.05 at 6:47 am

A comment on Slacktivist points out that, if anyone wants to avoid Nazis/gulags comparisons, how about Vietnam? The North Vietnamese treated their prisoners appallingly, but their prisoners were captured under arms, and weren’t killed en masse, so there can be no complaints about the comparison, right?

5

Rofe 06.24.05 at 6:50 am

With all due respect, but anyone who’s read Anne Applebaum’s book or knows about the gulag from other sources and draws even a passing comparison between that system and Guantanamo / Abu Ghraib has a serious problem with perspective. In fact, I find the comparison obscene.

By no means do I want to downplay the seriousness of any abuses that occurred at Guantanamo / Abu Ghraib / elsewhere. But they stand on their own beastly merit.

Any comparison with the gulag is like comparing a hangnail to traumatic amputation in a car wreck. The magnitude of difference makes even attempting a comparison incomprehensible to me.

Cheers,

6

Brendan 06.24.05 at 7:51 am

I wonder if other states would be exempt from being compared to the Gulag? For example if Iran, or the jails of Syria, or Zimbabwe were to be compared to the Gulag, would we also be lining up to state that this comparison was ‘obscene’?

I ask merely because some on the Right are already accusing Mugabe of committing, and I quote, ‘Genocide’. Is it obscence to compare Mugabe’s jails to Dachau and Treblinka, even implicitly?

More to the point, is it obscene to call Britain’s camps in Kenya a ‘gulag’? And if not, is it obscene to compare Abu Ghraib to the camps in Kenya?

7

Ray 06.24.05 at 7:55 am

A simple rule to follow.
Comparing things Americans did to bad things that other people did = obscene.
Comparing bad things that Americans did to other bad things Americans did = perfectly acceptable – as long as you can find some bad things done by Americans!

8

jet 06.24.05 at 8:05 am

To be fair to TechCentralStation’s over the top response, if you go to Amnesty International’s site as of 8:54 Eastern US time, and look at their latest news, you will see one article about the genocide in Zimbabwe and nothing about Sudan. But there are 5 articles about immigrants rights, 3 articles about the US’s WoT, and 1 article about arms control. Given the sheer numbers being murdered, starved, raped, and tortured just in Zimbabwee and the Sudan, AI would appear to be given undo attention to something that would save the fewest people in the problems it is trying to solve. In the Act Now section, the several genocides don’t even appear, but the US WoT is number 1 priority.

If TechCentralStation paints AI as a political organization that obviously is spending its resources, not on things to stop the world tragedy the fastest, but on things that will make it popular and thus earn more money, it’s because that’s pretty near the truth.

9

James Wimberley 06.24.05 at 8:06 am

I suggest that the home-grown US system of detention camps outside the rule of the law be called the “Bulag”.

10

jet 06.24.05 at 8:18 am

Brendan, Mugabe is being accused of genocide because he is creating a genocide. Hundreds of thousands of homes are being leveled, private gardens (responsible for 1/5 of the countries calories) are being destroyed, and food aid is (in 1980’s Ethopian style) being denied to those Mugabe wants cleansed in his “ruralization” experiment.

11

abb1 06.24.05 at 8:21 am

Genocide of the houses?

12

jet 06.24.05 at 8:31 am

Abb1,
In a country with such a high level of HIV infections, exposure kills more than usual. Withholding food aid while destroying family farms/gardens certainly led to Stalin’s genocide in the Ukraine, there is little doubt that Mugabe is creating those same conditions for genocide. I’d guess that the only reason the genocide is not more pronounced is that Zimbabwians were already dieing at a rapid rate from HIV coupled with starvation/malnutrition, so a higher level of malnutrition and exposure in Mugabe’s selected areas coupled with tighter control (and expelling) of international aid workers means it is hard to see exactly what is going on. But like in the Sudan, when the genocide becomes clearer, nothing will be done.

13

Sven 06.24.05 at 8:36 am

Ah, Guantanamo is like a “hangnail.” Lovely simile.

14

abb1 06.24.05 at 8:45 am

That’s all right, Jet; the point was that people may be quite happy with their favorite metaphor (e.g. Mugabe’s mass evictions=genocide) and in the same time totally outraged by some other very similar (better, IMO) metaphor: Bush’s ‘detention centers’=gulag.

15

Brendan 06.24.05 at 9:01 am

Abb1’s point is what I was trying to say. Mugabe is clearly NOT guilty of genocide in the classic ‘dictionary’ sense of that word, although he is clearly a very nasty character. Equally, in many ways Abu Ghraib etc. do not constitute a ‘gulag’. Both of these are metaphors. What is interesting is that some are pretty excited by the Mugabe metaphor, and horrified by the Amnesty metaphor.

The salient point is that (speaking non-metaphorically), the US is ‘vanishing’ people, moving them to prisons all over the world, holding them without trial, and, in some cases, torturing and killing them. And how do we all feel about this? And what do we feel should be done to stop it? Because it’s still going on, and it’s obvious that what we have done up until now is not adequate to stop it. So what should we do?

16

Rofe 06.24.05 at 9:17 am

I don’t think any country is exempt from the gulag comparison if, in fact, said country institutes a gulag-like system. Then the comparison would be completely justified.

The US has not instituted such a system. Far from it (despite the obvious, documented, and contemptible abuses).

Therefore, the comparison is obscene.

Regarding what we should do – protest, object, and protest again. Playing hardball in the WoT does not mean torture.

Cheers,

PS – Sven, I think you’re being more than a bit disengenous. No one compared Guantanamo to a hangnail.

17

nofundy 06.24.05 at 9:43 am

TechCentralStation

Founded by “DOW 30,000” Glassman.

Enough said.

18

Sven 06.24.05 at 9:47 am

16. GUANTANAMO : GULAG

A. hangnail : traumatic amputation

B. haircut : decapitation

C. Snickers break : Donner Party

D. rofe’s ‘gulag’ kabuki : Ivan Denisovich

19

roger 06.24.05 at 10:07 am

Actually, AI is paying the U.S. an implicit compliment. Are the North Koreans going to take action because they are taken to task by AI? Probably not. The whole point, there, is to leverage outside forces. But Americans are, supposedly, free to act — it is rumored that they even have a democracy, except in Alabama and Ohio. So putting energy into a campaign to take down America’s incipient, world wide prison camp system is a good investment.

The problem is, though, that the other side of the U.S. coin is the country’s domestic addiction to imprisonment, of which the world wide system is only an expression. When you have a prison system in which the rape of the inmates by other inmates is encouraged as a valid control — when you have the percentage of incarceration, grotesquely skewed by race, that you have in America — you have an entrenched human rights problem. From juvenile detention centers in California that routinely drive their prisoners to suicide to the industry of prison in northern New York that is a powerful driver to retaining bogus and outrageous drug laws (after all, putting people in prison does provide jobs), the American problem extends inward, making the country a second tier human rights offender — above Zimbambwe, below Portugal.

20

curious 06.24.05 at 10:09 am

what is tech central station? i’ve seen the site but i can’t figure out what it’s for …

21

puzzled 06.24.05 at 10:12 am

Jet,

When AI (or other human rights organizations) concentrate their attention to human rights violations by the US (or Israel or other democratic countries) this does not mean that these are the most serious offences. Neither does it mean that democratic countries should be “held to a higher standard”.

A reasonable way to think about the problem would be the following. Amnesty International has very few tools to deal with human rights abuses directly. One thing it could do is to campaign the public to pressure their governments to change their policy. One would think that this has any chance of working only in a democratic country. Moreover, it seems plausible that stopping human rights abuses perpetrated by your own government would be easier than starting a difficult and expensive campaign abroad. Hence, the best use of AI’s resources would be to stop abuses by democratic countries: not because this is the greatest tragedy but because its tools are uniquely suited for this purpose.

Obviously, this is a flawed argument. It seems silly to think that the government of a democratic country would be shamed into doing the right thing.

22

Brendan 06.24.05 at 10:16 am

‘Playing hardball in the WoT does not mean torture.’

This is true. But it’s also true that torture means torture. In the ‘war on terror’ the US (and the UK) have tortured numerous innocent people to death. This is a matter of public record.

Incidentally, do you object to the American system being compared (by me) to the South African concentration camps set up by the British for the Boers (a much more illuminating comparison)? What about to the Kenyan concentration camps set up to destroy the ‘Mau Mau’ insurgency by the British? How did you feel about these tactics being compared to the Gulag system?

Finally (to really cut to the chase) how about comparing the current situation to the numerous human rights abuses carried out by the US in Vietnam?

23

jet 06.24.05 at 10:23 am

Roger, Puzzled,
Count me convinced. Hard to see through the perceived (ant certinaly not disproven) anti-American bias, but if I was in their shoes, I’d probably work on the problems I saw as solvable even if they weren’t the most egregious ie work on paying my mortgage since I can’t cure cancer.

24

Jon H 06.24.05 at 10:43 am

The thing that suggests the gulag as an analogy is the geographic distribution, not the overall severity.

There isn’t really another, similarly distributed network of prison camps that is as well known. (I can’t think of *any* other system known primarily for being a far-flung network of camps. Can anyone? Most countries simply don’t have enough territory for it to even be an option.)

But even the severity argument isn’t convincing. No, our network of detention camps and torture outposts isn’t of the same magnitude as the Soviet Gulag. But then, the Soviet Gulag, as it stood in 1920, wasn’t of the same magnitude as the Gulag (considered over its whole history) either.

The Gulag started small, did it not? Was it okay in principle on day one? Was there a point at which the Soviet Gulag’s population grew beyond acceptability? Or was one prisoner too many?

I can see the Nazis, in 1938, complaining about an unfair comparison of their (pre-final solution) concentration camps to the gulag. “Why, Dachau is in a much more pleasant climate than the gulag! How can you compare verdant Deutschland to the icy steppes! And the gulag contains far more people than our camps! And while the gulag imprisons the innocent, our camps only contain enemies of the state!”

25

Brendan 06.24.05 at 10:52 am

In Robert Harris’ excellent novel ‘Fatherland’ (an alternative history novel in which the Nazis won the war), he talks about how, after the war, the Gulags were ‘liberated’ by the Nazis. Twenty years afterwards, monuments and ‘gulag memorial’ museums were ubiquitous, and endless anguished discussions went on in intellectual circles as to how this supreme evil (i.e. the Gulags) was allowed to happen, what it said about the Russian propensity towards violence and totalitarianism, and so on.

26

abb1 06.24.05 at 11:11 am

AFX News reports:

US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo; in Iraq, Afghanistan – UN
06.24.2005, 11:37 AM

GENEVA (AFX) – Washington has, for the first time, acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.

‘They are no longer trying to duck this and have respected their obligation to inform the UN,’ the Committee member said.

‘They they will have to explain themselves (to the Committee). Nothing should be kept in the dark,’ he said.

UN sources said this is the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities.

27

Rofe 06.24.05 at 11:22 am

Sven,

Disengenuous, still, but certainly clever. I enjoyed your progression.

Nonetheless, Guantanamo et al do not come close to the gulag.

Brendan,

I don’t know enough about the Kenyan / Boer camps to say if G et al reaches their level. If, in fact, their levels reached that of the gulag, then of course they can be compared to the gulag.

But hold on a second. Why are we rolling around in all this silly parsing ? The abuses at G et al were bad. Stupid. Malevolent. Etc. But regardless of whether you compare them to the gulag or a Snickers break, the abuses are what they are and that’s either something more or something less than whatever else one compares them to.

I happen to think that the abuses are orders of magnitude less than the gulag. I also think that the comparison diminishes the the evil that was the gulag and dilutes objections to G et al.

But the abuses (i.e. torture) have no place in the WoT. America is / should be better than that.

Clear enough ?

Cheers,

28

abb1 06.24.05 at 11:25 am

The abuses at G et al were bad. Stupid. Malevolent. Etc.

How about ‘systematic’?

29

Rofe 06.24.05 at 12:11 pm

I agree with systematic.

30

Dan Simon 06.24.05 at 1:26 pm

Whether or not one approves of AI’s current priorities, they are vastly different from–I would say, a betrayal of–their founding mission. AI was originally formed for the purpose of speaking out on behalf of “prisoners of conscience”–people who had been imprisoned for the crime of political dissent in countries without political freedom. It was that vital, narrow, non-partisan agenda that earned it so much kudos during the Cold War. Unfortunately, AI has since abandoned it completely, in favor of mushy “human rights” platitudes and international political grandstanding.

I elaborate here.

31

jet 06.24.05 at 1:49 pm

Rofe,
Only someone hell bent on diversion would compare Guantanamo, et al to the Boer camps. The Boer camps were full of the families of the Boer army that the British rounded up and kept in horrible underfed conditions as hostages. Comparing those camps to the US camps is about as accurate as comparing the US camps to a Russian Gulag; distortion and diversion on a level worthy of Hitler’s reasoning for the invasion of Poland [irony fully intended].

32

jet 06.24.05 at 1:50 pm

Oh, I forgot to add that the comparison was “Shameless”.

33

Uncle Kvetch 06.24.05 at 3:46 pm

Good, so we’re all in agreement.

Chaining people to floor for 24 hours and allowing them to wallow in their own filth is bad.

Using inappropriate metaphors to describe this treatment is worse.

34

José del Solar 06.24.05 at 9:48 pm

Genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.

So I guess the, according to jet’s analogy, the US is responsible for setting the conditions (through direct funding to reppressive governments and CIA actions) for the attempted “genocide of the latin-american left”.

35

José del Solar 06.24.05 at 10:03 pm

Or even worse, by refusing to take action in order to reduce or minimize the effects of global warming, it could be argued that the US is leading the world towards “ecocide”.

36

Brak 06.25.05 at 3:03 am

Let’s see. If I were an insane racist and abducted people I considered to be members of inferiour races and gassed them to death on my farm, I am sure that comparisons to Nazi extermination camps would be made in the popular media, despite the small scale of my operation.

37

Brendan 06.25.05 at 2:25 pm

Oh dear. There was Rofe with what seemed like a statement we could all agree with, and then comes along Jet and spoils it all. You are aware, Jet, of what goes on to the estimated 10,000 people currently being held by the US across the world? You do know that when people talk about ‘prisoner abuse’ this is a euphemism for torture? You do know what not a small number of those who ‘vanish’ are tortured to death?

To be fair to those who complain about the Gulag metaphor incidentally, it is probably unfair to compare (implicitly) what the US is doing to what happened under Stalin. It seems to me, however, to be quite comparable to the USSR in the ’60s and ’70s.

You are ignorant, Jet. Luckily due to the wonders of the internet, there is now an excellent website at which you can read up on these and many other issues.

http://slate.msn.com/features/whatistorture/introduction.html

38

farang 06.25.05 at 7:58 pm

I think Uncle Kvetch said it best. Plus a hearty laugh.

39

Matt Weiner 06.26.05 at 11:08 am

The accusation that Amnesty is ignoring Darfur displays truly lamentable ignorance. In this speech Irene Khan uses as her first example of the betrayal of human rights the failure to act against Sudan’s campaign of killing, rape, etc. in Darfur. (Her second example is the African Union’s failure of the people of Zimbabwe.)

You may have heard of this speech, since it’s the one that contained the original Guantanamo-Gulag comparison.

40

Randy Paul 06.26.05 at 4:58 pm

Jet,

Much, if not most of AI’s activities and impact takes place on a grassroots basis. Do you know how many local groups are working on Prisoner of Conscience cases throughout the world? How many are active in, say the Caribbean Regional Action Network? PABRAN/ The Urgent Action Network? The Medical Professionals group? The Legal professionals Group?

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