Amnesty Int. Defends US Chastising (US response like USSR, Libya, Khomeni)

[DeepModem Mom]

New York Times:
Rights Group Defends Chastising of U.S.
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
Published: June 4, 2005

LONDON, June 3 - An official of Amnesty International said Friday that the term gulag in its annual report to describe the United States prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was chosen deliberately, and she shrugged off harsh criticism of the report by the Bush administration.

The official, Kate Gilmore, the group's executive deputy secretary general, said the administration's response was "typical of a government on the defensive," and she drew parallels to the reactions of the former Soviet Union, Libya and Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, when those governments were accused of human rights abuses....

***

Amnesty has fired right back (at the Bush administration), pointing out that the administration often cites its reports when that suits its purposes. "If our reports are so 'absurd,' why did the administration repeatedly cite our findings about Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war?" wrote William F. Schultz, executive director of the group's United States branch, in a letter to the editor being published Saturday in The New York Times. "Why does it welcome our criticisms of Cuba, China and North Korea? And why does it cite our research in its own annual human rights reports?"

In a telephone interview on Friday, Ms. Gilmore, the second-ranking official in Amnesty, said "gulag" was not meant as a literal description of Guantánamo but was emblematic of the sense of injustice and lack of due process surrounding the prison....

***

The International Committee of the Red Cross, the F.B.I. and United States courts have criticized the detention policies at Guantánamo Bay, she said. In addition, Ms. Gilmore said, the detention policy has been expanded to apply to jails in countries like Egypt, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. The creation of an archipelago of detention centers, she said, was another factor in the choice of the term gulag.....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/04/international/europe/04amnesty.html?oref=login

[indepat]

1. Ms. Gilmore has fired rockets up several asses

[Jensen]

2. And I hope she continues!

[Karenina]

4. Cowabunga!!!

:nuke:

[Warren Stupidity]

3. AI: get with the program

when the administration express His displeasure, genuflect, bow, scrape, obsequiously retreat expressing your extreme remorse.

[Doctor_J]

5. Yes, the BFEE are the ones who are getting desperate

not their 5 billion or so critics around the world :scared:

[K-W]

6. I cant believe the republicans score points in this country simply

by constantly and consistantly assuming a comparison is an equivelency, and that half(and sometimes more) of the population of this country is so poorly educated they go along with it.

[DeepModem Mom]

7. They pull so many tricks like this --

succeeding in putting the idea into some peoples' heads, for example, that Deep Throat is the villain of Watergate!