Amnesty Int’l’s US leader, Bill Schulz, shows some of that old-time credibility that’s the reason we love his organization so much. The course of defending the irresponsible “gulag” remark, he claims support from the paper of record:
Over the past three weeks I’ve had more than one occasion to reflect on the power of symbols. Whether you agree with Secretary Rumsfeld that our analogy was “reprehensible” or with the New York Times that it was an “apt metaphor,” the use of that one word “gulag” had a remarkable impact on the public debate. Amnesty got more media time to discuss US detention policies in the past three weeks than we have in the past three years.
Now that looks like the Times must have taken an editorial position supporting his outrageous comparison, right? But in fact his link goes to a column by Tom Friedman that’s in the archive by now.
Whether Friedman supported Amnesty or not, it’s a lie to say that speaks for the paper. And as Amnesty doesn’t seem to be able to make its point without lying, perhaps there’s no point to be made.
The Times did venture into pro-Amnesty territory in an editorial still up on the IHT’s site:
What makes Amnesty’s gulag metaphor apt is that Guantánamo is merely one of a chain of shadowy detention camps that also includes Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the military prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and secret locations run by the intelligence agencies.
And this point is the one that Schulz tries to make. But this comparison is so weak it essentially applies to any prison: “this prison is only one of many prisons run by the state where people languish in custody for smoking doobies.” An argument can hardly be any weaker than this. Military prisons housing enemy combatants are of an entirely different character than secret prisons filled with a country’s own citizens, generally arrested for thought crimes.
China still has a gulag, America doesn’t.