Afternoon Baseball

Well, Amnesty International has called out the United States for its practices at Guantanamo, calling it, of all things, a "gulag." Now, I didn't quite understand that term, other than it was not good, for I am but a young man. However, I have been informed that it refers to the Stalinist prisons of the Soviet Union.


More evenhanded perspective...I promise!


Now, Amnesty International clearly was searching for some shock value, something to jar the sleepy media's attention into making a fuss of their report. It appears as much, since AI apparently has no idea if Guantanamo is that type of place. They just want a more throrough investigation.
And to that, kudos. They are correct. A secretive operation like Guantanamo post-9/11 can very easily lead to severe problems.

However, as the Star-Tribune's By The Numbers points out,

0: Number of documented prisoner deaths from torture by U.S. agents at Guantanamo Bay, which Amnesty International last month characterized as "the gulag of our times."
2.7 million: Minimum number of people who died in the camps of the actual Gulag and in the exile villages of the Stalinist era, from 1929 to 1953.

So AI is basically full of hyperbole, or worse.

To be quite honest, Bush and his team have exaggerated as well, as the next item in that article notes:

21 million: Midrange estimate of the number of non-combatants killed through genocide and mass murder by Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, which the Bush administration has frequently cited in its rhetoric regarding Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.
290,000: Approximate number of people who were murdered or "disappeared" in Iraq under Saddam Hussein's rule, according to Human Rights Watch.

So the lesson (especially for copy editors)? Don't buy into numbers without inspection, and especially don't buy into terms that can be used to represent numbers (i.e. gulag and Nazi/Hitler). And we'd better pay more attention to Bush's numbers, not just because he's a Republican and you aren't, but because he's the President, and all presidents, even ex- or dead presidents, will have much more influence with their input than AI ever will.

For more on the way AI under-covered some genuinely nasty regimes, read the exquisitely documented ChicagoBoyz post. I'm rather harsh on AI in my comment, but that is largely because such rash and foolish language only presents an easy out to an administration -- and a warning to any MSM that even thinks about getting some courage to pursue the issues behind the hyperbole.

For a little more perspective, read James Lileks' thoughts on how far we've lowered the bar for egregious, immoral, dastardly behavior since 2001. Another Star Tribune plug, I know. But I can't help it. They have good stuff (even lots of things I don't link to) and are a paper on the rise, starting from an already esteemed position.