The case against Amnesty

Hyperbole and Human Rights

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, June 3, 2005; Page A23

Why do President Bush's critics make life so easy for him?

At his news conference this week, Bush was asked about a report by Amnesty International in which Irene Khan, the group's secretary general, referred to the American detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as "the gulag of our times."

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What's maddening is that by reaching for the dramatic, overwrought and, yes, outrageous gulag metaphor, Amnesty's Khan let Bush slip right by the questions raised by American practices in Guantanamo and whether Guantanamo's problems are helping the "people who hate America" in their battle for world opinion.

But why so much fuss over a word? Because some words -- gulag is one, Holocaust is certainly another -- are freighted with such profound, chilling and specific historical meaning that they should never be used as attention-grabbing devices. More generally, a willingness to use hyperbolic language should never be confused with toughness.

  WaPo article

Okay, I'm with E.J. on that point. But let's take the complaint the rest of the way.

There are many problems in Guantanamo. They deserve attention and criticism. But Guantanamo is not "the gulag of our times."

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Why does gulag matter? The word refers to the vast machinery of political subjugation created by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and comes from the acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei , or Main Camp Administration. As my Post colleague Anne Applebaum noted in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Gulag," it eventually came to refer to "the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties."

These included "labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps, children's camps, transit camps," Applebaum wrote. Gulag also came to stand for "the Soviet repressive system itself," including "the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths."

I would like at this point to refer E.J. to my page of articles on Falluja and an article on a death convoy in Afghanistan (video), and ask the columnist to please tell me which of those criteria we do not meet. As far as I can tell there is only one: the forced labor. Perhaps we don't have separate camps for children, but we certainly have children in the prisons. Give us time. If we collect enough of them, we may yet give them a separate camp.

On the other hand, E.J. is absolutely right. Amnesty stepped into this one by using that word, as it has handed the Righteous Right Patriot Howler Monkeys a new screaming point.

Khan said the critique of her language "risked letting a semantic argument overshadow extraordinary and unlawful U.S. policy and actions." But that point applies most of all to Khan herself. By reaching for the incendiary phrase, she made it much easier for Bush and his administration to evade Amnesty's legitimate call for outside scrutiny of the practices at Guantanamo.

The shame here is that Amnesty International has long been one of the world's essential organizations. Its willingness to attack dictatorships of the left and the right and to go after human rights abuses everywhere has won it the gratitude of oppressed people of all ideologies. Applebaum notes that Amnesty was one of the great sources of information on Soviet dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s. The organization will certainly survive this "semantic argument."

But I hope the group learns a lesson that all of Bush's opponents should also take to heart. That lesson is not to pull back from criticism or to cower before administration attacks. It's outrageous that Bush tried to dismiss all questions about practices in Guantanamo as the work of "people who hate America."

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Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) has introduced a bill to create a commission to study allegations of detainee abuse and point the way forward. The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to hold hearings on the subject this month. These are not the actions of "absurd" people. They reflect the habits of truth-seekers and truth-tellers.

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Human rights are too important to be lost in bad metaphors.

Or even good ones.