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Amnesty International Hits A Nerve

A hit, a palpable hit.  The President, Vice-President, Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all responded this week to Amnesty International’s latest Human Rights Report.  Bush called Amnesty’s concerns “absurd” and Rumsfeld, while acknowledging that “some abuses” had occurred, objected most strongly to the terms “gulag” and “concentration camps” being used to describe the US detention centers.

The gents protest too much.  We can argue about the name; we can even argue about the relation of the Nazi “concentration camps,” the Soviet “gulags,” and the American “detention centers” to the law, since the Nazi and Soviet regimes did, in some cases, actually tie detention to (rigged) legal procedures and proceedings.  Our government officials keep trying, with their talk of a few bad apples in the lower ranks or of outrage that a force for “freedom” like the US could be compared to the great criminals of the 20th century, to obscure from view that the US is forcibly detaining people against their will outside of any legal process. To “admit” and “punish” abuses in this schema actually serves the larger policy because once you agree to use the word “abuses” about some of the behavior, you are granting the legitimacy of the day-to-day operations.

Recall that the Supreme Court has ruled that the detainees at Guantanamo must have hearings.  How many have gotten their Court-mandated hearings so far?  I’m having a Brad DeLong—“why can’t we have a better media?”—moment on that question.  An hour reading the news stories on Guantanamo failed to yield an answer.  The Court ruling came on January 31, but I can’t find any updates on what has been done in way of compliance.  And nobody raises the question—no less answers it—in the current spate of stories about the Amnesty Report. Except, of course, it is right there in the Amnesty Report.  Will the answer shock you?  None.  Nada.

Rule that the Geneva Conventions are quaint.  Ignore a ruling from the US Supreme Court.  But jump all over the “excessive” language of “gulag” and “concentration camp.” How many times can these guys—and Condi—pull off this trick?

Hannah Arendt was very clear that evils done to humans in the modern world—which is organized politically around the form of the nation-state—begin by rendering people “stateless,” by moving them outside of any legal structure in which they are recognized as citizens with certain rights or have access to a legal system in which to contest their treatment.  The US has headed down that path, not on the scale of 20th century evils, but making use of the same forms. (Of course, I didn’t have to look long to find a conservative blog that is full of scorn for legal protections for obviously wicked people.) In that respect, Amnesty’s terms are apt—and, if sensationalist, reflect a desperate attempt to get somebody’s, anybody’s, attention. 

Keep the pressure on.  We’ve got this brief swinging of the media’s attention to our detention centers once again.  We have an administration placed once again on the defensive—and reacting by swinging out wildly at its accusers. Maybe even someone in the mainstream media will read the Amnesty report and remember the Supreme Court decision. 

Posted by on 06/02 at 09:52 AM

  1. To “admit” and “punish” abuses in this schema actually serves the larger policy because once you agree to use the word “abuses” about some of the behavior, you are granting the legitimacy of the day-to-day operations.

    An excellent and important point, and first cousin to Cockburn’s wise observation about the function of the corrections column in the daily newspaper.

    (Let’s see if a positive mention of Cockburn gets Michael up out of bed.)

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/02  at  11:17 AM

  2. Hey, I’ve been out of bed since the Sunday before last.  And I liked Cockburn’s March essay on Ahnuld and the nurses, too.  I just don’t want to horn in on John’s gig, that’s all.  I’m really enjoying the phenomenon of clicking on this site and finding great new stuff every couple of days.

    Posted by Michael  on  06/02  at  12:09 PM

  3. John, Amnesty International veered into counterproductive hysteria with their gulag reference, a very offensive and illiberal usage.  Shame on them, and those making thoughtful arguments about legal protections denied the detainees must disassociate themselves from this perversion of Godwin’s law.

    In form and effect, legal substance or suface appearance, the detainees abuses do not even come close to the evils of the gulag, and making such facile comparisons on the basis of formal legal processes without clearly noting the vast difference in moral scale is abhorrent.  Worse, as they say in the monthly department meetings, it is poor argumentation.

    Posted by  on  06/02  at  12:40 PM

  4. I wonder whether the Bush administration, or even the media, would have addressed the report in any way had it just mentioned and detailed the torture/"abuses" in the various U.S. detention facilities.  The details have been coming out for months/years and nothing productive has been done.  It certainly is not the Soviet gulag, but its comparison is only offensive if it is not comparative.  I think it is, maybe not in scope but in moral equivalency (torture, murder, lack of legal process, secrecy, etc.).  It only becomes counterproductive hysteria because those who do not want to change it turn it into such without addressing the relevant similarities.  They have been dealing in counterproductive hysteria since the beginning of the “War on Terror” anyway, so I really don’t see the damage that is done.

    Posted by  on  06/02  at  01:20 PM

  5. I’m inclined to agree that AI made a tactical error in using the word “gulag,” because it handed people such as Ms. Snelling an excuse to ignore the heinous violations of human rights detailed in the report.

    Not that such people wouldn’t have come up with something on their own without AI’s help.

    “The report is unfair: our rape rooms were much more sanitary and well-lighted than Saddam’s!”

    “Stalin didn’t pay his informants nearly as good a price for turning in their innocent neighbors as we did!”

    And of course there’s always the ever-popular

    “Look! A runaway bride!”

    It’s depressing as hell to see the seamlessness with which people such as Snelling slide into becoming apologists for torture. History is going to judge the US people very, very harshly.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/02  at  02:06 PM

  6. detainees abuses do not even come close to the evils of the gulag

    Now you’ve done it. You force me to whip out my Medium Lobster:

    Q: I seem to be losing all feeling in my lower body. Is there a doctor in the gulag?

    A: Please: we find the term “gulag” absurd and offensive. A “gulag” is Russian. You are not being interrogated to death by Russians. You are being interrogated to death by the greatest country in the world.

    Posted by  on  06/02  at  02:34 PM

  7. Getting past the naming, the symbolic referents, the feigned offense---a big part of the problem is that the US is operating a very extensive, globally-based, prison system that denies virtually every human right to those incarcertated therein.  And it operates this with tremendous amount of support for all of our neighbors who live across the street, and down the road, standing in line next to us at the grocery supermall complexes and such.  Ask them if they think treating people like this is OK, and they tell you that they do.  Why? Because “these” people are evil incarnate. 

    We are experiencing a dissonance nearly equal to that of the Europeans who were colonizing Africa, Asia, and North and South America.  Commiting crimes of the most vile evil nature in the name of all that was good and great, the subtext was that those who were suffering were less than equals, less than human.  If we listen or read any of the rhetoric spewed out by the leaders of the amerikan taliban, we find the same degrees of dehumanization upon those whom we cast the evil eye of empire and our war on some terrors.  Who cares what we call it?  That it, is behaviors that are passionately supported by a vast constituency of our fellow citizens.

    Posted by  on  06/02  at  03:07 PM

  8. John. Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but your article (and informed comments) prompted my response
    It seems to me that not enough people in mainstream life in USA care about the abuse of basic Human Rights being perpetuated in their name by the US authorities. 

    We in bloggerworld are fairly vociferous in calling injustices. 
    It’s easy.  We can share info via these blogs and create *joined up* campaigns.
    But it seems to me from UK, that what’s needed is for MORE law abiding US citizens to protest to their Senators about Guantanamo Bay abuses.  People have got to wake up, smell the coffee and decide if they *mind* that Human Rights are being flaunted by US Govt. just because apparently Pres. Bush, et al, thinks its OK! 
    If Joe Public care *enough* about law and order, truth and justice; they need to have joined up, media aware, campaigning.
    Why ?  I’ll come back to that at the end of this piece.

    9/11, unforgiveable, tragic and terrible though it was, is not sufficient reason to continue to break International law, ad infinitum.  An eye for an eye, is a biblical response, not a 21st. century legal justification for illegal acts by the most powerful country in the world.
    The immediate rush to action was understandable in the heat of battle in Iraq.  The peace is not won, but the War is over.  It’s now clear that Al Qaeda terrorists were not the main apposing force in Iraq.  The fight against Al Qaeda is another war, a covert war against international terrorism. 

    Meanwhile, in your name, that your US President continues to hold foreign citizens (many from Iraq), against their will, subject to no charge, no fair court hearing, (and apparently with impunity in the face of Supreme Court direction otherwise) is an outrage in any country, let alone the most powerful nation in the world.  Assumption of guilt based on being in the wrong placed at the wrong time when picked up by honourable US soldiers acting under battle orders, is simply not good enough and not worthy of any civilised nation.
    The US Govt. has a moral and ethical duty to show leadership and proper jurisprudence to corrupt leaders and banana republic countries.

    So, US people if you don’t want to be held under similar restraint in (say) 20-30 years time in a foreign country far from home - then for goodness sake wake up and ACT NOW.
    Why ?  Because, my friends, and you are friends, in 20-30 years time, it will be China or India that is the most powerful nation in the world. 
    At that point, any abuse of power, and you know what China is capable of (remember Tianaman Square ?) it will be too late to bleat about Human Rights and abuse of State power, because China will simply remind you about Guantanamo Bay.
    Game Over!

    Posted by LukePDQ  on  06/02  at  03:25 PM

  9. God, I hate posting typo’s.  Please excuse them in above post.  In my haste to get the words down, I didn’t check closely enough.  My apologies.

    Posted by LukePDQ  on  06/02  at  03:33 PM

  10. "We are experiencing a dissonance nearly equal to that of the Europeans who were colonizing Africa, Asia, and North and South America. Commiting crimes of the most vile evil nature in the name of all that was good and great, the subtext was that those who were suffering were less than equals, less than human.”

    A weird (and scary) instance of this attitude popped up in a Fareed Zakaria column that was intended to *criticize* our current incarceration practices. He argued that, while it can be necessary to pratice the kind of no-holds-barred decimation that the US army practiced against Indians in the Jacksonian era, in the current “war” it isn’t necessary or prudent. There wasn’t a flicker of awareness that the history he was evoking (near genocide in pursuit of land) was at problematic as an instance of American “defense” and “security.”

    Posted by  on  06/02  at  04:45 PM

  11. Ms. Snelling:

    They said “Gulag of our Times.” They didn’t say “It’s just like the Gulag Archipelago that Solzhenitsyn wrote about.”

    In other words, they qualified their statement. No one has refuted them on the facts.

    BTW, Godwin’s Law pertains to Nazi references, Not USSR references.

    Posted by Randy Paul  on  06/02  at  06:26 PM

  12. “ Maybe even someone in the mainstream media will read the Amnesty report and remember the Supreme Court decision.”

    Thanks for providing my laugh for the day.

    Posted by  on  06/02  at  07:03 PM

  13. Granted, I flunked moral philosophy 101, but I honestly don’t recognize a significant distinction between a government that kidnaps, tortures and kills dozens of people and one that does the same to millions.

    The only distinction between a garden-variety rapist murderer and Ted Bundy is the adjective “serial.”

    Posted by  on  06/02  at  07:30 PM

  14. The Amnesty International report deserves far more attention than it’s getting.  But can someone also tell me why the American media outlets aren’t making a bigger deal about the Downing Street memo and the outing of Bush as a complete liar—and worse, a chickenhawk who sent our troops into harm’s way for no good reason?

    See this article from *The Nation* for more disturbing details about “the war before the war”:

    http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050613&s=scahill

    Posted by  on  06/02  at  07:34 PM

  15. The Bush administration’s responses remind me of the Three Stoooges during one of their wedding reception food fights, where no matter how much they duck and weave, everybody just keeps getting more, erm, stuff on themselves. 

    The Three Stooges, however, were innocent comedians with buckets of talent. The administration, well, ah, cough, let’s see, um, it’ll come to me.

    Posted by  on  06/02  at  08:09 PM

  16. Perhaps AI’s use of the term “Gulag” is a minor semantic error, but those who unthinkingly support what’s going on at Gitmo and other places
    where we are holding “detainees” are making a more serious error.

    It’s not that far to slide into the hell spawned by Hitler and Stalin when you start treating enemies as if they’re subhuman, deserving NO rights. And the really scary part is that this attitude has been extended to some US citizens accused of being involved in terrorism.

    It’s said that a liberal is a conservative that has been unjustly accused of a crime. I hope it doesn’t take stripping large numbers of Americans of their liberties to bring the public to understand how injurious our present policy is to our way of life.

    Posted by  on  06/03  at  08:53 AM

  17. Well, one big difference between Stalin’s gulags and the current “detention center” archepelago, is that many of Stalin victims at least had trumped-up show trials before they got shipped out.  As for “millions” vs. “thousands” of prisoners, isn’t that comparing 5 years of Bush and 25+ years of Stalin?  If Bush engineers a putsch and stays in office for 20 more years, expect millions of detainees.

    It’s amazing to me that our MSM allows Bush, Cheney, etc. to get away with calling the AI report “absurd” (the ‘non-denial denial’wink without following up:

    “You said that the claims in Amnesty’s report are ‘absurd’. Does that mean that Amnesty’s claims are _wrong_? Yes or no.”

    “Would you be willing to state that under oath?”

    Posted by  on  06/03  at  10:29 AM

  18. Chris Clarke, thanks for clearly demonstrating to the world the breadth and depth of your reading and comprehension skills.  You were the only one capable of reading the invisible digital ink sentences apologizing for human rights abuses.  Was it you, or do you have a secret decoder overlay on your monitor?

    Randy Paul, “perversion of Godwin’s Law” perhaps implies a differentiated application of the common usage, does it not?  Another ineffective use your opportunity to make a point, if you have one.

    Grant D clearly knows nothing of value about the historical record of the gulag, nor of any scales of moral values that are meaningful.

    Liberals are as much in despair of such “allies” as we are of the administration and the right.

    Posted by  on  06/03  at  10:57 AM

  19. Chris Clarke, thanks for clearly demonstrating to the world the breadth and depth of your reading and comprehension skills.

    Hey, no probnlem. That’s what I do.

    You were the only one capable of reading the invisible digital ink sentences apologizing for human rights abuses.

    I assure you I was not the only one, but you made it easy. No invisible digital ink at all.  Here is your apologia:

    In form and effect, legal substance or suface appearance, the detainees abuses do not even come close to the evils of the gulag, and making such facile comparisons on the basis of formal legal processes without clearly noting the vast difference in moral scale is abhorrent.

    It’s all about choosing what to call “abhorrent.” You made your choice. Reading a report like Amnesty’s, you have basically three options for response. You can

    1) express horror at the described abuses,
    2) express skepticism at AI’s methodology,
    3) object to a word used at a press conference.

    The first two options are legitimate. The third might be legitimate (though trivial) if you were the only person doing so. But when your response is, nearly verbatim, what a million talking-point-laden flying monkey rightists are bleating, it’s a bit disingenuous for you to act offended when called on it.

    You had a choice what to call “abhorrent,” and you chose to use that word to describe a bit of hyperbole rather than the heinous actions the hyperbole referred to. How much clearer could you have been?

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/03  at  11:19 AM

  20. Hey, what about me?  I’m still being held after three years.  I’ve never been charged, I don’t know what the evidence is against me, I’ve no personal access to a lawyer, argh! here they come, they’ve discovered I’m on the internet, helpppppppppp

    Posted by  on  06/03  at  01:06 PM

  21. Chris Clarke, I also failed to mention in my post that Mother is the greatest, I must be one of those mother-haters who also disdains good old apple pie.

    From now on I will be certain to first ask you to enumerate the only possible statements I am permitted to make on any topic, ranked by legitimacy.

    Wildly offensive gulag-invoking hyperbole (though thankfully they stopped short of calling it a holocaust) may give you a happy thrill, but it is hardly effective in presenting a legitimate argument to a skeptical or under-informed public.  Amnesty sounds childish and overwroght, not authorative.

    Oh, yes, AIDs is a dreadful scourge, and aren’t puppies cute?  Please don’t think I am one of those awful people who never say so.

    I very much admire your writing, Chris, but sometimes your commenting and modes of argument do not convince or appeal.

    Posted by  on  06/03  at  01:50 PM

  22. Gina, you may want to keep in mind Molly Ivins’ First Rule Of Holes.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/03  at  01:57 PM

  23. here’s what i dislike about the apologia. (note: not the same as an apology, Gina.)

    In form and effect, legal substance or suface appearance, the detainees abuses do not even come close to the evils of the gulag, and making such facile comparisons on the basis of formal legal processes without clearly noting the vast difference in moral scale is abhorrent.

    in form, effect, legal substance, and surface appearance, the evils of guantanamo, abu graib, and afghanistan are virtually the same as the gulag.  They both took the form of horrible mistreatment of detainees, in order to efface their suffering and death and to frighten those not yet apprehended (effect), they are totally against the law (geneva applies), and they appear, to me, to both be torture, plain and simple, and very evil.

    Beating a man to death is not a “formal legal process” in my mind, and if it is, i am opposed to its so being.

    The one thing you come close to being correct about is that the scale is vastly different.  Not the *moral* scale, just the literal, headcount scale.  As has been pointed out, Bush (and the republican party) have only recently started to treat their enemies this way (not counting the many years we’ve encouraged, trained, and supported our client states in such treatment of course), so sure, the scale can be expected to be significantly less.  Let us hope and pray that it remains so, in which case i will grant you that morally, to kill and torture a mere several 100 or 1000 is not comparable, in scale, to killing and torturing several million.  I will not grant you that it is different, however, in form, effect, legal substance, or surface appearance.  And i will not grant you that it is moral, in any way.  Not *as* immoral?  Well, congratulations.  Bush is not as evil as Stalin!  Bully for him.  Personally i hope they can find something better to say about me than that, in the end.  And that they can find something better to say about Bush, as well, come to think of it.

    Unfortunately, i’m afraid that Bush et al. are heading in that direction.  Do you understand me?  I’m not being hyperbolic, i am literally afraid that Bush and the Right are leading towards death camps for their domestic enemies.  There are many reasons why torture bothers me, and that is one.  I may be next.  It is not the only one.  But i am afraid of it, and it looks more and more like it, to me, every day.

    So, did amnesty fail to mention that Bush had not (yet?) tortured as many people as Stalin?  Let me apologize on their behalf.  If they had realized you would seize on that as an excuse to ignore the substance of the report, i’m sure they would have.  Can we now move on to the substance of the report?

    Posted by Zenji  on  06/03  at  04:42 PM

  24. The one about ‘ceasing excavation,’ Chris?

    That is, given that we’re not allowed to call a sharp, handled digging implement a spade these days.

    Posted by  on  06/03  at  04:46 PM

  25. Chris Clarke, I also failed to mention in my post that Mother is the greatest, I must be one of those mother-haters who also disdains good old apple pie.

    you’re right Gina, it is WAY out of bounds for us to expect you to express dismay over torture as a respone to a report detailing instances of torture!  What could we have been thinking!?  Please, feel free to nitpick about our choice of comparisons instead.

    Wildly offensive gulag-invoking hyperbole (though thankfully they stopped short of calling it a holocaust) may give you a happy thrill, but it is hardly effective in presenting a legitimate argument to a skeptical or under-informed public.  Amnesty sounds childish and overwroght, not authorative.

    Hrm....someone is sounding childish and overwrought, but i’m not sure it’s amnesty.....


    Oh, yes, AIDs is a dreadful scourge, and aren’t puppies cute?  Please don’t think I am one of those awful people who never say so.

    actually, i’m way more worried that you’re one of the awful people who never say ‘torture is wrong, even if my team is doing it’, or ‘i do not support torture’......so how about it?  Just to make me feel better?

    Posted by Zenji  on  06/03  at  05:04 PM

  26. Lots of nastiness generated by this post.  Of course, in many ways, Amnesty was wrong to use the gulag reference, in part because of scope, and in part because gulags existed in a specific time and cultural/historical context and are, as such, unique. 

    But you have to balance such faulty analogies--I refuse to call it hyperbole, because I’m not going to split hairs; atrocities are atrocities, and one is too many--against the need for Amnesty to be heard when it has something to say that is critical of the U.S.  The Bush administration was quite willing to grant Amnesty International all the credibility in the world and even cite its literature when making a case for war on Iraq, but it conveniently ignores critiques of its own--our own--practices.  Well, the gulag reference sure got notice. 

    So, on balance, I’m not offended by it, even though, logically, the analogy may not hold up under scrutiny.  And, again, I’m not even going to address whether it holds up morally--a splintery broomstick up the ass is a splintery broomstick up the ass, whether in Siberia in 1970 or Guantanamo Bay in 2005.

    Posted by  on  06/03  at  05:49 PM

  27. As Randy Paul pointed out above, calling the extensive and secret detention system run by the Bush Cabal “the gulag of our time” is not the same thing as saying that the Bush Cabal is running a gulag that is the same as the one in Stalin’s Russia.  Nor is it hyperbole to use a word that has now become a commonplace to describe a network of secret prisons into which thousands of people have been “disappeared” in order to describe a network of secret prisons into which thousands of people have been “disappeared” merely because it is the United States that operates the network of secret prisons.  The major difference between what the U.S. is doing and what Stalin did is one of scale.  He locked away millions; we have locked away thousands.  The torture remains the same, as does the lack of due process or protection of simple human rights. 

    The only mistake Amnesty International made in using the word “gulag” was in not realizing how the right-wing spin artists would grab that one word and start screaming about it—in order, of course, to drown out the screams of the poor souls who are being water-boarded and beaten and, yes, tortured, at this very moment in the gulag.  When people like Ms. Snelling start acting as outraged about the fact that the U.S. is using torture as an official method of interrogation and punishment as they do when they hear the word “gulag” then maybe they’ll be taken seriously.

    Posted by  on  06/03  at  07:28 PM

  28. Ms. Snelling,

    Apparently your reading comprehension does not rise to the level of your skill at being snarky. Here’s what I wrote:

    They said “Gulag of our Times. They didn’t say ‘It’s just like the Gulag Archipelago that Solzhenitsyn wrote about.”

    In other words, they qualified their statement. No one has refuted them on the facts.

    You and AI’s numerous critics still have not refuted AI on the facts. That was my point. Perhaps next time you will actually read something before putting finger to keyboard.

    Posted by Randy Paul  on  06/04  at  01:55 PM

  29. What Basharov said here:

    When people like Ms. Snelling start acting as outraged about the fact that the U.S. is using torture as an official method of interrogation and punishment as they do when they hear the word “gulag” then maybe they’ll be taken seriously.

    Posted by Randy Paul  on  06/04  at  01:56 PM

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