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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (122951)	7/1/2005 5:32:24 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793846

My perception of Amnesty International's request was not that the prisoners at Guantanamo be treated as common criminals, per se, but that unless there is actual evidence of wrong-doing then let them go. If the sole reason for holding them is that they sympathize with Al Qaeda, then how does that differ from imprisonment for political ideology?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (122951)	7/1/2005 6:14:16 PM
From: carranza2	Respond to of 793846

You think there's the equivalent of a Solshenitzin residing at Gitmo? Some pure nonviolent humanist whose memoirs are going to make us weep at our lack of humanity? Don't hold your breath. Plus, it was cold in Siberia. You think the poor mistreated AQ guys are going to be forced to work at hard labor in -20F temperatures while wearing newspaper shoes? It's not as if some of the prisoners haven't been released, either. Also, I don't think Amnesty has backed away from its silly-ass Gulag interpretation: ww4report.com Amnesty International is defending its description of Guantánamo prison as a "gulag," and urges the US to allow independent investigations of allegations of torture at its detention centers for terrorism suspects. A verbal feud between Amnesty and Washington has escalated since the group's new annual report compared Guantánamo Bay to the brutal Soviet system of forced labor camps where millions of prisoners died. President Bush dismissed the report as "absurd" the Amnesty report, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the description "reprehensible." "The administration's response has been that our report is absurd, that our allegations have no basis, and our answer is very simple: if that is so, open up these detention centers, allow us and others to visit them," Amnesty International secretary general Irene Zubaida Khan told a news conference. The US holds about 520 men at Guantánamo, where they are denied rights accorded under international law to prisoners of war. Many have been held without charge for more than three years. Khan rejected a suggestion that Amnesty's use of the emotive term "gulag" had turned the debate into one over semantics, and distracted attention from the situation in the detention centers. "What we wanted to do was to send a strong message that ... this sort of network of detention centers that has been created as part of this war on terrorism is actually undermining human rights in a dramatic way which can only evoke some of the worst features of human rights scandals of the past," she said. (Reuters, June 5)