The head of Amnesty International USA on Sunday started to notably tiptoe away from charges by one of his group’s bigwigs that Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison is “”the gulag of our times.”
This underscores a cautionary note for groups on the right and left and politicians as well. Using labels and potent phrases is as old as politics. What’s new is the existence of news “cycles” that are actually one continuous news cycle, zipping along at the speed of milliseconds — allowing all charges to be out there, instantly discussed and examined for accuracy on TV and on the Internet. And if an attention-getting charge can’t be proven to quite hold up you get this:
Despite highly publicized charges of U.S. mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the head of the Amnesty International USA said on Sunday the group doesn’t “know for sure” that the military is running a “gulag.”
Executive Director William Schulz said Amnesty, often cited worldwide for documenting human rights abuses, also did not know whether Secretary Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved severe torture methods such as beatings and starvation.
Schulz recently dubbed Rumsfeld an “apparent high-level architect of torture” in asserting he approved interrogation methods that violated international law.
“It would be fascinating to find out. I have no idea,” Schulz told “Fox News Sunday.”
A dispute has raged since Amnesty last month compared the prison for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the vast, brutal Soviet gulag system of forced labor camps in which millions of prisoners died.
Another report adds these details:
On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace asked William Schulz, director of Amnesty International USA, if he stood by the description of the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison.
Schulz responded by saying, “Clearly, this is not an exact or a literal analogy, and the secretary general has acknowledged that.”
“In size and in duration, there are not similarities between U.S. detention facilities and the gulag,” Schulz said. “People are not being starved in those facilities. They’re not being subjected to forced labor.”
Schulz maintained that some similarities did exist, saying the United States keeps a network of prisons worldwide, “many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared.” In some cases, he said, prisoners are being tortured and killed.
The problem with this kind of approach is: it’s akin to the old story of the boy who cried wolf. There’s nothing wrong with using forceful language to condemn and get attention for an alarming problem or abuse. The problem is: the language used must be able to be defended with specifics later. Amnesty International’s future strong warnings could be met with some raised eyebrows from some potentially sympathetic media reporters and citizens in the future because in this case it’s seemingly unable to defend its leader’s initial powerful charge.
How does this play in the media? There are contradictions but the net result is that the “gulag” phrase has not been backed up sufficiently. It seems to have been partially discredited if you look at these often-conflicting headlines:
- Chicago Sun-Times: “Amnesty USA backs off Gitmo as ‘gulag’
- Monsters and Critics runs a UPI story that focuses on Schulz not completely taking back the charge with this headline:”Amnesty Int`l defends U.S. gulag reference”
- Reuters Alert.net:”Amnesty USA-‘Don’t know for sure’ about Guantanamo”
- Calcutta Telegraph:”Rights reprieve for US”
There seems to be a split in approach between the USA Amnesty International group, which is backing off the allegation, and the London Amnesty International office which has been more prone to defend it. For instance, on Saturday there was this:
An official of Amnesty International said Friday that the choice of the term gulag in its annual report to describe the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was chosen deliberately, and she shrugged off Bush administration criticism.
Kate Gilmore, the group’s executive deputy secretary-general, said the administration’s response was “typical of a government on the defensive,” and she drew parallels to the reactions of the former Soviet Union, Libya and Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, when those governments were accused of human rights abuses.
But why all the uproar?
Some of the angry criticism leveled at Amnesty International for its choice of words is being leveled by players in or supporters of the Bush administration’s Iraq war effort (including George Bush himself). But not all. The group is also under fire for making its charge in a way that seemingly ignored the rights abuses of other countries, including some that clearly have large problems, some of them systemically entrenched.
Amnesty International became the focus of controversy due to (a)its use of language which would have been OK if it could have defended its use of the phrase with specifics versus early statements simply saying it stood by its statements (b)the lack of its charge being presented in a way that confirmedit within the context of what is going on elsewhere in the world in other countries. Context does matter.
See this previous post for some of those issues.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.