President George Bush held a press conference today in which he blasted as “absurd” the human rights organization Amnesty International’s report that likened U.S. treatment of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a gulag in the old Soviet union.
This will likely spark a new round of debate. But what did the President actually say? ABC Newsonline reports this:
United States President George W Bush has lashed out at Amnesty International, suggesting it has been hoodwinked by “people who hate America”.
President Bush dismisses Amnesty’s report into human rights, which compares the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to a gulag.
“I’m aware of the Amnesty International report, and it’s absurd,” he said.
President Bush says the allegations about mistreatment have been made by prisoners who hate the United States.
“It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of, and the allegations by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble – that means not tell the truth,” he said.
Amnesty last week described the US detention camp as “the gulag of our time”.
You can also read the press conference’s transcript and decide for yourself what he said.
Here’s our interpretation:
- It’s very possible (in fact, highly likely) that GWB feels Amnesty International itself hates America. But his words are specific.
- He’s talking about the sources of information for their report — that he feels they are not credible sources of information because the people in detention hate America.
- But news reports indicate not all of the people in detention — including an Iraqi taxi driver who was held and basically roughed up until he died of his injuries — are automatically guilty because they are HELD in detention…since military officials can basically pick up whomever they want and hold them for as long as they want. The detainee (and his/her attorney) have little to do about it.
So Bush is partly right: the Amnesty International report has some questionable sources of information — which is NOT to say that every, single source they cite is wrong.
For instance: someone can indeed hate America and also be subject to treatment at variance with American traditions. Haven’t we seen a little bit of proof of abuses in American-run Iraqi prisons already?
A SEPARATE ISSUE is whether the Amnesty International report lacked any attempt to look at all sides, test the veracity of the information — and whether charging that the United States was light years worse than brutal, dictatorial regimes around the world reflected (a)sloppy report analysis, (b)poor research or (c)political bias that undermines the human right’s group’s pronouncements on other issues.
Oxblog’s David Adesnik wrote a powerful post a few days ago on the Amnesty International report. To put this issue in perspective we’ll give you most of it (but read it in its entirety):
MILLIONS DEAD BY ANALOGY: In a bold effort to destroy any pretense of her own detachment or objectivity, the the head of Amnesty International has described the US prison at Guantanamo Bay as “the gulag of our times”.
Although the editors of the WaPo have made the right decision to single out this absurd comparison as the dumbest and most offensive remark made by AI’s Secretary General, Irene Khan, this single outrage should not obscure how thoroughly offensive her entire speech was.
The purpose of Khan’s speech was to introduce and summarize AI’s annual report on human rights. Before getting into what Khan did say, it is far important to observe what she didn’t say, namely anything about North Korea, let alone Cuba or Syria. This sort of calculated ignorance constitutes nothing less than a betrayal of the millions and millions who suffer at the hands of the world’s most reactionary dictatorships.
That IS a point: context matters. If you do a report and blast the United States as basically the worst what does it say about your overall vision? We appreciate that many readers have a GUT reaction to this depending on where they stand on the war. But isn’t what goes on in North Korea, Cuba or Syria, in terms of context, a teenie-weenie bit important if you’re writing a report. Adnesk adds:
I say “calculated” because I presume that Khan’s emphasis on the US (and the UK), reflects her knowledge that exerting pressure on the world’s greatest democracies may actually result in a change of behavior, whereas Kim Jong Il and Fidel Castro couldn’t care less about what Amnesty International thinks of their behavior.
This, however, is no excuse for Khan’s behavior, because there are many, many nations that are susceptible to pressure and which commit atrocities far worse than anything that happened at Abu Ghraib. Let’s start with Syria. Just a few months ago, I might have ignorantly said that Bashar would never listen to foreign critics. But now he has no choice, and Amnesty should recognize how much good it might accomplish by emphasizing Syrian brutality.
Of course, there is a chapter on Syria in AI’s annual report. The same is true of Cuba and North Korea. But when the head of the organization singles out the US and UK for criticism, she lets the Cubans, Syrians and North Koreans know that they are not her biggest concern. It’s exactly the same as when Bush singles out Egypt for criticism but lets Pakistan and Saudi Arabia slide.
At least Bush can say in his own defense that the Saudis and Pakistanis are helping us fight the war on terror. Amnesty could never say that the Cubans, Syrians, or North Koreans are doing anything to make the world a better place.
Context matters — both in Bush’s comments and what Amnesty International reported.
PERSONAL FOOTNOTE: When I reported from Spain from 1975-1978 as Special Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor (which they once defined as “full time contributor” since I had to do all of their reporting in the immediate post-Franco era up until Spain’s first new-era free election) I often read and cited Amnesty International reports. The group then enjoyed the reputation of being a human rights watchdog.
What appears to be at play here is that some at Amnesty International apparently oppose the war in Iraq and are letting that color the context in which they present their information. YES. There have been reports of hideous U.S. abuses of prisoners — and we have reported and condemned them here (taking heat from many readers for it). But the Amnesty International report seems more of an expression of anger than a completely trustworthy, clinical detailing of human rights abuses, putting abuses in each country in the context of others. In short: they seemed to have had it in for the U.S. and let it color the tone of their report.
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.