(NOTE: We posted this towards the end of the day yesterday and have reposted it today.)
The human rights organization Amnesty International has suffered a blow to its credibility due to a piece in the Washington Post that contends that claims that there was an “American Gulgag” was specifically calculated to get publicity — and was not true:
Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet “prisoner of conscience” adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty’s executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the “gulag of our time.”
“Don’t you think that there’s an enormous difference?” I asked him.
“Sure,” he said, “but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees.”
This column will be quoted far and wide because of the credibility of its author.
He isn’t someone who’s claiming Michael Schiavo murdered his wife. He isn’t a talk show host whose mantra is attacking Democrats and making excuses for anyone with an “R” in front of his name. He isn’t a military official, defending his side’s interrogators. And he isn’t a blogger who writes for a like-minded audience and tends to take a certain line.
The piece is in fact by Pavel Litvinov, a dissident active in human rights causes in the Soviet Union, now lives in the United States. He is precisely the kind of person you can see someone contacting in an effort to get him to say that, yes, Guantanamo and the U.S. system for detainees is just like it was in Soviet Russia.
Just as GOPers fall all over themselves to try to defend the Bush administration, in this case we are sure to see some on the left fall all over themselves to discredit Litvinov’s piece — but it’ll be harder to do, since he doesn’t seem to have an axe to grind. And what he writes makes sense.
Why? Because he is NOT letting the U.S. off the hook. He is demanding the U.S. be held to high standards.
And he’s demanding the same of Amnesty International:
There is ample reason for Amnesty to be critical of certain U.S. actions. But by using hyperbole and muddling the difference between repressive regimes and the imperfections of democracy, Amnesty’s spokesmen put its authority at risk. U.S. human rights violations seem almost trifling in comparison with those committed by Cuba, South Korea, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
The most effective way to criticize U.S. behavior is to frankly acknowledge that this country should be held to a higher standard based on its own Constitution, laws and traditions. We cannot fulfill our responsibilities as the world’s only superpower without being perceived as a moral authority. Despite the risks posed by terrorism, the United States cannot indefinitely detain people considered dangerous without appropriate safeguards for their conditions of detention and periodic review of their status.
Words are important. When Amnesty spokesmen use the word “gulag” to describe U.S. human rights violations, they allow the Bush administration to dismiss justified criticism and undermine Amnesty’s credibility. Amnesty International is too valuable to let it be hijacked by politically biased leaders.
We wrote about Amnesty International’s comments here and here. The problem for Amnesty International — an organization that has a long, laudable history — is one of credibility. This writer specialized in stories on the Basque County when he covered Spain for the Chicago Daily News and Christian Science Monitor during the last months of the Franco regime and the first few years of Spain’s post-Franco government. He often read and quoted the reports of Amnesty International, which had the reputation of being a group that painstakingly collected and presented info about human rights violations — trustworthy information that you could accept as fact.
The problem now: next time Amnesty International sounds the alarm there will be some who feel it is either exaggerating a given situation or acting out of some staff political bias.
UPDATE: Some other comments
—Glenn Reynolds:”Sorry, but this is corruption.”
—Secular Blasphemy:”Let’s mourn the loss of what was once an important human rights organisation.”
We have systematically debased our language to the point where we now consider chaining a guy to a floor and making him listen to rap music to be “torture,” to where a few hundred people in clean, air-conditioned and heated cells, with television, books, clean and regular food and water, flush toilets, and exercise facilities are in a “gulag” because once in a while during interrogations we let a dog bark at some of them, and a few times some copies of their holy books may (or may not) have been mishandled.
I ask again: if this is how we use our language today, what will we say when real fascists, real communists, real torture artists, come along? Will we treat them as “equally bad?”
—Countercolumn:”Nice to see the kids put down by the adults.”
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.