Amnesty International Round-Up

For those of you who haven't heard, human rights group, Amnesty International came out with its annual report on human rights abusers. In this report, they actually called the detetention center at Guantanamo a "gulag." On top of that, their officials suggested that foreign governments could charge top American officials with war crimes.

Now comparing Guantanamo to a the soviet Gulag does an extreme diservice to Amnesty's cause. First of all, Guantanamo is nothing like the Gulag. As Roger Simon points out, in order for Guantanamo to be like the Gulag, we would have to kill all the prisoners, and then wipe out the entire population of Cuba. Then and only then would be Guantanomo be close to the Stalin run gulags that killed millions.

By making such a simplistic and flawed comparison, Amnesty actually empowers the real human rights abusers. Instapundit notes that due to the simple principle of opportunity cost, whatever pressure you're exherting on the U.S. is pressure you're NOT exherting on regimes that need the pressure. Indeed, Amnesty has cheapened the the meaning of suffering.

Not suprisingly, Amnesty officials made their contributions to the Kerry camp.