GUANTANAMO PRISON A GULAG OR MAYBE NOT

Here's the latest from Australia's ABC on the Guantanamo gulag – first, the ABC's Leigh Sales interviews Amnesty International's William Schulz:

LEIGH SALES: At Guantanamo Bay, detainees eat culturally-sensitive meals, they have Korans, clean clothes and access to medical treatment. In the Soviet Gulag prisoners were starved, deprived of adequate clothing in subzero temperatures and severely beaten.

Yet Amnesty International's American Director, William Schulz, says the organisation basically stands by its comparison between the two detention camps.

WILLIAM SCHULZ: There are some similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared, held in indefinite, incommunicado detention without access to lawyers or a judicial system, or to their families, and in some cases at least we know that they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed. And those are similar at least in character, if not in size, to what happened in the Gulag. (Disappeared is, of course, code for murdered.)

LEIGH SALES: Amnesty's criticism of Guantanamo has attracted a sustained and furious attack from the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney:

DICK CHENEY: Frankly, I was offended by it. For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously.

LEIGH SALES: Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld:

DONALD RUMSFELD: To compare the United States and Guantanamo Bay to such atrocities cannot be excused.

LEIGH SALES: And President Bush himself:

GOERGE W. BUSH: I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd. It's an absurd allegation.

Sales isn't exaggerating with the furious attack thing, is he? If Cheney keeps getting all worked up like that he's bound to have another chest-burster.

For a bit of perspective, lets take at look at what former Soviet political prisoner Natan Sharansky has to say about the AI gulag beat-up:

"In Guantanamo Bay, there was a very serious violation of human rights and it's very important to deal with this and to correct it. But the comparison of Amnesty International is very typical, unfortunately, for this organization, which has no moral clarity."

Sharansky argued that Amnesty International compromises its work by refusing to differentiate "between democracies where there are sometimes serious violations of human rights and dictatorships where no human rights exist at all."

"This comparison between gulag and Soviet Union and United States of America, erases all these differences," he said. "It makes moral equivalence between these two very different worlds and that's unfortunately very a typical, systematical, mistake of Amnesty International."

To that end, Schulz said his group has no favorites and they are "equal opportunity offenders."

"We do our best within the limits of human fallibility," he said. "To apply one universal standard -- one plumline to every society -- to China and to the U.S. to Israel and to Cuba, to Afghanistan and Zimbabwe."

But Amnesty International critics say that may be part of the problem.

They point out that the group's international report has multiple pages criticizing Israel and milder critique of the Palestinian Authority. Meanwhile, the report devotes a similar amount of space to the slaughter in Sudan as it does poor treatment by police officers in Switzerland.

Anyway, back to the ABC's Leigh Sales who's now speaking with Jackie Northam, the National Security Correspondent for National Public Radio:

LEIGH SALES: A few days ago, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld expressed his frustration at the amount of media coverage Guantanamo Bay is attracting. He says the criticism is out of proportion.

JACKIE NORTHAM: Guantanamo is really becoming a public relations problem for the administration right now. For a long time there wasn't an enormous amount of attention given to the prison camp. It's a long way away, it's isolated, security is enormous in that area.

But, you know, ever since Abu Ghraib something's changed. More and more questions are being asked about Guantanamo right now, and they're not really being answered.

And the other thing that's developing is that Guantanamo is becoming a rallying cry for the Arab world, much along the same lines like the Palestinian issue is. There's growing resentment that there's hundreds of detainees, Muslim detainees being held there without charge, you know, without representation, nothing. So it's a growing problem for the administration.

It's a growing problem for the administration because the left dominated MSM is trying to blow the story out of all proportion. But, the American public ain't gonna buy it:

Large majorities of between 3-to-1 and 2-to-1 trusted the police and the military in both the United States and in Europe.

A 62 to 22 percent (almost 3-to-1) majority of Americans did not trust "the press."

And, rightly so.