Just a little bit more on the joke that is Amnesty International

Ned Rice has a stellar, meticulous refutation of charges leveled by Amnesty International, and the Left general, against Gitmo and other US military detention sites. Where he really picks up steam, though, is in guessing at the probable motives behind AI and its fellow accusers. After pointing out the historical ignorance and idiocy animating the accusations, he says:

All of which is lost on the 'new American gulag' crowd because they don't really care about prisoner abuse. If they truly cared about the mistreatment of the incarcerated they would have demanded the liberation of Iraq long ago. And Afghanistan, and Cuba, and, if I understand the facts of the case, the Neverland Ranch. These Bush haters aren't even focusing on the genuine outrage of the few cases in which detainees were genuinely tortured and even killed. No, most of their ire is over the embarrassment of few dozen prisoners by a handful of sick people at an understaffed military prison called Abu Ghraib. The same prison where Saddam's surgeons practiced punitive amputations. Where men and children watched their wives and sisters and daughters being gang raped. Where tens of thousands were murdered, and then dumped into unmarked trenches. And on, and on, and on. No, the real goal of these Bush haters is to delegitimize this war and this scandal is just another weapon in their feeble arsenal. They would have you believe that it was morally wrong-impeachable, even — to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq and perhaps trigger the democratization of an entire subcontinent because some terrorist prisoners may have been improperly (and unjustly — don't get me wrong) treated during the chaos of a shooting war. Which is a bit like saying the United States was on the wrong side of World War II simply because Allied soldiers sometimes roughed up German POWs during questioning, or shot Japanese troops deep behind enemy lines because they had no means of securely detaining them (both of which happened). With this new report and its gratuitous use of the term 'gulag,' Amnesty International has joined that shameful chorus who would reflexively condemn any initiative, even one to liberate an entire region of the world, rather than give George W. Bush credit for doing something good. As anyone familiar with history and warfare knows, Amnesty International's characterization of the U.S. prisons as being a 'the gulag of our time' are more than just obscene. They are, as President Bush recently noted, absurd.