The Expansionist

Saturday, May 28, 2005

Gulag, Guantanamo. Both begin with GU. Coincidence?
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But seriously, folks, Amnesty International aroused the ire of rightwingers this week in comparing the Guantanamo prison camp to the Soviet gulag. I sent the following emailed letter to the editor of the New York Post today on one rightwinger's reaction:

Surely John Podhoretz understands that in talking of moral outrages, comparisons are to the essence of a wrong, not to relative numbers. So when Amnesty International compares the unlawful U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo to the Soviet Gulag, or abortion opponents call U.S. government connivance in the abortion industry our Auschwitz, quibbling over the numbers affected is moral relativism, something conservatives are supposed to be indignant about. We are supposed to obey our Constitution, which provides very plainly that anyone arrested for any crime is to be formally charged or released, and if held to have a "speedy trial" by a jury of his peers, with "compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel". If we refuse to abide by our own Constitution, as in so many other ways, "the terrorists have won".

The right wing never thinks about the innocent accused of crimes, nor ever puts themselves in the place of someone wrongly accused and mistreated by a police authority. It's time they did. How would John Podhoretz like to be arrested for assisting a lawful government in resisting foreign invasion, then hauled off to a prison camp where he is never charged with anything but held without trial for years at a time? I'd like to see that. Maybe then he wouldn't trivialize the injustice we are doing to foreign fighters — mind you, if any other country did that to our soldiers, he'd be livid — and the violence the Bush Administration is doing to the Constitution.
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(Responsive to "Amnesty's Idiocy", column by John Podhoretz in the New York Post, May 27, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,656.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:56 PM

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