by Ken Sanders

When Amnesty International described the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of our times," the Bush administration and its supporters took extreme offense. They decried Amnesty for daring to compare Guantanamo to Stalin's camps where political prisoners were either summarily executed or slowly starved and worked to death. Guantanamo, the Bush administration claimed, was a bastion of human rights and necessary for the protection of the U.S. Regardless of whether Amnesty abused its creative license in describing Guantanamo as a gulag, it is interesting how literally Bush and his apologists took the remark. Applying an interpretive standard of strict construction, Bush & Co. were aghast that a heretofore respectable human rights organization would relegate itself to the dust bin of irrelevance by leveling such incendiary and unwarranted criticism at Bush and his stalwart defense of these United States. If, however, one applies that same standard of strict construction to Bush's remarks leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, an unfortunate picture emerges. It is a picture of the President of the United States employing the tools of deception and exaggeration to trick a wounded nation into embarking upon an unnecessary, unwarranted, and unwinnable war against a nation that had not done us any demonstrable harm and was incapable of doing so...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/June05/Sanders0623.htm