Moral Freefall: Amnesty International

Three must read editorials on Amnesty International. Below are small excerpts. Please read them completely before commenting:

Kenneth Anderson:

We also know that it is suicidally irresponsible for groups that depend on the moral force of their pronouncements to habitually say things they don't actually mean. Rhetorical inflation is a dangerous indulgence for the human rights movement. And it is a bad thing for the cause of human rights.

Dennis Prager:

That devolution was most apparent years ago when Amnesty International listed the United States as a major violator of human rights because it executed murderers. The organization's inability to morally distinguish between executing murderers and executing innocent people means that Amnesty International is worse than ineffectual; the good it has done notwithstanding, it is becoming harmful to the cause of human rights.

His statistical comparison between Gitmo and the Gulags is worth a read all its own.

And speaking of comparisons,
David Limbaugh:

If the Left could bring itself to take a hiatus from its hyperbole in redefining "torture" so as conveniently to encompass the detention practices of the U.S. military in Guantanamo and elsewhere, perhaps it could rediscover the true meaning of torture by perusing the pages of Solzhenitsyn's gripping account.

If they want to understand what real torture-minded interrogators have been known to do, they could begin with the chapter on "The Interrogation." The chapter begins, "If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in 20, 30, or 40 years had been told that in 40 years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the 'secret brand'); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums."

Nor were these isolated, extreme, or extraordinary events being practiced "by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims."

Oh, yes, and lest we forget, the interrogators of the Soviet camps were not trying to extract information from their subjects for such laudatory purposes as preventing the further slaughter of innocent human beings such as the victims of the Sept. 11 massacres. "Throughout the years and decades, interrogations under Article 58 were almost never undertaken to elicit the truth, but were simply an exercise in an inevitably filthy procedure: Someone who had been free only a little while before, who was sometimes proud and always unprepared, was to be bent and pushed through a narrow pipe where his sides would be torn by iron hooks and where he could not breathe, so that he would finally pray to get to the other end. And at the other end, he would be shoved out, an already processed native of the Archipelago, already in the promised land. (The fool would keep on resisting! He even thought there was a way back out of the pipe.)"

The left's hysteria trivializes the true evil of places like the Gulag. It reveals an ignorance of the history of the Evil Empire, and evil in general. It also accuses both the current administration, and individual soldiers of horrendous evil without evidence in order to fulfill their own agenda.