So many organizations and ideas revered of the elite are beginning to seem pass’.
Voters (as in people, not bureaucrats) in France and the Netherlands showed what they think of the European Union: non or nee.
Is Amnesty International next?
Amnesty’s report calling the detention center Guantanamo Bay a “gulag” was so outrageous that even E.J. Dionne found it a bit much (though mainly because Dionne felt the glaring inaccuracy helped President Bush):
“What’s maddening is that by reaching for the dramatic, overwrought and, yes, outrageous gulag metaphor, Amnesty’s Khan let Bush slip right by the questions raised by American practices in Guantanamo and whether Guantanamo’s problems are helping the ‘people who hate America’ in their battle for world opinion.”
Obviously, I’ve never been to Gitmo but somehow I think it’s less a torture center than a place where U.S. officials try to get information from people who want to kill us.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer has choice remarks on the Amnesty allegations today:
“In March the Navy inspector general reported that, out of about 24,000 interrogations at Guantanamo, there were seven confirmed cases of abuse, ’all of which were relatively minor.’ In the eyes of history, compared to any other camp in any other war, this is an astonishingly small number. Two of the documented offenses involved ’female interrogators who, on their own initiative, touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner.’ Not exactly the gulag.
“The most inflammatory allegations have been not about people but about mishandling the Koran. What do we know here? The Pentagon reports (Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, May 26) — all these breathless ’scoops’ come from the U.S. government’s own investigations of itself — that of 13 allegations of Koran abuse, five were substantiated, of which two were most likely accidental.
“Let’s understand what mishandling means. Under the rules the Pentagon later instituted at Guantanamo, proper handling of the Koran means using two hands and wearing gloves when touching it. Which means that if any guard held the Koran with one hand or had neglected to put on gloves, this would be considered mishandling.”
Amnesty has done valuable work in the past, but its reflexive anti-Americanism may make it one of those remnants of the left that suddenly seem so out of touch with reality.