ran into this today from the San Francisco Bay View, a "black" paper out West (perhaps a version of our Khartoum-loving Insight_News ). It basically states that the U.S. prison system is every bit as bad as the worst Soviet G.U.Lags.
What a shame. We actually could use some constructive criticism of the way we treat prisoners in this country. Instead, we get an Irene Kahn wannabe.
On a certain news site's message board, I often wind up posting Christopher Hitchens' critique of Amnesty International's take on Guantanamo Bay:
And now look. I think it is fairly safe to say that not one detainee in
Guantanamo is there because of an expression of opinion. (And those whose
"opinion" is that all infidels must die are not exactly prisoners of
conscience.) Morally neutral on this point, apparently, Amnesty nonetheless
finds its voice by describing the prison itself as "the gulag of our times." No
need to waste words here: Not everyone in the gulag was a "prisoner of
conscience," either. But if an organization that ostensibly protects the rights
of prisoners is unaware of the nature of a colossal system of forced labor and
arbitrary detention—replete with physical torture, starvation, and brutal
execution—then the moral compass has become disordered beyond repair. This is
not even neutrality between the fireman and the fire. It surely expresses a
covert sympathy with the aims and objectives of jihad and an overt, if witless
and sinister, hatred of the United States. If only this were the only symptom of
that tendency.