President Bush called a human rights report \"absurd\" for criticizing the United States' detention of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and said Tuesday the allegations were made by \"people who hate America.\"

\"It's absurd. It's an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world,\" Bush said of the Amnesty International report that compared Guantanamo to a Soviet-era gulag.

swiminbuff:
The rest of the world tends to forget that America can do no wrong.

millerbeach:
Thank God he doesn't have to say the word \"nuclear\" too often.

swiminbuff:
Believe me we have no weapons of mass destruction up here...unless you mean Tim Horton's coffee.

twin58:
It gets worse. Uzbekistan:

The Amnesty International accusations struck him as being based in part on \"allegations by people who were held in detention, people who hate America,\" he said.

PhillyFan:
Whoops

bobby78751:
Thank you for providing a link to an unbiased source. Remind me to address your hypocrisy the next time you throw-up (pun intended) my linking to a liberal source.

PennState4Ever:
The \"source\" here is not the Washington Times, but rather the Federal Election Commission. The Times simply reported what is found in FEC records, should one care to look.

bobby78751:
And I suppose the \"attack last week on the Bush administration's handling of war detainees\" had absolutely nothing to do with digging up who the Kerry contributors were. Nothing to see here, move right along.

If AI's hyper/hypo-critical gaze extended beyond into Fidel's Cuba, maybe they'd have a little more credibility than they do now.

Because some words -- gulag is one, Holocaust is certainly another -- are freighted with such profound, chilling and specific historical meaning that they should never be used as attention-grabbing devices. More generally, a willingness to use hyperbolic language should never be confused with toughness...

President Bush drives many people into a fury, and I empathize. But the negative passions the president inspires should not get in the way of the clarity, precision and tough-mindedness that effective opposition demands. Human rights are too important to be lost in bad metaphors.

IT'S ALWAYS SAD when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse. It's particularly sad when the institution is Amnesty International, which for more than 40 years has been a tough, single-minded defender of political prisoners around the world and a scourge of left- and right-wing dictators alike...But lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United States.

But we draw the line at the use of the word \"gulag\" or at the implication that the United States has somehow become the modern equivalent of Stalin's Soviet Union. Guantanamo Bay is an ad hoc creation, designed to contain captured enemy combatants in wartime. Abuses there -- including new evidence of desecrating the Koran -- have been investigated and discussed by the FBI, the press and, to a still limited extent, the military. The Soviet gulag, by contrast, was a massive forced labor complex consisting of thousands of concentration camps and hundreds of exile villages through which more than 20 million people passed during Stalin's lifetime and whose existence was not acknowledged until after his death. Its modern equivalent is not Guantanamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on Stalinist lines; or China's laogai , the true size of which isn't even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.