Via Eric I see that a spokesman for Amnesty in the US, interviewed on Fox News, used a version of the Irene Khan response - 'to send a strong message' - when pressed about the comparison of Guantanamo with the Gulag. Amnesty's US Executive Director William Schulze says this to Chris Wallace:
Chris, I don't think I'd be on this station, on this program today with you if Amnesty hadn't said what it said and President Bush and his colleagues haven't responded as they did. If I had come to you two weeks ago and said, "Chris, I'd like to go on Fox with you just to talk about U.S. detention policies at Guantanamo and elsewhere," I suspect you wouldn't have given me an invitation.Earlier in the interview Schulze has already said that the Gulag reference wasn't an 'exact' analogy, but that it was making important points nonetheless, about detention without access to lawyers, rendition, torture. This is all he needs to say. That Amnesty officials are now willing to give out publicly that statements from the organization may be determined by their attention-grabbing effect, and notwithstanding the misleading nature of their actual content, is scarcely credible. This is one of the most widely respected organizations in the world, and with good reason - for the invaluable work it has done during more than four decades. Why would it now squander the trust it has gained, by shaping its official utterances for publicity effect rather than by considerations of accuracy and proportion?
