The Amnesty report has been mentioned by both Cheney and Bush in recent days. The header of the CNN story Acidus memed is somewhat misleading, as one could read it to imply that he said that people who've raised questions about Gitmo "hate America." This isn't actually what he said. CNN is blowing the exchange out of proportion because it started with a Larry King interview that they are trying to market.

] In terms of the detainees, we've had thousands of people
] detained. We've investigated every single complaint against the
] detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on
] the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in
] detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some
] instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth. And so it
] was an absurd report. It just is.

Bush is saying that a lot of the detainees hate America. He is not saying that Amnesty international hates America. However, those who are given to believing such things are likely to believe thats what he said.

The question is what did Amnesty say, and is it truly absurd?

] In the US, almost a year after the Supreme Court decided that
] detainees in Guantanamo should have access to judicial review,
] not one single case from among the 500 or so detained has reached
] the courts because of stonewalling by the Administration.
]
] Under this agenda some people are above the law and others are
] clearly outside it.
]
] Guantanamo has become the gulag our times, entrenching the
] notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law.
]
] If Guantanamo evokes images of Soviet repression, "ghost detainees"
] – or the incommunicado detention of unregistered detainees - bring
] back the practice of "disappearances" so popular with Latin American
] dictators in the past.
]
] According to US official sources there could be over 100 ghost detainees
] held by the US.
]
] In 2004 thousands of people were held by the US in Iraq, hundreds in
] Afghanistan and undisclosed numbers in undisclosed locations.
]
] AI is calling on the US Administration to "close Guantanamo and disclose
] the rest". What we mean by this is: either release the prisoners or charge
] and prosecute them with due process.

Hrm... Absurd? I can see that. The rhetoric in this essay is firey and analogies chosen are bad ones. However, the specific allegations aren't false. By responding to the gulag analogy as if it was an accusation of willful detainee abuse (it isn't), Bush and Cheney avoid addressing the actual matter that Amnesty has raised, which is about accountability and not torture. The administration is making a straw man argument, betting that no one will read past the analogy and into the details of the report (I haven't bothered. None of this is news.). Amnesty, for their part, is using puffed up language to increase the emotional impact of their report, and devotes an unfair amount of focus on U.S. policy for what is supposed to be an objective, international view. I wouldn't call it absurd, but I wouldn't call it reasonable either. It feels leftist.

In sum, spin on both sides. I'm glad we're talking about accountability and not torture, but ultimately, if we don't have the former we can rest assured that we're going to have the later. I'm more concerned about whether or not our Gitmo policy is a good idea then whether or not Amnesty is a left wing group. By changing the subject the Administration avoids having to address lingering, substantive questions by focusing on the over heated framework in which they were presented.

If might notch an arrow here, I would point out that later in the interview Bush said:

] I expressed my concerns about the case to President Putin because, as
] I explained to him, here you're innocent until proven guilty...

Ironically thats exactly the most substantive question that has been raised about Gitmo. The administration started detaining people outside the Geneva convention. A lawsuit was filed which argued that if there is no convention, there are no checks and balances. The administration's lawyers argued (and Cheney noted in his Larry King appearance) that they would eventually have to release these people once hostilities had ended, but the Supreme Court didn't buy that arguement, largely due to Cheney's comments about the WoT being a perpetual war, so the Court created vauge a requirement for tribunals for these people and stated in dicta that they might accept a presumption of guilt as a reasonable standard for such trials.

So, here, sometimes you're guilty until proven innocent. And exactly the point that Amnesty makes is why should people like Putin listen to us when we have a mess like this in our backyard. And I agree with that point, despite the fact that I don't agree with how they presented it.

But who the hell cares what I think?

President on Amnesty report