Atrocities: real and imagined

By Doug Hagin

Recently Amnesty International declared the United States a violator of human rights. They labeled the detention center in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, a modern day gulag. Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan declared that nowhere has "the assault on fundamental values that is shaking the human rights world" been more damaging. In addition, she blasted "efforts by the U.S. administration to weaken the absolute ban on torture."

Newsweek, of course has done its share of America bashing by running with stories of American soldiers abusing the Quran. The stories, as we know proved to be false, and Newsweek retracted their story. The rest of the media has, however, continued leading their headlines and broadcasts with more accusations of Quran desecration.

Likewise, the International Red Cross took the United States to task for alleged prisoner abuses in Iraq. The daughter of Saddam Hussein has called the photos of her father inhumane and questioned why her father was not being treated like a human being and the father of three daughters. Even that bastion of civil liberties and human rights, North Korea bashed the United States over what they called violations of the human rights of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

So obviously, this has been a bad time for public relations for the Bush administration and for the military. Of course, most of the bad press has been based on false retracted news stories, the testimony of terrorists, overreaction from left-wing groups that always enjoy bashing America, and the rantings of North Korean Communists. Therefore, as usual, the ones pointing fingers at us are hardly angels themselves.

Overall, the various charges leveled at American forces have fallen well short of believability. The facts are very clear. The examples of abuse, atrocities, and torture which have been given as proof of how evil America is have fallen far, far short of doing anything of the sort. The behavior of our troops, and the treatment of prisoners we hold, is not anywhere near justifying the criticisms cast upon them.

The real problem here is the extreme double standard these groups and the mainstream American media use to judge America's military. There is no doubt American troops ought to be held to a higher standard of conduct than terrorists are. That is not the issue though. America is consistently held to an impossible standard rather than a higher standard.

America's armed forces are doing battle with evil people who think nothing of attacking and killing innocent people. These are people who do not honor the Geneva Convention or any sort of civilized code of conduct. Yet, our military is supposed to deal with them and stay within a strict observation of the Geneva Convention.

Thus, where the various critics of America turn a blind eye to terrorists beheading civilians, or bombing innocent civilians, they scream "atrocities" when our troops use some tough interrogation techniques on the terrorists we capture. These miscreants compare the torture Saddam used on Iraqis with our troops taking humiliating photos of prisoners.

Really now, are we going to be expected to conduct a war against fanatical murders in a politically correct, sensitive fashion? Some photos of Saddam in his drawers bring cries of Geneva Convention violations. Imprisoning terrorists in Guantanamo Bay brings cries that the gulags are back. Some humiliation of Iraqi prisoners brings claims that Saddam's torture chambers are open for business once again.

This is insanity. Perhaps those doing all the screaming about atrocities and torture ought to take a look at what atrocities really are! Perhaps groups like Amnesty International might want to take a look at the gulags of Josef Stalin before they start accusing America of opening gulags!

In Stalin's concentration camps or gulags, 10,000,000 people were imprisoned by 1940. In these Hellholes the death rate ran between ten and thirty percent per year! The prisoners were not fed or clothed properly and were subject to backbreaking labor.

Now who were these people? Criminals? Rapists? Murderers? No, they wee anyone who dared oppose Communism or Stalin. Millions of peasant families were sentenced to the gulags because they opposed collectivization. Make no mistake Stalin meant these people to perish. Imagine being arrested, sent to Siberia for no crime accept having an opinion and then being worked , starved, and frozen to death.

Also of historical note is that since so many died in Stalin's slave labor camps, they had to be replaced. So more innocents, or perceived enemies of Stalin, or Communism were hauled off to these evil places. Just more human beings forced into hard labor and horrid conditions and all too often, death!

Amnesty International and their fellow America bashers might want to consider how many people Stalin had executed as well. In 1935 Stalin decreed that children as young as 12 could be executed. From 1936-39, the years known as the great terror, 1 million were executed by Stalin's evil government.

Is Amnesty International really trying to compare Guantanamo Bay where a few hundred suspected terrorists are kept, and well fed, and are given Qurans and religiously sensitive meals to Stalin's gulags where an estimated 10-30 million perished in hellish conditions between 1931 and 1950? Are they going to compare executing children and more than a million people to getting a little rough while interrogating terrorists America holds?

Maybe they ought to review the record of Mao Tse-Tung who murdered between 10 and 15 million in China. On the other hand, they could look at the bloody record of Pol Pot and his millions of victims. Or Ho-Chi Minh, or Josip Tito or any number of evil dictators. They could compare those real atrocities to America's humiliation of prisoners and accidentally touching a Quran and see the vast differences.

I guess that approach would not work for them, though. They would rather give terrorists and Communist mass murderers passes and bash America.

© Doug Hagin