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April 23, 2013

Is Guantanamo Detention Camp really the 'Gulag of our times'?

By Paul Murphy

Recently I posted an image of an Iranian torture chamber on my Facebook in which an inmate was being tortured for the pleasure of various Muslim officials, including the ex-President of Iran, Muhammad Khatami (president between 1997 and 2005). This inspired a poster/commentator to say that such a thing is no worse than what has happened at Guantanamo Bay - which Amnesty International once referred to as "The Gulag of our Times."
When you Google 'Guantanamo Bay - Wikipedia', you'll be very surprised about how long the entry is. It's massive! It's over 18,000 words long. That is much larger than the Wikipedia entries on President Hafez Assad's killing of up to 40,000 fellow Muslims in the Battle of Hama in 1982 (only 1,730 words). It is about four times larger than the entry of the Jordanian killings ('Black September') of up to 10,000 of Yasser Arafat's PLO in 1970/1 (4,481 words). There is no specific entry on the recent killings (in the last 15 years) of up to 20, 000 Kurds - killed by the Turkish army and state. And no entry at all on the massive persecution, often the killings, of Christians today in many Muslim/Islamic countries.

But what's worse than all this, at least in terms of Wikipedia entries, is that the article on the 9/11 attacks only warrants around 10,000 words - that's 8000 words less than the article on the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

All this is no surprise. Guantanamo Bay is a massive industry. It's literally an industry - a money-making scam - for the Leftists and Left-Liberals who are involved in the very many "human rights groups," campaign groups" and whatnot involved in uncovering what they might call the "Worst Crime & Institution in Human History."

Primarily their obsession with Gitmo is ideological and political. Their monomania has virtually nothing to do with their moral disgust or their outraged consciences. Ranting on and on and on about Gitmo is but a means to smack the US government in the face as well of furthering various ideological/political ends and causes. The very fact that Gitmo is actually so small-scale in the vast scheme of things shows this to be the case. (It parallels, very well, the obsession, often by the very same people, with the Israel-Palestine conflict.)

Let's just cite a few facts and statistics.

i) Only eight people have died at Gitmo, some of them by suicide.

- Is that the story of Amnesty International's supposed "gulag of our times"?  In the Communist/Soviet Gulag, tens of millions died and hardly anyone was ever released.

ii) In 2011, there were 240 detainees. Today there are around 166 detainees.

- Is that a Gulag? Is it even a massive crime considering the wider geopolitical and military context of the imprisonment of these people?

iii) Gitmo was set up in 2002. By 2004, 200 detainees had already been released. By 2011, 600 had been released.

- Then again, the opponents of Gitmo will stress the fact that this implies that there must have been many innocent people who had been detained. However, these very same people would also have stressed the fact that if no one had been released then the legal status of the detainees would have been fatally flawed. In other words: "Why has no one been released?"

iv) According to many reports, up to 50%, some say higher, of those released are suspected of having gone back or have gone back to  fighting US/Western forces and/or terrorism.

- This leads you to conclude that at any one time at Gitmo, well over 50% of the detainees must, in fact, have been guilty of either terrorism and/or fighting US/Western forces. If 50% of detainees have gone back into fighting Western/US forces and/or terrorism, we also have to realize that many guilty parties would not have gone straight back into fighting and/or terrorism.

- Then again, their Leftist and Left-Liberal defenders will now change their tune and ask: "Guilty of what?" They will then say that these people "have a right to defend their countries", etc. So at least that's a clear and big jump from the supposed innocence of Gitmo detainees to their "right" to bomb and kill people on behalf of their countries, people and and/or Islamic beliefs.

This, again, show that the obsession with Gitmo "injustice" and "torture" is not moral but ideological and political.

It's a fact that if enough monomaniac Leftists and Left-Liberals rant on about a given subject - then many of the rest of us will then think that there's got to be something to that ranting. But what if it's nearly all ranting and political/ideological bias - as with Gitmo?
That very excessive concentration on a given subject, as with every misdemeanour of Israel, leads people to believe something truly bad must be going on. Thus these Leftist and Left-Liberal agitators end up achieving exactly what they set out to achieve - changing the "political consciousness" of the people.
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