Amnesty International secretary general Irene Zubaida Khan held a press conference to defend her absurd equation of Guantanamo Bay with the Soviet gulag: Amnesty defends ‘gulag,’ urges Guantanamo access.

“The administration’s response has been that our report is absurd, that our allegations have no basis, and our answer is very simple: if that is so, open up these detention centers, allow us and others to visit them,” Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Zubaida Khan told a news conference.

“Transparency is the best antidote to misinformation and incorrect facts,” said Khan, who is here to meet with Japanese officials.

The United States holds about 520 men at Guantanamo, where they are denied rights accorded under international law to prisoners of war. [Notice how al-Reuters simply states this as a fact, without mentioning that the detainees are illegal combatants, and as such, not entitled to these “rights.” —ed.]

Many have been held without charge for more than three years.

Khan rejected a suggestion that Amnesty’s use of the emotive term “gulag” had turned the debate into one over semantics, and distracted attention from the situation in the detention centers.

“What we wanted to do was to send a strong message that ... this sort of network of detention centers that has been created as part of this war on terrorism is actually undermining human rights in a dramatic way which can only evoke some of the worst features of human rights scandals of the past,” she said.

“I don’t think people have got off the hook yet.”

Got that? She used an “emotive” term like “gulag” because she wanted to send a “strong message.”

Millions died in the Soviet gulag, victims of one of the most repressive empires the world has ever known. But Irene Zubaida Khan feels no qualm of conscience at trivializing this immense suffering and injustice, merely to “send a strong message.”

UPDATE at 6/2/05 9:50:32 am:

John Podhoretz amply demonstrates the sheer idiocy of Khan’s statements, with a simple recital of historic facts:

Number of prisoners at Gitmo: approximately 600.

Number of prisoners in the Gulag: as many as 25 million, according to the peerless Gulag historian Anne Applebaum.

Number of camps at Gitmo: 1

Number of camps in the Gulag: At least 476, according to Applebaum.

Political purpose of Gulag: The suppression of internal dissent inside a totalitarian state.

Political purpose of Gitmo: The suppression of an international terrorist group that had attacked the United States, killing 3,000 people while attempting to decapitate the national government through the hijack of airplanes.

Financial purpose of Gulag: Providing totalitarian economy with millions of slave laborers.

Financial purpose of Gitmo: None.

Seizure of Gulag prisoners: From apartments, homes, street corners inside the Soviet Union.

Seizure of Gitmo prisoners: From battlefield sites in Afghanistan in the midst of war.