MITCH ALBOM: If you criticize U.S., you must criticize them

Mitch Albom is right to declare that his "sense of balance is insulted" by Amnesty International's annual report because it has no balance. By calling Guantanamo Bay the "gulag of our times", Irene Khan, the organization's secretary general, looks to sensationalize the problem by linking U.S. abuses to unimaginable evil. Gulags were the forced-labor prison camps used by Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev to suppress political opposition and punish criminals. Prisoners were beaten, raped, starved, tortured, and forced to work and live under brutal conditions. Of the millions of people sent to the gulags, documents show 1.6 million died. No one knows how many undocumented deaths occurred.

Contrast this with reported abuses at the U.S. detention facilities which currently house 500 unlawful combatants. Some of the most serious accusations include female interrogators humiliating Muslim men and the mistreatment of the Koran. Pardon my cultural ignorance, but I wonder what it takes to humiliate a man who kills on behalf of the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden.

If Guantanamo Bay is truly the "gulag of our times", it must mean that terrorism has been defeated and the murderous regimes in North Korea, Cuba and Iran have fallen.

[Letter to the Editor - Detroit Free Press - Submitted 06/03/2005]