A tightly wound view of the world

Don Salomon Hernandez of Guatemala is known for his quick wit and ready laugh. He's all of 5 feet tall and is always seen with his even shorter wife, Mery. In fact, gratitude and joy infect everyone they spend time with. It's in the air around them.

The surprising thing is that Salomon & Mery have not had an easy life. Salomon has been held at gun point at least once, robbed several times, and lived in the middle of a forgotton Central American warzone for over a decade.

It's my time with the Hernandezes and many others who have been through countless trials, that makes me surprised to hear pontificating "Human Rights" groups condemn the delivery of justice. Who are these people and when was the last time they laughed or had a glass of wine? (or are they drinking too much?)

After over a year of keeping it, today I am removing the link to Amnesty International from my Human Rights and Responsibilities Page. Why? They have described America's detention facility at Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of today" and called the US "a leading purveyor and perpetrator of torture." I'm certain it's not the Ritz, but are these people serious? Amnesty has confused the justice with injustice and has fallen in love with a fashionable fallacy that the US is patently evil.

As someone who has actually been to gulags in Russia's far north and seen the frosty inmates, the comparison is so absurd as to fatally damage what remaining credibility Amnesty still had. Fortunately, a new crop of human rights and responsibilities groups are emerging such as the International Justice Mission. Still, Amnesty's allegations are at best foolish and uninformed, and at worst, politically calculating.

If you didn't catch this in the news, the following WSJ editorial captures the situation:

`Gulag" is the Russian acronym made famous by Alexander Solzhenitsyn to describe the vast network of Soviet slave labor camps in which millions died. It is thus one more sign of the moral degradation of Amnesty International that the pressure group is now calling the U.S. detention facility for Taliban and al Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay "the gulag of our time."

At a press conference yesterday releasing its annual human rights report, William Schultz, the executive director of Amnesty's U.S. branch, called the U.S. a "leading purveyor and practitioner" of torture. He urged foreign governments to investigate and arrest U.S. officials. "The apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera," he said, "because they may find themselves under arrest as Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998." The "apparent" is a nice touch, perhaps an unconscious bow to the fact that multiple probes and courts martial have found no evidence that the U.S. condones or encourages torture.

"Our list," as Mr. Orwell -- er, Mr. Schultz -- puts it, is too long to print in full. But it includes Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and William Haynes at Defense; Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jack Goldsmith, and Patrick Philbin from Justice; Tim Flanigan, just nominated to be Deputy Attorney General; George Tenet, former head of the CIA; and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.

It's old news that Amnesty International is a highly politicized pressure group, but these latest accusations amount to pro-al Qaeda propaganda. A "human rights" group that can't distinguish between Stalin's death camps and detention centers for terrorists who kill civilians can't be taken seriously.