More on Gitmo

Is there any doubt that the liberal media is driving the Gitmo abuse claim? E.J. Dionne of the Houston Chronicle opines that there are two reasons why Amnesty International's should not have used the word gulag. One, its not accurate, but two, it provides Bush with an opening to "attack" AI. According to Dionne, President Bush "attacked" AI when he said, "It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of and the allegations by people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people who have been trained in some instances to disassemble, that means not to tell the truth." Dionne went giddy over the Presidents misuse of the word dissemble and goes on to deflect AI's duplicity. Its the Bush administration's dishonesty stupid!

But I hope the group learns a lesson that all of Bush's opponents should also take to heart. That lesson is not to pull back from criticism or to cower before administration attacks. It's outrageous that Bush tried to dismiss all questions about practices in Guantanamo as the work of "people who hate America."

On the contrary, it's people who love America and the liberties it espouses who are most vehement in insisting that we live up to our creed. Those who care about the fate of our men and women in uniform worry how the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib might affect what happens to Americans taken prisoner in current and future wars.

This last paragraph above is so disingenuous that it brands Dionne as the liberal propagandist he is. Let me see, if we give every detainees a Koran and appropriate meals and time to pray, fanatical islamicists will not cut off the heads of US solders or citizens. Come on E.J., confess that you're anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war, anti-US foreign policy. Don't give us this platitudinous crap.

On the other side of the gitmo issue is straight talking pundit Charles Krauthammer, the token conservative at the Washington Post. In his op-ed, Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already he writes:

Even greater hypocrisy is to be found here at home. Civil libertarians, who have been dogged in making sure that FBI-collected Guantanamo allegations are released to the world, seem exquisitely sensitive to mistreatment of the Koran. A rather selective scrupulousness. When an American puts a crucifix in a jar of urine and places it in a museum, civil libertarians rise immediately to defend it as free speech. And when someone makes a painting of the Virgin Mary, smears it with elephant dung and adorns it with porn, not only is that free speech, it is art -- deserving of taxpayer funding and an ACLU brief supporting the Brooklyn Museum when the mayor freezes its taxpayer subsidy.

Amnesty International is supported by donations, and without encouragement by the MSM, they would not use the word gulag. They wouldn't risk alienating their constituents.