Recently, Amnesty International released a report calling the Guantanamo POW camp a "gulag." Real gulags were camps for Soviet citizens who violated section eight of the Soviet penal code. Section eight was applied to anyone suspected of opposing the Soviet state. Most gulag camps killed inmates through a combination of undernutrition and overwork.
This is not the case at Guantanamo. First, the prisoners aren't being killed. Second, the inmates were out of the protection of the Geneva Connvention because they wore no uniform in their combat against coalition and Iraqi forces. Even Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International Josh Rubenstein called the gulag metaphor "overheated rhetoric."
This sort of report not only overstates the discomfort of the prisoners, it makes gulags seem less evil than they really were.
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