I'll show you a gulag for our time

OneFreeKorea on Command Post:

I have moments when I feel that my blog is a stimulating conversation among friends that will never really amount to much (by which I mean the conversation). I'm having one of them right now, in fact. When the intelligentsia that claims to speak for world opinion can't distinguish between a gas chamber and fart in a crowded elevator, I tend to stare through the screen of my monitor, like Sisyphus looking past the stone, up an insurmountably steep grade of illogic. My latest such moment began when I read this:

"Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time."
--Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International

...

A global human rights organization that expends its energy and credibility on a blend of questionable and valid concerns won't have any left to expend on the outrages. It is fair, then, to question just what Amnesty's published reports--at least those available on its Web page--tell us about gulags in the worst place on earth. The results disappoint:

* Amnesty has never published a detailed report on North Korea's gulags.
* Amnesty's last report on North Korea's "detention places" was published in 1999. It is two and a half pages long and discusses temporary detention facilities, rather than North Korea's gargantuan gulag zones.
* Amnesty publishes approximately four reports on South Korea for every report it publishes on North Korea.
* In the last year, Amnesty has published one annual report on North Korea and dozens of reports on the United States.
* And finally . . . and this is really at the heart of the matter . . . Amnesty has never called North Korea's gulags, "gulags."