Hot Air

Reuters, gods know no lapdog of the administration, reports on the U.S. Amnesty International guy's appearance Sunday morning talk shows, and leads with the fact that he couldn't substantiate the world organization's "gulag" charges, that he didn't know such basic facts as whether ICRC had access to the prisoners at Gitmo (If you're going to toss the "gulag" bomb, you'd better first get facts like that in line).

'Don't know for sure' about Guantanamo: Amnesty USA was the headline. Here's the lede:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Despite highly publicized charges of U.S. mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the head of the Amnesty International USA said on Sunday the group doesn't "know for sure" that the military is running a "gulag."

Now, AI is a fund-raising organization, and like all of them, left and right, it knows how to shake loose the money. "America could do better" doesn't look very good on that appeals mass-mailing. Apparently busting on Castro is a non-starter, too.

But I wonder if they really see how their work comes out in the wash. Here's the current lede story on the Al Jazeera Web site -- based on the same interview quotes that produced the Reuters story:

U.S. has secret prisons - Amnesty

United States is running an "archipelago" of prisons in several countries around the world

A top Amnesty International official revealed on Sunday that the United States is running an "archipelago" of prisons all over the world, many of them secret camps into which people are being "literally disappeared".