The Ghost Prison Archipelago

When I was ten my family spent a year living in the Philippines, for reasons that are irrelevant here. I was sent to a boarding school in Manila. When I arrived at school, my new roommates welcomed me to “the Gulag.” I was vaguely familiar with the term, couldn’t remember where I’d heard it but I knew it referred to some sort of prison, so I filed it away to use later. On a visit soon after that, my father asked how things were going at the school and I replied “It’s the Gulag.” A strange look crossed his face and he told me that no, son, it was definitely not the Gulag.

Then we had one of those family historical moments where my father sat me down and explained exactly what the Gulag was, what life there was like, and how my great-grandfather, Josip Ostapenko, had been sent there with many other Ukrainian “kulak” landowners who resisted Stalin’s forced collectivization in the late 1920s and early 30s. (Josip escaped while in transit to the front during WWII, when Stalin was emptying the Gulag of prisoners to use as cannon fodder to stop the German advance. Family records do not reveal whether Josip actually said “YOINK!” when he slipped away, but I like to believe that he did, even if only under his breath.)

True, for a ten year old kid from New York with reasonably liberal parents, being placed in a boarding school run by a bunch of weird fundamentalist missionaries didn’t seem all that different from a prison camp, we used candy instead of cigarettes for barter, but I took my father’s point. Gulag was not a term to be thrown around. In the years since, as I’ve learned more of my family’s history and the circumstances surrounding their eventual flight from Ukraine, the hideous, nearly unimaginable inhumanity of the Gulag system is something that has always chilled me.

So my disgust last week at Irene Khan’s reference to the U.S.’s Guantanamo detention camp as “the gulag of our times” was twofold. First, that she would so carelessly and obviously disrespect the memories of the millions of men, women, and children (yeah, they had children in the camps, too) who were executed or starved or froze to death in the Gulag. Second, that she had, as E.J. Dionne also points out, essentially handed Bush a portable hole to escape into every time inconvenient questions about the Amnesty report are asked, and there are very important questions to be asked and answered about the Ghost Prison Archipelago which the U.S. government has set up.

It’s a shame. The Amnesty report, like most of their work, is excellently researched, very detailed, and well written. It should, and still will, become part of American liberals’ efforts to hold our government to higher standards of due process and prisoner treatment. With her unnecessary use of hyperbole, in what looks to be an applause line, I think Khan has hurt that effort by effectively lessening the initial impact that her organization’s report could have had.

So, no, Gitmo is not the Gulag. But it can not be the Gulag and still be pretty damn bad, which it is. A national disgrace, in fact. It’s ironic that while answering a question about the Amnesty report Bush used the word “disassemble” when he meant to say “dissemble,” considering Bush himself was dissembling at the time, and that disassembled is precisely what should be done with Bush’s Ghost Prison Archipelago.