Recently Amnesty International termed the prison at Guantanamo Bay an American “gulag”. The Bush administration and the rightwing seized upon that term in an effort to defend their actions at the prison.

I don’t think Guantanamo is the equivalent of Stalin’s labor camps or Hitler’s concentration camps. But Dachau didn’t start out as an extermination center and the Soviet labor camps were not originally designed to kill large numbers of people. But that’s the road they traveled once they started walking down it. If we tolerate Guantanamo today, we’re in grave danger of walking down the same road.

What Amnesty did not point out out was the conditions at Guantanamo are somewhat better than in a lot of American prisons and jails where beatings, rapes, murders and assaults are accepted as part of everyday life.

What we are doing at Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib is actually representative of our attitude toward our own people. We toss human beings into these hellholes called American prisons and jails without adequate legal defenses so that the innocent get thrown in with the guilty and some people come out more damaged and dangerous than when they went in. But hey, most prisoners are working class, a disproportionate number of them minority, so who cares? They certainly won’t be returning to the kind of communities Bush and Cheney live in.

Amnesty International also did not point out that “gulags”, forced labor camps that were also used to control political dissent, are as American as apple pie. Of course, not being Russian, we didn’t call them gulags. We called them slave plantations. Anyone who doesn’t think we’re capable of creating gulags slept through US history.

One of the problems of the rightwing is their low ambition and their low standards. If today’s Guantanamo is not yet the Vorkuta of Soviet history, that’s good enough for the rightwing. But we’re Americans. We should have the ambition to try live up to our ideals and to set the bar higher for our own conduct.