Original Article Amnesty defends assailing of the U.S. Rights group used 'gulag' deliberately Lizette Alvarez New York Times Jun. 4, 2005 12:00 AM LONDON - An official of Amnesty International said Friday that the choice of the term gulag in its annual report to describe the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was chosen deliberately, and she shrugged off harsh criticism of the report by the Bush administration. Kate Gilmore, Amnesty's executive deputy secretary-general, said the administration's response was "typical of a government on the defensive," and she drew parallels to the reactions of the former Soviet Union, Libya and Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, when those governments were accused of human rights abuses. The report, released April 26, placed the United States at the heart of its list of human rights offenders, citing indefinite detentions of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and secret transfers of prisoners to countries that practice torture. But it is the use of the word gulag, a reference to the complex of labor camps where Stalin sent thousands of dissidents, that has drawn the most attention. President Bush called the report "absurd" several times, and said it was the product of people who "hate America." Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN that he was "offended" by the use of the term and did not take the organization "seriously." And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the comparison "reprehensible." Amnesty has fired right back, pointing out that the administration often cites its reports when that suits its purposes. "If our reports are so 'absurd,' why did the administration repeatedly cite our findings about Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war?" William Schultz, executive director of the group's U.S. branch, wrote in a letter to the editor to be published today in the New York Times. In a telephone interview Friday, Gilmore, the second-ranking official in Amnesty, said "gulag" was not meant as a literal description of Guantanamo but was emblematic of the sense of injustice and lack of due process surrounding the prison. While the substance of the report was defended by human rights organizations and others, several said Amnesty International had erred in using the word gulag, if only because it allowed the Bush administration to change the conversation. "I think it was a rather serious misjudgment to use the term gulag," said Nigel Rodley, a University of Essex law professor and chairman of the Human Rights Center there. "The basic criticism of some of the problems are very real and it has given the administration the opportunity to divert from the substance of the concern."