having said that..............gulag?

surely anyone can see that Amnesty's argument is weakened by this sort of comparison.

I'm an ex-member of Amnesty and I have a lot of time for it. Although I'm not sure it ever had much time for me. i wrote to them explaining that my life was depressing enough _ I didn't want to write to any prisoner - political or on death row, but I was willing to make a contribution.

However they spent more than my subscription(which I couldn't really afford at the time) every year on sending me letters asking for more money.

to most people gulag(whatever the literal meaning) means Stalin, Solzhenitsyn, etc, the murder of the Kulaks, Beria.....

This was a crime so big that there comes a point where quantitively it becomes qualitatively something quite distinct in everybody's mind. rather like the Holocaust. When we use those terms, we know of what we speak.

Whatever you think about Bush and the verbal chaos in which he exists, he's not damn silly enough to make remarks like that.

all the best

Big Al Whittle