Okay, so Guantanamo Bay isn't a Gulag...

According to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, it is inexcusable to compare conditions at Guantanamo bay with a Soviet Gulag.

Okay - let's play with this for a moment or two. Soviet Gulags were notorious prisons, brutal in both their intent and conditions. The conditions under which people were sent to them were often shadowy and no doubt debatable.

At Guantanamo Bay, we have prisoners held for reasons obscured in the shadows of the American-led "War on Terror".

They are held outside the norms of US law and jurisprudence, as well as outside of the Geneva Convention terms for treatment of Prisoners of War. (Largely by the dubious creation of the "Enemy Combatant" designation - a term which seems to mean whatever's convenient at the time).

Although recently a few motions have finally started to reach the top levels of the US judiciary as to whether the prisoners at Guantanamo are in fact eligible to have access to US legal recourse, the fact is that they have been held there for years without charges being laid, legal representation of any sort.

Are they held in conditions including forced labour? Not that I'm aware of, but then again, any kind of serious scrutiny of goings on at Guantanamo Bay has been well and truly suppressed by the Bush Administration.

Okay - it's not a Soviet Gulag, it appears to be an American Gulag with no fair system of law in place. The military is creating some kind of tribunal structure, but the lack of transparency and appeals process in the proposed structure makes it highly subjective.

Rumsfeld's verbal outrage seems to be rather similar to a child who has been "caught out" at some misdeed.