The 'Gulag' Debate cont'd.

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 Sir Nigel Rodley, a professor of law at the University of Essex 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."

Sir Nigel, who said that having been Amnesty International's legal adviser from 1973 to 1990 he represents the old guard, also said that the organization should have avoided using an inflammatory term that did not precisely apply. He also said the "lapse" lent credence to a growing chorus of concerns that Amnesty, which was founded in 1961 to lobby for political prisoners and has since expanded into the areas of poverty, domestic violence and AIDS, had overextended itself and lost focus.

Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch in New York, said he thought the Bush administration had taken cover behind semantics. "We're concerned that the debate over the label is obscuring the real issue," he said. "That the United States is locking people up without due process possibly for the rest of their lives."