Guantanamo gulags?

Democrats Senator Natasha Stott Despoja is normally right on the ball, but today's press release was just a touch on the dramatic side.

David Hicks' incarceration in Guantanamo Bay is a shameful display of the hegemonic power and arrogance that the United States wields over the rest of the world, and our own government's lack of action on the matter is just as disgusting. But to compare the prison - admittedly second rate and probably even a haven for torture - to the Soviet gulags is not only inaccurate, but insulting to anybody who had to endure their horror.

In Stalin's gulags it is estimated that a quarter of the approximately twenty-five million prisoners (some estimates put the figure as high as fifty million - most of them innocent, jailed only due to the fact that Stalin, with his feeble understanding of how to run a country properly, needed their labour, or persecuted for their religious beliefs) died, and the conditions were almost impossibly grim.

I'm the first to criticise America and their policies, but hyperbole and exaggeration won't get the cause anywhere - Stott Despoja normally knows this better than anyone.