The Amnesty Archipelago

Those “cards” at Amnesty International are it at it again with their Solzhenitsyn jokes.

William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty’s Washington-based branch, speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” defended the human rights group’s recent criticism of U.S. treatment of detainees at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“The U.S. is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons, into which people are being literally disappeared, held in indefinite, incommunicado detention without access to lawyers or a judicial system or to their families,” Schulz said.

“And in some cases, at least, we know they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed.”

Okay, here’s what I’d like to know. How much are these guys being paid to spew this propaganda? I mean what’s the salary of the excutive director of Amnesty International’s Washington Branch and the other key Amnesty executives? Shouldn’t such things be transparent in a pro bono organization like that? I just Googled the question and unfortunately ended up on Monster.com. Maybe someone more web savvy can come up with better information, because people who continue to use the rhetoric applied to Soviet mass murder to characterize US government activities in the War on Terror most probably are making a fair amount of money from it (assuming they’re not members of Islamic Jihad or Al Qaeda). Furthermore, it would be interesting to study Amnesty fund-raising patterns as they relate to increases and decreases in this kind of inflammatory and idiotic verbiage.

UPDATE: NGO salaries can be found here (registration necessary). As of 2002, William Schulz was solidly over 200K. My reason for bringing it up, however, was not solely to attack the man’s salary, but to underscore that there is real money involved in the decisions made by people in these orgazinations. This affects not only their own incomes, but more importantly the general funds of their organizations. Simple-minded anti-Americanisms pay. (You might even attract George Soros.)