Who's Driving This Car?

My how Amnesty International has gotten off track. It's not a good sign when you're being taken to the woodshed by The Washtington Post:

Guantanamo Bay is an ad hoc creation, designed to contain captured enemy combatants in wartime. Abuses there -- including new evidence of desecrating the Koran -- have been investigated and discussed by the FBI, the press and, to a still limited extent, the military. The Soviet gulag, by contrast, was a massive forced labor complex consisting of thousands of concentration camps and hundreds of exile villages through which more than 20 million people passed during Stalin's lifetime and whose existence was not acknowledged until after his death. Its modern equivalent is not Guantanamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on Stalinist lines; or China's laogai , the true size of which isn't even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

and The San Francisco Chronicle:

It's odd how the left bemoans "the desecration of the Koran." An investigation found that five U.S. personnel may have mishandled the holy book. There has been no substantiation of charges that any American flushed the Koran down a toilet. Still, Bush-haters are outraged. It wasn't too long ago that conservative Christians were enraged that the federal government funded an exhibition with a crucifix in urine. That was a matter of free speech, and woe to the taxpayer who dared to complain. So why complain if a U.S. soldier might have treated the Koran as poorly as a U.S.-funded artist treated the crucifix?

Memo to Amnesty International, Greenpeace, PETA and the national Democratic Party: Once you trade your institutional benevolence for rage, and let your hateful leadership blow rhetoric in place of reason, you drive away the very constituency that one sought you out.