WASHINGTON, June 5: The US government is operating an “archipelago” of prisons around the world, many of them secret camps into which people are being “literally disappeared,” a top Amnesty International (AI) official said on Sunday AI Executive Director William Schulz criticized the administration of US President George

W. Bush for holding alleged battlefield combatants in “indefinite incommunicado detention” without access to lawyers in an interview with Fox News on Sunday.

Schulz was pressed to substantiate Amnesty’s claim in a May 25 report that the US prison camp at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba naval base — where hundreds of foreign terror suspects are being held indefinitely — represents the “gulag of our times”.

The gulag claim, referring to the notorious prison camp system of the Soviet Union, has drawn withering criticism from the US president, who called it “absurd”. Vice President Richard Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have also slammed the rights group’s claim.

Russian 1970 Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the Soviet prison camp system in his best-selling book “The Gulag Archipelago”.

Schulz said the gulag reference was not “an exact or a literal analogy”.—AFP