WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush on Tuesday dismissed a human rights report as "absurd" for its harsh criticism of U.S. treatment of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying the allegations were made by prisoners "who hate America."

"It's an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world," Bush said of the Amnesty International report that compared Guantanamo to a Soviet-era gulag.

In a Rose Garden news conference, Bush defiantly stood by his domestic policy agenda while defending his actions abroad. He repeatedly pledged to press ahead - "The president has got to push, he's got to keep leading" - despite mounting criticism.

With the death toll climbing daily in Iraq, he said that nation's fledging government is "plenty capable" of defeating insurgents whose attacks on Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers have intensified.

The President is, of course, correct in classifying this report absurd. It compared U.S. detention of terrorists in Guantanamo Bay with the Soviet detention of political dissenters (among others) in gulags during the rule of Stalin and other communist leaders there. Anyone who is at all familiar with the history of forced-labor camps and their use in Soviet Russia would call the comparison absurd as well.

Millions of people were held captive in Soviet gulags, with countless numbers of them dying while in captivity. Even if some of the claims made by the detainees in Guantanamo Bay were true, even if America had authorized the use of beatings, barking dogs and desecrtion of the Koran to torture detainees into talking about their suspected dealings with terrorism, those allegations pale in comparison to the evil of millions of Russians being literally worked, starved and beaten to death in forced labor camps.

How about a little perspective?

Only a bitter, left-wing organization looking to score cheap political points would try to compare those camps with the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, and only a bitter and throughly biased media would report those comparisons as though they were legitimate and bore merit.

Update:

Michelle Malkin says that the President flubbed his response to the question about the Amnesty International report at his press conference today. The "absurd" remark was right on, but generally I agree with her.

She's got links to more reactions (including what Bush should have said) above.