Bush: "Absurd."

Anyone who alleges mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo is, clearly, an America-hater.

Asked about the recent Amnesty International report that censured the U.S. human rights record in detaining suspected terrorists, Bush reacted sharply, commenting on the criticism personally for the first time.

"I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd. It's an absurd allegation," Bush said. He said the United States "is a country that promotes freedom around the world" and fully investigates accusations of mistreatment "in a transparent way."

Bush said that "we've had thousands of people detained" and "we've investigated every single complaint against the detainees."

He added, "It seemed like to me they [Amnesty International] based some of their decisions on the word of and the allegations by people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble, that means not tell the truth."

In a speech accompanying the release of Amnesty International's 2005 human rights report last week, Irene Khan, the group's secretary general, said, "Guantanamo has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law." She called on the United States to close the detention facility at its Cuban base and either release or charge its prisoners.

That's odd, as the Rude Pundit so discretely explains, Bush's White House didn't find Amnesty International's work so "absurd" when the organization was highlighting Saddam Hussein's record of torture. And, subsequently, being retroactively used to justify a war.