Human trafficking and the Gulag defense

The State Department released its annual report on human trafficking today. The link goes to the introduction to the report. Every year, this report is successful at pointing out the problem of human trafficking in countries around the world. To its credit, this is an issue that the Bush administration has made a top priority.

What will now occur is several of the countries in Tier 3 or the Tier 2 watch list will complain that the list is politically motivated. They'll claim the US favors some political allies with higher ranks and punishes some international political opponents (i.e. Venezuela) by ranking them lower.

This complaint ranks as low as the "Gulag defense" currently being used by this administration to defend its detention centers.

The US should not be able to dodge its obligations towards a transparent justice system by complaining about the word choice of Amnesty. Other countries should not dodge their own human rights obligations by blaming the US.

UPDATE: Two things. First from today's Miami Herald:

The Venezuelan Embassy dismissed the report in a statement, calling it "a sad demonstration of how the [Bush] administration has politicized its work on human rights.''

Second, Robert Mayer has a good post on why Amnesty should not criticize all governments equally. I would note that the point of my post here was not to equate the abuses at Gitmo to human trafficking, it was to equate the responses by those trying to dodge any allegations.