For years we heard from the ACLU as well as from the hired legal guns and radical law professors taking up the terrorists’ cause (with hearty support from the Lefty bloggers) that Guantanamo was a living hell. Inhumane! Mental torture! We had to move them. It was not befitting the U.S. to incarcerate people in this manner. We should be ashamed. Well, as is the case with much of the hue and crying from the Left, the reality is different — tragically so.
This report explains:
For up to four hours a day, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, can sit outside in the Caribbean sun and chat through a chain-link fence with the detainee in the neighboring exercise yard at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Mohammed can also use that time to visit a media room to watch movies of his choice, read newspapers and books, or play handheld electronic games. He and other detainees have access to elliptical machines and stationary bikes. At Guantanamo, such recreational activities interrupt an otherwise bleak existence, according to a Pentagon report of conditions at Camp 7, which houses 16 high-value detainees. But even those privileges may soon vanish.
Why are we taking away the sun-bathing and exercise bikes? Because the Left insists that we move these terrorists — to facilities where such amenities don’t exist. Yes, that’s right:
While lawmakers and activist groups have been consumed with a debate over such a move, little attention has been paid to the conditions that Mohammed and other high-value detainees would face in the United States. And those conditions, it turns out, would be vastly more draconian than they are at Guantanamo Bay.
Like so much of what passes for high-minded policy making by the Obami and their fans, the moral preening is actually meant to make the preeners feel better, with only the mere afterthought given to the subject of their sympathies ( no, not Americans — the terrorists). We now hear that the Guantanamo detainees, if moved, will face “profound isolation” and will “have little or no human contact” except with guards. And this is supposed to make the terrorists’ advocates feel better?
Perhaps when that January deadline for closing Guantanamo slips by, the Obama team will finally consider how it is that we are supposed to be getting brownie points from would-be terrorists or in European coffeehouses by removing terrorists from state-of-the-art, cushy surroundings to SuperMax isolation. The answer from some on the Left is that we can’t keep these people at all. (And in any event, they need to be able, when the time comes, to die in their home country, like the Lockerbie butcher, right?)
