So President Obama never actually followed through on that campaign promise to close Guantanamo Bay. But as a modest consolation, the administration has reportedly made certain upgrades to the facility to enrich the lives of the detainees, including a world-class soccer field, a “communal living” environment with cable TV and entertainment, and life improvement classes. Yes, they are still detained indefinitely, but at least they can learn how to write a cover letter or hone their watercolor techniques:
Among the recent improvements to the facility commonly known as “Gitmo”: a heavily guarded soccer field for detainees known as “Super Rec,” which cost nearly $750,000 and opened this week; cable television in a communal living quarters and “enriching your life” classes for detainees, which include instruction on learning to paint, writing a resume — even handling personal finances. …
Many of the improvements have been made at the most modern facility in the detention center, known as Camp VI, a communal living compound that houses about 80 percent of the 169 detainees currently held at Gitmo. There, detainees who are deemed to be compliant with the rules and therefore eligible for more privileges are able to watch 21 Cable TV channels, DVD movies, read newspapers and borrow books from a library.
You’ve got to be kidding. Only 21 cable channels available? It would have been so much more humane to simply drop a drone on their heads and get it over with.
Notice that Democrats pretty much stopped complaining about the detention facility after gaining control of the executive branch. Most of their concerns about civil liberties at Guantanamo Bay seemed to evaporate shortly after Obama’s election. The issue just never comes up anymore — and even the media lost interest in stories about alleged “mistreatment” at the facility. Also note that Democrats are pretty nonchalant about Obama’s “kill list,” and his increase in drone strikes. They were appalled with the idea of detaining terrorists and attempting to collect intelligence from them, but they support killing them in the desert with hellfire missiles.
For the record, I’m in favor of both. But how can you support the latter and not the former, and claim it’s for humanitarian reasons?
Why these terrorists who were preening themselves to commit mass murder before they were fortunately stopped deserve free luxuries that law-abiding citizens don't receive upsets my moral compass.
Why do terrorists need help writing resumes? What are they going to put on it? n
The military follows orders, as best they can, without ever questioning the wisdom of them. My guess is that they are at the "any port in a storm" level at this point and are desperately adapting the stuff they are doing for their own troops (including the wounded warriors about whom Ms. Goodman wrote) because it is the only thing they have to offer to these perps. n nWhat I don't understand is why we are being so nice. Why don't we do EXACTLY what we do to our OWN people when we lock them up in a psych ward because they (like these guys) are perceived to be dangerous — subject them to hypnosis and whatnot and brainwash them into having beliefs that we want them to have. For that matter, why don't we treat them like sex offenders, electrodes on the genitals and the rest, and go from there? n nThe Geneva Convention only says that we have to treat them as kindly as we do our own people. I say let's wire up their genitals and let's have some "therapy."
Of course, cushing their needs is more important than focus on the sky rocketing suicide of our troops in the field. What a clusterfarck; why do taxpayers have to foot the bill to upgrade these nutcases,while they continue to insult and assault us?
I would love to see these resumes: "Self-motivated jihadist seeks challenging postion in explosives field. Willing to relocate."
My mother-in-law put it so succinctly and directly: "why are they even alive? They should have been tried and executed where they were caught".
Because facts matter — GITMO refers to the entire Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, established in 1903 after the Spanish-American war as a "Coaling Station" for the US Navy. This back in the era when battleships burned coal which had to be stockpiled in strategic locations for refueling — coal is not only heavy but had a bad habit of catching on fire if tightly packed into a bunker (this is one theory as to what happened to the USS Maine) and while they could distill water from the ocean, the problem of switching from sail to steam was that we had to have massive piles of coal ready for our warships because only in the cartoons could Teddy Roosevelt wade through the Caribbean towing them behind him on strings. n nToday all but one of our aircraft carriers have nuke power (and the unasked question is what happens if we ever get into the likely shooting war with the ChiComs and they sink a few of them, with "hot" reactors), most everything else has a Diesel engine except for some of the high tech stuff that actually has a form of jet engine and hence burns jet fuel. What we do today is have both the ship & tanker running in the same direction/speed on the high seas, shoot a line across (with a special form of shotgun), and then pull large hoses across and refuel the warship at sea. We also give them more ordinance this way — including the "million dollar" Tomahawk missiles — we don't talk about our Merchant Marine much but you can't fire stuff you don't have aboard. n nThe "Dreadnaught" battleships could only go about 20 knots (less than 25 MPH) and the round trip to some place like Norfolk, VA took quite a while — so it made sense to have stockpiles of "stuff" closer to where the battleships were and hence GITMO — and other "coaling stations" throughout the world. We acquired the 45 acres of water and land on the end of Cuba before it was even a country and have held ever since, much to the chagrin of Castro (who refuses to cash our rent checks) and during the Cold War, GITMO and West Berlin (the combined American/French/British quarters of the occupied Berlin) were strategic outposts of freedom (and espionage) in the midst of the Communist world. Cuba is still a dangerous player in a still dangerous world, and Ron Paul notwithstanding, there are some very good reasons for us to have a naval base at GITMO. n nFacts matter here for a very important reason — there are those who would like to close GITMO itself, normalize relations with Cuba and everything else — I don't think that The Boy President ever went quite this far. The GITMO detention center is what he promised to close, and we need to make that distinction lest the slippery slope leads us even further afield. n
Three other points about all of this. n nFirst, in a normal war, these would be considered prisoners of war — people captured on the battlefield, people whom our soldiers lawfully could have killed there and some argue should have. In prior wars, most of these people would have been killed — either outright or after capture. The appropriate analogy here is WW-II and the Japanese and there were very few POWs on either side, to a large extent we simply shot them all. n nSecond, it is interesting that the Boy President is willing to consider any teenaged/adult male killed by a drone strike to be a "combatant" — a standard far more lax than the one our soldiers, on the ground and being shot at, are allowed to employ. n nThird, exactly what *are* the 21 cable channels they get? I am not going to go as far as Ann Coulter's infamous conclusion to what essentially was an eulogy to her friend Barbara Olsen but I think it would be a really good thing were we to indoctrinate Western Judeo/Christian values at "Club GITMO." 21 channels of pro-American propaganda, an Arabic-language version of the Voice of America and the rest — that I could go for. But why do I fear that it is going instead to be 21 channels of radical Islam? n nI would like to see us do what the North Koreans did — turn these people around to reject their values and to instead hold ours. Then send them home.