Stop The Gitmo Nonsense

[Annie]

Ralph Peters:

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/25151.htm

GITMO COCKTAIL

By RALPH PETERS

THE demands to shut down our Guantanamo lock-up for terrorists have nothing to do with human rights. They're about punishing America for our power and success.

From our ailing domestic left to overseas America haters, no one really cares about the fate of Mustapha the Murderer or Ahmed the Assassin. The lies told about Gitmo are meant to undercut U.S. foreign policy and embarrass America.

The Gitmo controversy is about many things, from jealousy of the United States and outrage that we refuse to fail, to residual anger that we won the Cold War and exploded the left's great fantasy of a dictatorship of the intellectuals. But the one thing the protests aren't about is human rights.

Except, of course, as a means to slam the United States.

Torture? Who and when? Koran abuse? I'd rather be a Koran in Gitmo than a Bible in Saudi Arabia. Illegal detentions? Suggest a better way to handle hardcore terrorists. Maltreatment? Spare me. The food the prisoners receive is better than what I had to eat in the Army.

Another thing: Would it be more humane to incarcerate the declared enemies of civilization in northern Alaska, rather than on a Caribbean beach?

Has the Bush administration made mistakes regarding Guantanamo? You bet. The biggest one was attempting to placate the critics. By launching a new investigation every time a terrorist had a toothache, our government played into the hands of its enemies.

The truth is that the terrorists and their defenders have something in common. It's not courage, which is one quality violent fanatics don't lack. It's that neither can be appeased.

Any concession only increases their appetites. The Clinton administration's reluctance to respond to terrorist strikes encouraged al Qaeda. If the Bush administration closed the Guantanamo facility, any alternative holding center would be attacked just as rabidly and dishonestly.

If we put our captives up at the Four Seasons, we'd be condemned because somebody smelled bacon at breakfast...

 

[Bonnie]

Losing their heads over Gitmo
Ann Coulter


June 15, 2005

I guess Bush should have backed Katherine Harris, after all. Sen. Mel Martinez, the Senate candidate Bush backed instead of Harris, has become the first Republican to call for shutting down Guantanamo. Martinez hasn't said where the 500 or so suspected al-Qaida operatives currently at Gitmo should be transferred to, but I understand the Neverland Ranch might soon be available.

Maybe Sen. Arlen Specter – the liberal Republican Bush backed instead of conservative Pat Toomey, which still didn't help Bush in Pennsylvania – will step forward to defend the Bush administration. That Karl Rove is a genius.

Martinez explained his nonsensical call for the closing of Guantanamo by asking: "Is it serving all the purposes you thought it would serve when initially you began it, or can this be done some other way a little better?"

There are Arabs locked up at Guantanamo, no? Admittedly, not enough. (And not under what any frequent flier would describe as "harsh conditions.") Still and all, Arabs are locked up there. That is what we call a "purpose."

By becoming a focus of evil for human-rights groups, Martinez suggested, Guantanamo has become a recruiting tool for al-Qaida: "It's become an icon for bad stories," Martinez said, "and at some point you wonder the cost-benefit ratio." (I've been wondering the same thing about Mel Martinez.)

This is preposterous. NBC's "The West Wing" is an icon for bad stories; Gitmo is a place where we keep an eye on evil, dangerous people who want to kill us.

Martinez was borrowing a point from Sen. Joe Biden – which is always a dangerous gambit because you never know who said it originally. The "Biden" version was: "I think more Americans are in jeopardy as a consequence of the perception that exists worldwide with its existence than if there were no Gitmo."

So if people around the world believe that if they try to kill Americans they might go to a bad, scary place called Guantanamo, that will make them more likely to kill Americans? How about doing a cost-benefit ratio on that analysis?

Let's also pause to ponder the image of the middle-of-the-road, "centrist" jihadist who could be "recruited" to jihad by reports about abuse at Guantanamo. You know – the kind of guy who just watches al-Jazeera for the sports and hits the "mute" button whenever they start in about the Jews again, already.

Liberals want us to believe such a person exists and that he is perusing newspaper articles about Guantanamo trying to decide whether to finish his coffee and head off to work or to place a backpack filled with dynamite near a preschool.

Note to liberals: That doesn't happen.

What happens is this: There are thousands of Muslim extremists literally dying to slaughter Americans, and only three proven ways to stop them: (1) Kill them (the recommended method), (2) capture them and keep them locked up, or (3) convince them that their cause is lost. Guantanamo is useless for No. 1, but really pulls ahead on No. 2 and No. 3 (i.e., a "purpose").

Let's just hope aspiring jihadists are not reading past the headlines and discovering that what Amnesty International means by "the gulag of our time" is: No Twinkie rewards for detainees!

That's not a joke. As described in infuriating detail by Heather MacDonald in the Winter, 2005, City Journal, interrogators at Guantanamo are not allowed to:



yell at the detainees, except in extreme circumstances and only after alerting Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld – and never in the ears;

serve the detainees cold meals, except in extreme circumstances;

poke the detainees in the chest or engage in "light pushing" without careful monitoring and approval from the commander of the U.S. Southern Central Command in Miami;

reward detainees (for example, for not throwing feces at the guards that day) with a Twinkie or a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwich in the absence of express approval from the secretary of defense. (I suppose it goes without saying, "supersizing" their order is strictly forbidden under any circumstances.)

Without careful monitoring, interrogators aren't even allowed to subject the detainees to temperature changes, unpleasant odors or sleep cycle disruptions. But on the bright side, they are allowed to play Christina Aguilera music and feed the savages the same food our soldiers eat rather than their usual orange-glazed chicken. That isn't sarcasm; these are the rules.

No cold meals, sleep deprivation or uncomfortable positions? Obviously, what we need to do is get the U.S. Army to serve drinks on commercial airlines and get the airlines to start supervising the detainees in Guantanamo.

American soldiers make do with C-rations. Dinner on an America West flight from New York to Las Vegas consists of one small bag of peanuts. Meanwhile, one recent menu for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo consisted of orange-glazed chicken, fresh fruit crepe, steamed peas and mushrooms, and rice pilaf. Sounds like the sort of thing you'd get at Windows on the World – if it still existed.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/printac20050615.shtml

 

[nosarcasm]

Losing their heads over Gitmo
Ann Coulter


June 15, 2005





http://www.townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/printac20050615.shtml

I am with Mc Cain on this one, we need to have some legal process
reviewing it case by case.

They released asshole that rejoined the insurgency.

Time to find out who is a terrorist and who was blamed without merrit.

Torture, whenever necessary has to be case by case okd by
some judge. I dont feel comfortable to just declare them
all terrorist. Already some cases came out where
the wrong people got incarcerated.

 

[Gunny]

I guess Bush should have backed Katherine Harris, after all. Sen. Mel Martinez, the Senate candidate Bush backed instead of Harris, has become the first Republican to call for shutting down Guantanamo. Martinez hasn't said where the 500 or so suspected al-Qaida operatives currently at Gitmo should be transferred to, but I understand the Neverland Ranch might soon be available.

Open the gate and let Fidel have them.

 

[Bonnie]

Open the gate and let Fidel have them.

Hey theres a idea........Afterall he sent us his finest

Cuba could be one giant "Escape From NY island"

 

[Annie]

Facing the Music

http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/g...Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2005/06/20&ID=Ar00800

Mark Steyn on Democratic complaints about Guantanamo

Mark Steyn

Been following the latest horrifying stories from what Amnesty International calls the “gulag of our time”? John Kass of The Chicago Tribune was outraged by the news that records by Christina Aguilera had been played at Guantanamo at full volume in order to soften up detainees. He thought they should have used “Dance, Ballerina, Dance” by Vaughn Monroe, over and over and over.

Well, readers had plenty of suggestions of their own, and so the Tribune’s website put together a list of “Interro-Tunes” — the most effective songs for aural intimidation, mood music for jolting your jihadi. A lot were the usual suspects - like the Captain and Tennille’s blamelessly goofy “Muskrat Love”, which, as I recall, put the Queen to sleep at a White House gala, though the Duke of Edinburgh sat agog all the way to the end. Someone suggested Bob Dylan’s “Everybody Must Get Stoned”, which even on a single hearing sounds like it’s being played over and over. I don’t know what Mr Kass has against “Ballerina”, which is very pleasant in the Nat “King” Cole version. But he seems to think one burst of “Dance, ballerina, dance/And do your pirouette in rhythm with your aching heart” will have the Islamists howling for the off-switch and singing like canaries to the Feds. Who knows? I sang “Ballerina” myself once on the radio long ago, and, if it will discombobulate the inmates, I’m willing to dust off my arrangement and fly down to Guantanamo, if necessary dressed liked Christina Aguilera. If they want an encore, I’ll do my special culturally sensitive version of that Stevie Wonder classic, “My Sharia Amour”.

By now, one or two readers may be frothing indignantly, “That’s not funny! Bush’s torture camp at Guantanamo is the gulag of our time, if not of all time.” But that’s the point. The world divides into those who feel the atrocities at Gitmo “must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others” (in the widely quoted words of Senator Dick Durbin), and the rest of us, for whom the more we hear the specifics of the “atrocities” the funnier they are. They bear the same relation to the gulags (15-30 million dead), the Nazi camps (nine million dead) and the killing fields of Cambodia (two million dead) as Mel Brooks‚ “Springtime For Hitler” does to the original. Nobody complained at Auschwitz that the guards were playing the 78s of The Merry Widow (the Fuhrer’s favorite operetta) with the volume knob too high. When that old KGB hand Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev as the big guy in the Kremlin, he was reported in the western press to be a big Glenn Miller fan. But to the best of my knowledge no-one suggested he was in the basement of the Lubyanka torturing the inmates with “I Got A Gal In Kalamazoo”.

The first time the full-blast junk-pop treatment caught the eye of the media was a decade and a half back, when US troops bombarded the Panamanian strongman General Noriega with the Bobby Fuller Four’s “I Fought The Law (And The Law Won)”. In those days, nobody reckoned it was torture. But these days torture seems to be in the ear of the behearer. Because the jihadi find western culture depraved — and I’m not necessarily in disagreement on that, at least where Christina Aguilera’s concerned — we’re obliged to be extra-super-duper-sensitive with them.

Says who? Again, the more one hears the specifics of the “insensitivity” of the American regime at Guantanamo, the more many of us reckon we’re being way too sensitive. For example, camp guards are under instructions to handle copies of the Koran only when wearing gloves. The reason for this is that the detainees regard infidels as “unclean”. Fair enough, each to his own. But it’s one thing for the Islamists to think infidels are unclean, quite another for the infidels to agree with them. Far from being tortured, the prisoners are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The US military hand each jihadi his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship The Times of London. When I bought a Koran to bone up on Islam a couple of days after 9/11, I didn’t wear gloves to the bookstore. If that’s “disrespectful” to Muslims, tough. You should have thought about that before you allowed your holy book to become the central motivation for global jihad.

I’m not arguing the merits here so much as the politics. There’s certainly a discussion to be had about how to categorize these people. As things stand, they’re not covered by the Geneva Conventions — they’re unlawful combatants, captured fighting in civilian clothes rather than uniform, and, when it comes to name, rank and serial number, they lack at least two thereof, and even the first is often highly variable. As a point of “international law”, their fate is a matter entirely between Washington and the state of which they’re citizens (Saudi Arabia, mostly). I don’t think it’s a good idea to upgrade terrorists into lawful combatants. But if, like my namesake the British jurist Lord Steyn, you feel differently, fine, go ahead and make your case.

Where the anti-Gitmo crowd went wrong was in expanding its objections from the legal status of the prisoners to the treatment they‚re receiving. By any comparison — ie, not just with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot — they’re getting better than they deserve. It’s the first gulag in history where the torture victims put on weight. Each prisoner released from Guantanamo receives a new copy of the Koran plus a free pair of blue jeans in his new size: the average detainee puts on 13 pounds during his stay, thanks to the “mustard-baked dill fish”, “baked Tandoori chicken breast” and other delicacies. These and other recipes from the gulag’s kitchen have now been collected by some Internet wags and published as The Gitmo Cookbook.

Judging from the way he’s dug himself in, Dick Durbin, the Number Two Democrat in the US Senate, genuinely believes Gitmo is analogous to Belsen, the gulags and the killing fields. But he crossed a line, from anti-Bush to anti-American, and most Americans have no interest in following him down that path.You can’t claim (as Democrats do, incessantly) to “support our troops” and then dump them in the same category as the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge. In the hermetically sealed echo chamber between the Dem leadership, the mainstream US media, Hollywood, Ivy League “intellectuals” and European sophisticates, the gulag cracks are utterly unexceptional. But, for a political party that keeps losing elections because it has less and less appeal outside a few coastal enclaves, Durbin’s remarks are devastating. The Democrats flopped in 2002 and 2004 because they were seen as incoherent on national security issues. Explicitly branding themselves as the “terrorists’ rights” party is unlikely to improve their chances for 2006.

 

[no1tovote4]

You can’t claim (as Democrats do, incessantly) to “support our troops” and then dump them in the same category as the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge. In the hermetically sealed echo chamber between the Dem leadership, the mainstream US media, Hollywood, Ivy League “intellectuals” and European sophisticates, the gulag cracks are utterly unexceptional. But, for a political party that keeps losing elections because it has less and less appeal outside a few coastal enclaves, Durbin’s remarks are devastating. The Democrats flopped in 2002 and 2004 because they were seen as incoherent on national security issues. Explicitly branding themselves as the “terrorists’ rights” party is unlikely to improve their chances for 2006.

Yup.

 

[ThomasPaine]

Just a thought. It would explain how the CIA can't get to him he's being hidden by the Dem's.

 

[Bonnie]

You can’t claim (as Democrats do, incessantly) to “support our troops” and then dump them in the same category as the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge. In the hermetically sealed echo chamber between the Dem leadership, the mainstream US media, Hollywood, Ivy League “intellectuals” and European sophisticates, the gulag cracks are utterly unexceptional. But, for a political party that keeps losing elections because it has less and less appeal outside a few coastal enclaves, Durbin’s remarks are devastating. The Democrats flopped in 2002 and 2004 because they were seen as incoherent on national security issues. Explicitly branding themselves as the “terrorists’ rights” party is unlikely to improve their chances for 2006.

I second No1's yup and add a Fu@k!n A right!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Gabriella84]

If you want to make a point, you need to list a credible source. The New York Post is NOT a credible source. It is a tabloid, and about as believable as the National Enquirer.

 

[Annie]

If you want to make a point, you need to list a credible source. The New York Post is NOT a credible source. It is a tabloid, and about as believable as the National Enquirer.

Actually the NYPost is a credible source. Feel free to run a google news from other sources though.

 

[Annie]

And what would someone from your side of the fence consider a credible source?

personally SE, I don't give a flying fu* what she thinks is credible. I offered her the chance to refute it.

 

[Gabriella84]

Aljazeera is more credible and open-minded than the NY Post.
The NY Post is merely a media outlet for the Bush administration.

 

[Bonnie]

And what would someone from your side of the fence consider a credible source?

Gabby thinks

Aljazeera is more credible and open-minded than the NY Post.

 

[Annie]

Aljazeera is more credible and open-minded than the NY Post.
The NY Post is merely a media outlet for the Bush administration.

Based on what, retard?

 

[Bonnie]

Welcome to the war on image
Diana West


June 20, 2005

Finally, our guards at Guantanamo Bay are getting the hang of showing "reverence and respect" toward that "fragile piece of delicate art" (military-speak for the Quran), and, wouldn't you know it, our politicians and pundits, from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to Tom Friedman and Bill Kristol, are angling to put a lock on Gitmo.

Why? It's an "international embarrassment," says Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who should know. His colleague, Sen. Richard Durbin, (D-Ill.), is himself so internationally embarrassed that he compared the terrorist detainee facility to Nazi deaths camps, Communist gulags and Khmer Rouge killing fields.

And so what if closing Gitmo lets hundreds of jihadists out of their prison cages and into their terror cells? "Sure, a few may come back to haunt us," writes Friedman. But being haunted -- which presumably requires some additional number of American dead to do the haunting -- is apparently a risk worth taking in order to win the war.

I'm not talking about the so-called "war on terror." It seem there's been a change in focus. Islamic jihad is out. The war on "image" is in. And, according to the anti-Gitmo-nists, we're getting creamed. Go figure: "They" kill people over a soggy Quran, and "we" lose the image war -- and all over the world, according to Sen. Hagel. He thinks closing Guantanamo is the only way to win World Image War I. That's because closing the detention center would "give us a clean slate in the Muslim world," as Nancy Pelosi said, revealing an ignorance of history so vast and untamed that facts alone would perish there. Clean slate -- like on Sept. 10.

Projecting power is not the same thing as winning a popularity contest. Nor is winning a popularity contest the same thing as winning hearts and minds -- at home where it really counts, or abroad -- which seems to be another point of desperate confusion. But in our poll-driven age of celebrity worship, the popularity contest is becoming the preferred forum for geopolitics, a kind of "Survivor"-slash-"Who Wants to Be a Superpower?" reality show for world leaders. If this is the case, by all means go for that "clean slate" and close Gitmo. Miss Congeniality would do the same. But don't stop there.

After all, reverence and respect, even surrender, only go so far. More sensitivity is needed as well. In a recent meeting with Daniel Sutherland, head of the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties division of the Department of Homeland Security, American University's Akbar Ahmed had some suggestions, beginning, according to an online report in the Pakistani Daily Times, with pretty much eliminating Muslim profiling at airports. This, of course, would do nothing to spare my own white-haired mother and white-haired mother-in-law from the next checkpoint body search, but the boost to world image would be colossal. "You simply cannot humiliate Muslims like this," Akbar said, describing a "peak level of anger" in "the young generation on the edge." Just one more pat-down and they'll blow. He also suggested "more social and cultural contacts" between government officials and American Muslims, and an unspecified reading list on Islam.

Maybe such a list would include one of his own books, "Islam Under Siege" (Polity Press, 2003). There, he describes the kind of gathering Homeland Security could really learn from -- roughly 60 Muslim-American professionals from Cleveland, Ohio, whom Ahmed addressed in October 2001.

"When I stated that Islam had suffered a major setback after Sept. 11 (for a grossly un-Islamic act of violence), that every Muslim was in the dock as a result ... I was challenged by some Arabs and Pakistanis," he writes. "They" -- Muslims in Cleveland, Ohio -- "called Sept. 11 a glorious event for Islam. The taking of innocent lives was justified, they argued, as Sept. 11 was the continuation of a full-scale Islamic war taking place against Israel, which is backed by the United States. I heard a similar debate when the Muslim Council of Britain hosted a dinner for me in London in July 2002."

Maybe this last bit helps explain why the Queen of England this month bestowed a knighthood on Iqbal Sacranie, general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain. "Sir" Iqbal Sacranie: a body blow in the war on image. And also why, as Sutherland reportedly told Akbar, Homeland Security "has undertaken many measures to eliminate racial profiling." I think I see a strategy emerging. Little by little, we'll win this war on image. So what if we no longer recognize ourselves.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dianawest/printdw20050620.shtml

 

[Bonnie]

Based on what, retard?

I guess she's referring to the all day Durbin love-in they had the other day when he compared Gitmo to concentration camps..??? VERY OPEN-MINDED indeed

 

[Said1]

Based on what, retard?

Has she even quoted anything from Aljizzera?

 

[ThomasPaine]

Aljazeera is more credible and open-minded than the NY Post.
The NY Post is merely a media outlet for the Bush administration.

the "truth" telling NY Times. Wake up sweetie. It's the MSM,LED BY THEIR STALWART, the NY times that can't tell the truth. Sorry sweetheart but the MSM is just a mouthpiece for the DNC. MSM, DNC, one and the same. That's why their subscribership and viewership are dropping like a stone. The American people are onto the MSM (AKA NY Times impersonators) darlin' and they ain't buyin' it anymore.

 

[ThomasPaine]

Has she even quoted anything from Aljizzera?

super hottie....