Posted on 06/28/2004 5:03:10 AM PDT by Elkiejg
You'll have to pardon my insensitivity, but I'm just not much concerned about the abuse of the detainees we're holding at Guantanamo Bay.
ABC's Peter Jennings doesn't see it that way, of course. He actually seems to believe the lamentations of the relatives of one Guantanamo detainee who claim he was in Afghanistan only to work with refugees. In fact, no humanitarian aid agency ever heard of him, and the one thing we know for sure is that when the remnants of the Taliban army high-tailed it out of the country he went with them.
So I'm just a little suspect of his do-gooder credentials. Nonetheless, Jennings gave the family tons of face time in his hatchet job "documentary" last night.
Remember, ABC is the network that won't even give its own monthly poll any coverage when it shows Bush ahead of Kerry, but puts it front and center whenever it shows the opposite.
Jennings has been on the Guantanamo story for some time now. Back in November of 2002, he introduced a story about how "human rights organizations" were upset over the treatment of prisoners there, and then cut to reporter Bob Woodruff, who related the tragic tale of a Pakistani detainee who had never seen air conditioning before and assumed it was a kind of torture. Yep, that's what we're doing down there – air conditioning those poor bastards until their will is broken and they talk.
Jennings went to Gitmo himself in April of this year, and wrapped up his report thusly: "The biggest health issue here is mental. Isolation and uncertainty have led to numerous attempted suicides. And at any time of the day or night, the detainees may be interrogated, a subject of enormous controversy in itself. There is no thought here of rehabilitation. Some of these men may be here for years, and as of now, they have no appeal. Hard place to photograph. Harder place for many people to understand."
I'm hear to tell you folks, when the biggest health issue in a prison is mental, that's a pretty good prison. Mental was never the biggest health issue in the Gulag. Of course, they didn't use air conditioning to terrify the zeks, either.
In May, Jennings did an exposé on Halliburton (How original is that?) and managed to find it worthy of mention that the giant construction company had built the Camp Delta terrorist housing complex at Guantanamo. Well, if Halliburton built it, it's got to be a chamber of horrors, now, doesn't it? No doubt a little further research would turn up the fact that Halliburton also built Devil's Island, Dachau and the Lubyanka, but ABC may be holding that story for October, just before the election.
Another prison story ABC has yet to get around to is the one referenced by Marine Lt. Col. Stan Coerr, in his celebrated essay "No One Asked Us," which remains as good an essay on the real meaning of the Iraq War as has yet been written (you can find it a million places on the web, including http://www.smcgop.us/_fileCabinet/commentary/NoOneAskedUs.pdf). Coerr writes that the "1st Battalion, 5th Marines, out of Camp Pendleton, liberated a prison in Iraq populated entirely by children. The Ba'athists brutalized the weakest among them, and killed the strongest."
To be fair, I have to tell you that at least some of the detainees taken to Cuba were underage, too, but they were typically released pronto. One of them, a 13ish Afghan boy, told the left-wing Guardian newspaper in London, "I am lucky I went there, and now I miss it. Cuba was great." Apparently this kid didn't mind the air conditioning, and he specifically praised the food. He also reported that he took up snorkeling, apparently during those few minutes of the day when his captors loosened the thumb screws. "Americans are great people, better than anyone else," he told the Guardian. "If I could be anywhere, I would be in America. I would like to be a doctor, an engineer -- or an American soldier."
Brainwashed that sucker, didn't we? But don't expect him to show up on ABC anytime soon.
Earlier this week when the Supreme Court heard a case asking them to rule on whether the Gitmo detainees had the right to access the U.S. judicial system, only ABC among the three network news organizations made the story Numero Uno for the day, dispatching Jennings to Washington and giving three soundbites to a rag-tag group of anti-Bush protesters outside the court and otherwise savaging the Administration.
A guy from New York named Ed Voyer sent me an email this week in response to an earlier column of mine. I think his summary of the awfulness of our War on Terrorism prisons is worth quoting. "I was just reading the DoD's interrogation methods both pre and post January 2003," he writes. "One thing struck me, that amused me to no end. Most of the tortures are those I voluntarily submitted to in Army Basic Training of 1977 (though we had nothing as tasty as MRE's back then). Shouting, sleep deprivation, forced shaving, prolonged standing, twice daily calisthenics, good guy bad guy, and much more. It seems that the terrorists will come out fit and healthy under such torture."
My friends, we are the good guys in this fight. The bad guys chop off the heads of the prisoners they take, and send the videotapes to the deceased's relatives. If Peter Jennings can come up with any examples of where we've done that, then maybe I'll join him worrying about how we're abusing detainees' rights.
Maybe a little bit over the top, but otherwise largely agree with you. I do have some concern, way down on my list of things to be concerned about, that we may have some number of detainees who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I am far less concerned about their quality of life and mental health than that of our soldiers who are giving and risking all only to hear how Jenning's and his cohorts portray (betray) that service.
Heck, Jennings almost cried when the Berlin Wall came down - he is a Socialist at heart and hates it when strong, noble people have successes.
I read that the average Gitmo detainee weighed 20 lbs more when released than when captured. When they get there, they are shaved and deloused (many for the first times in their lives), innoculated against disease, given health and dental care (again for the first time in their life for many), eyeglasses if they need them, dewormed, made to take showers, and gorced to eat balanced meals provided by a nutritionist specializing in Muslim diets.
The care they get at Gitmo will extend most of their miserable lives by 10 or more years.
Who is Jennings?
Since when did Pasty Boy Jennings gain the intelligence to know when somebody's a liar or not? These parasitic media dogs are so easily used. They ruin anyone's chances of being believed when a REAL story comes along.
Jennings knows liars. He sees one every morning, in the mirror while shaving.
I stand corrected!
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