Posted on 02/12/2010 6:17:18 AM PST by Kaslin
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- It is the oddest of unintended airport stopovers -- a short stay at Guantanamo Bay. Helicopter flights for the ship I was trying to reach off the coast of Haiti had been canceled. So I slept in an Air Force tent at Camp Freedom, an arrow's shot from where 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed is imprisoned -- his stay now extended longer than the Obama administration would wish.
"Guantanamo" has become a synonym for "prison." Actually, it is a 45-square-mile U.S. Navy base, complete with a McDonald's and a Subway. The Guantanamo Bay Children and Youth Program sounds like a violation of the Geneva Conventions. But there are families stationed here needing child care. The Navy conducts operations against drug running and human trafficking. The base is now a major transit point for supplies headed to Haiti.
But Guantanamo's reputation is largely determined by roughly 200 detainees. Military personnel involved in holding and prosecuting these terrorists are proud of their work, but can't be public with their pride. When I saw one television camera attempt to film a soldier, he covered his face with his cap -- not out of shame, but out of concern for the possibility of terrorist reprisals.
The highest profile trials take place in courtroom No. 2, housed in a maximum-security compound of East German aesthetic sensibility -- all concrete and barbed wire. On the fences are large signs reading, "No photography." The building also hides its face.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
All Obama and his crony union buddies have ever run
was their mouth.
Re: the families: I was 14-15 yrs of age when my dad was stationed in GTMO. My mother thinks of it as one of our best tours.. and I tend to agree. In a nutshell, for we dependents, it was like living a regular life but on a resort. Other than being evacuated to Norfolk, VA for a few months during the Cuban Missle Crisis, we were there for two years.
From the Cubans who ‘commuted’ onto base for work, we learned, at an early age, of the horrors of Castro’s communism that was just on the other side of the fence.
The gate was closed in ‘63 or ‘64 around the same time that the Admiral activated the desalinization plant and cut the water pipe and the base’s dependancy of water from communist Cuba.
You can take a tour of the base on Google Earth. .. there’s a lot more there than just a prison.
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