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Expand Gitmo!
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John Henry
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Jul 07, 2007 09:50 PDT
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Expand Gitmo!
By Deroy Murdock
July 6, 2007
President Bush and his administration should yank their tails from
between their legs, stand up, and fight for Guantanamo.
While suspected al Qaeda associates deployed their Mercedes-Benz bombs in
London last week, Congressional Democrats announced plans to chop Gitmo’s
funding in half. On June 29, as alleged Muslim terrorists prepared to
ignite their Jeep Cherokee bomb the next day at Glasgow’s airport, the
U.S. Supreme Court announced it would hear fresh lawsuits filed by the
boys of Gitmo.
While human-rights groups holler for Guantanamo’s closure, the Bush
administration whispers the same message.
“The president said he wants to close Guantanamo,” Defense Secretary
Robert Gates
told journalists hours before the Glasgow attack. “Obviously a
lot of people on the Hill want to close it. We want to close it as a
detainee facility.”
This is pathetic, embarrassing, and potentially fatal.
President Bush and his appointees should stop cowering beneath their
desks and return fire. Bush should start by uttering a simple sentence:
“I am proud of Guantanamo.”
I am proud of Guantanamo, as every American should be. Here’s
why:
First, Guantanamo keeps bloodthirsty terrorists surrounded by armed
guards, ringed by barbed wire, and encircled by the shark-filled
Caribbean. Muslim zealots who escape are welcome to swim to Haiti 110
miles away. Securing crazed killers there prevents them from coming
here.
Second, interrogating those at Gitmo has yielded priceless intelligence
that has foiled conspiracies to murder innocent men, women, and children.
Al Qaeda bigwig Abu Zubaydah kept mum until American officers played him
the Red Hot Chili Peppers at high volume. After they turned down the
stereo, Zubaydah unmasked al Qaeda agents Omar al-Faruq, Rahim
al-Nashiri, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. After questioning, they, in turn,
exposed more terrorist scum.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s lips were sealed until he experienced a few
minutes of unpleasant but non-fatal waterboarding. Then he wouldn’t shut
up. With his guidance, counterterrorists nabbed accused Islamo-butchers
Majid Khan, Bali bomber Hambali, Rusman “Gun Gun” Gunawan, Yazid Suffat,
Jose “Dirty Bomber” Padilla, and Iyman Faris, who
plotted to plunge the Brooklyn Bridge into the East
River.
Third, Guantanamo’s conditions are beyond humane. Detainees enjoy soccer
and volleyball, face Mecca five times daily on taxpayer-funded prayer
mats, and eat Allah-ready meals, adding ten pounds to the typical
combatant’s physique.
On Tuesday, camp commandant Navy Rear Admiral Mark Buzby announced that
well-behaved detainees would see a new movie each week. As the Associated
Press
reports, Guantanamanians care for a new vegetable garden and
enjoy episodes of Deadliest Catch, a Discovery Channel program
about Alaskan crab fishermen.
While indicting American medicine, rabid Bush hater Michael Moore
inadvertently shatters Guantanamo’s image as “W’s Dungeon.” Moore’s new
movie,
SiCKO, vividly documents Gitmo’s high-quality medical
care.
“We’ve created a population health database so that we can track those
detainees to make sure we’re seeing them frequently, monitoring their
labs and their overall health,” Navy Commander Cary Ostergaard said in
June 29, 2005, House Armed Services Committee testimony cited in the
film.
“The health personnel-to-detainee ratio is 1 to 4 remarkably high,”
then-Senator Bill Frist, M.D. (R., Tenn.) said in a September 12, 2006
Senate speech shown in the movie. Frist added that after visiting “the
doctors, and the nurses, and the psychologists, and the psychiatrists, I
left with an impression that health care there is clearly better than
they received at home and as good as many people receive in the United
States of America.”
The Weinstein Company, SiCKO’s studio, furnished this excerpt from
a September 14 Pentagon fact sheet on Guantanamo.
“Detainees receive medical, dental, psychiatric, and optometric care at
U.S. taxpayers’ expense. In 2005, there were 35 teeth cleanings, 91
cavities filled, and 174 pairs of glasses issued.”
Guantanamo is not the Hanoi Hilton.
The president of the United States constantly should explain why
Guantanamo must remain open. In fact, he should announce its EXPANSION.
Gitmo should grow into a global destination where foreign countries may
deposit terror convicts and suspects for safekeeping. Call it
al-Qatraz.
Keeping Muslim radicals under U.S. supervision will
prevent the outrage whereby at least 157 convicted or accused Islamic
terrorists have engineered at least 17
escapes from custody since September 11 in Afghanistan,
Bosnia, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, and Yemen. These
murderers, most of whom remain at large, collectively have killed at
least 328 individuals and wounded 518 more.
In June, Jordanian Maath Braizat and Iraqi Saad Nuaimat slipped
Jordan’s Juweida prison. Braizat was serving ten years for endeavoring to
kill Iraqi police trainees. Nuaimat was doing life for attempting to bomb
Jordan’s Queen Alia International Airport.
“The scale and frequency of these escapes reveal a dangerous weakness in
the ability of foreign states to detain terrorists securely,” says Bryan
Hill, research associate at the
Center for Security
Policy, who helped marshal this
evidence. “We have a vital, vested interest in making sure
these figures cannot break free and continue their menacing, violent
behavior.”
The Bush administration also should stop releasing detainees from Gitmo.
“Reports indicate that at least 30 former Guantanamo detainees have taken
part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving U.S. detention,”
Pentagon spokesman Navy Commander J.D. Gordon tells me. “Some have
subsequently been killed in combat in Afghanistan.”
“These former detainees successfully lied to US officials, sometimes for
over three years. Many detainees later identified as having returned to
fight against the U.S. with terrorists falsely claimed to be farmers,
truck drivers, cooks, small-scale merchants, or low-level combatants,”
Gordon continues. “Other common cover stories include going to
Afghanistan to buy medicines, to teach the Koran, or to find a wife. Many
of these stories appear so often, and are subsequently proven false, that
we can only conclude they are part of their terrorist training.”
“They gave me a good time in Cuba,” Mohammed Ismael
told
journalists after his 2004 release from Guantanamo. “They were very nice
to me, giving me English lessons.” Four months later, Ismael was caught
attacking U.S. troops near Kandahar. The Afghan carried a letter
certifying him as a respected Taliban member.
After eight months in Guantanamo in 2002, Maulavi Abdul Ghaffar was
freed. He soon became Taliban commander of Afghanistan’s Uruzgan and
Helmand provinces. Government forces killed Ghaffar and two comrades on
September 25, 2003 as they planned to strike Afghan cops.
So, what should America do with these detainees? The term “Texas hold
’em” comes to mind.
“When you capture a lawful enemy combatant and hold them as a prisoner of
war,” Pentagon detainee affairs chief Alan Liotta recently told
journalists, “you are entitled, under the laws of war, to hold that
individual until the end of the conflict. And the reason for that is
because you’re trying to diminish the enemy’s capacity to
fight.”
Since terrorists deliberately target civilians, wear no uniforms, and
belong to no country, they are entitled to less, not more, protection
than if they were uniformed national soldiers covered by the Geneva
Convention. Thus, if the Geneva Convention lets America keep uniformed
soldiers until hostilities end, the U.S. should detain these detainees at
least until the War on Terror concludes.
And when does that happen? Ask Osama bin Laden and his pals when they
plan to neutralize their guns, disable their car bombs, and stop taking
flight lessons.
Closing Guantanamo buys President Bush nothing. American and global
Leftists still will hate his guts, and enemy Islamofascists still will
want him and his 300 million constituents dead. So, Bush might as well
expand Guantanamo so he can padlock more Muslim fanatics even if
liberals scream.
Sourse:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZWI0ODU5MDQ5ZjEwZTAyYWVlNTJlYjVjNjJiY2M3MzY
Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps
Howard News Service and a media fellow with the
Hoover Institution.
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