November 15, 2005

A Google search this morning revealed some typical headlines, "No Justice at Guantanamo," "Right to Trial Imperiled By Senate Vote," "Legal Relief in Jeopardy," "Habeas Corpus Attack Undermines Courts," "Abused by Senate," "ONE STEP BACK," "Guantanamo inmates to lose all rights," "Renouncing American ideals" and my personal favorite, "Senators acting as judges." (Note to San Francisco Chronicle re: that last headline - the Senators were doing their jobs, not acting as judges. I'm sure you agree with Nancy Pelosi that any sound emanating from the Supreme Court - that is favorable to your liberal agenda - "is almost as if God has spoken" but you need to go back and take a sixth grade refresher Civics course. Start with the concept of "checks and balances.") Surprisingly, Reuters played this one pretty straight.

Click the graphic to see a clip of the debate that sums up why giving detainees habeas corpus rights is a dumb idea.

As to the torture debate, I agree that we ought not to engage in neck slashing, gouging out eyes, burning off genitals, using rusted shackles, refrigerating people naked and putting them underground for a year, ripping teeth out with pliers, cattle prods applied to genitals, and drilling holes through people's ankles. Nor should we force people to sit on broken Pepsi bottles until they bleed to death, hit people on the head with baseball bats, pour salt into wounds, and rape women at all, much less in front of their husbands. I'll even go so far as to say that we should not use people's skin to extinguish cigarettes, or purposely flood underground prison cells so that the prisoners drown. But I also think we need not go so far as to utilize the dreaded comfy chair.

Here are three quotes from the Gitmo Cookbook as a reminder - we're not torturing them, they are not innocent goatherders who stumbled into the wrong place at the wrong time, and simply letting them go is a bad idea.

• "The food is good, the bedrooms are clean and the heath care is very good. There is a library full of Islamic books, science books, and literature. Sports, reading, and praying, all of these options are not mandatory for everyone, it is up to the person."
  
• More than 10% of detainees possess college degrees or obtained higher education at western colleges. Among the detainees are medical doctors, airplane pilots, aviation specialists, engineers, divers, translators, and lawyers.
  
• Abdullah Mahsud [Massood] was a detainee who was released in 2004 after claiming to be forcibly conscripted by the Taliban military to be an office clerk and truck driver. During his stay at Gitmo, his medical treatment included receiving a prosthetic leg. After his release, press reports from the Washington Post and Fox News indicate that al Queda linked militants, ordered by Mahsud, kidnapped two Chinese engineers in Afghanistan.
  

Mahsud is not the only detainee that we had, and released so he could continue to make war against us. Zenpundit had a good article on illegal combatants with lots of cites. In any event, giving these detainees rights that no POW or other detainee has had before is simply stupid, and bowing to left wingers who just want to sit around and sing kumbayah with those poor misguided insurgents - I'm guessing that's their plan, since they have not publically announced one since 9/11/01 - is a waste of our hard earned majority status.

Posted by Laura Curtis at November 15, 2005 03:24 AM

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