Gitmo: The Disneyland Of Gulags 

6-14-2005

You can count them on one hand.

A soldier intentionally kicked a Quran. An interrogator stepped on one of the holy books. The urine of a soldier was blown through an outside air vent onto a detainee and his Quran. A two-word obscenity was written inside a book. Some Qurans got wet when water balloons thrown by soldiers burst.

These incidents were confirmed through an investigation conducted by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood who commands Guantanamo Bay, a detention center in Cuba where terrorists and enemy combatants captured during the War on Terror are held.

When the report was released, media elitists and their liberal counterparts in government went on the attack in seeming retribution for the Newsweek debacle where they had to retract an earlier report that falsely accused a United States soldier of flushing a Quran down the toilet and sparked riots in several Muslims countries causing the deaths of at least seventeen people.

What the media establishment refuses to accept or is intentionally disregarding is the fact that the United States military launched it’s own investigation into the incidents and handed out punishment for each confirmed allegation. Including the firing of the interrogator for, ‘a pattern of unacceptable behavior’.

They also ignore that Hood himself wrote upon release of the report that his investigation elaborated that military personnel in Guantanamo Bay, ‘revealed a consistent, documented policy of respectful handling of the Quran dating back almost 2 ½ years’.

Instead, they go on the attack. ‘Why, you can’t just overlook those five incidents of torture and abuse during those 2 ½ years. It makes America look bad! George Bush and his imperialistic storm troopers are wrongfully incarcerating innocent terrorists and torturing them by forcing them to listen to Christina Aguilera!’

One story documented by the press, recounts how an 18-year-old who was arrested by the U.S. military in Afghanistan for shooting at them and was detained at Guantanamo Bay ended up as an enemy combatant fighting for the Taliban.

“My infant cousin was born. We had a party. We were playing,” the boy told the tribunal questioning him during his hearing to determine if he should be released. “When they [the Taliban] came they broke the tapes, they broke the drums, they took me to jail, they beat me with a cable then they put salt in it - my wounds.”

Even after the details of that horrendous story, the media applauds Amnesty International for denigrating our military personnel as torturers who run the ‘gulag’ at Guantanamo Bay for feeding and clothing the boy, while allowing him to worship and giving him his own holy book, because he was a teenager and shouldn’t have been there, even though he was fighting against our troops along with the Taliban.

So what do the national leaders of the Democrat party think about Gitmo? Senator Joseph Biden Jr., the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wants to close it down! “I think we should end up shutting it down, moving those prisoners,” Biden said. “Those that we have reason to keep, keep. And those we don’t, let go.”

Biden’s posturing in that statement proves his rhetoric is unfounded. The very purpose of detaining the prisoners in Gitmo, is to give the military tribunals time to investigate each case, give them a hearing and release the people who can be ‘let go’.

Moving them to another place only creates another place for media elitists to generate new fallacious accusations of torture and abuse by our military personnel. But then, that’s exactly what Biden and liberal brethren are hoping for.

He then turned to the incidents concerning Quran ‘mishandling’, or as media elitists like to write, ‘desecration’, Gitmo, and Abu Ghraib. He postulates that they have, ‘become the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting terrorists around the world. And it is unnecessary to be in that position.”

In the first place, is he saying it is unnecessary to be fighting the War on Terror, which is the liberal mantra? Or is he saying that it’s unnecessary for us to incarcerate enemy combatants captured during battle and terrorists we stop from committing deadly acts of destruction while we fight the War on Terror?

In the second place, propaganda used for recruitment can come in many forms, including fake documents presented by CBS News and false reporting in Newsweek, so our enemy doesn’t have to use any of the examples Biden refers to, because they already hate us, that’s why 9-11 happened.

More importantly, the dissemination of propaganda is the heart of terrorist recruitment and terrorists have to put little time and effort into that endeavor, because the American press is doing the job very well for them!

Liberals don’t care that using our military personnel to attack the President will not help us defeat terrorism or help them defeat President Bush. They claim to ‘support the troops’, but telling the world repeatedly that our military people are doing bad things because it’ll make George W. Bush look bad, is directly attacking American soldiers and only aids and abets terrorists.

They are also slavering at the feet of the Anti-American institution Amnesty International... which is based in London, that should give some indication as to their loyalties... because they have decided that Gitmo is our modern day equivalent to a ‘gulag’.

Then throwing water balloons and playing Christina Aguilera music could be labeled torture by hundreds, if not thousands, of adults who are having to endure ‘gulags’ right here in America!

But, wait! Amnesty International has clarified that their labeling of Gitmo as a ‘gulag’, ‘is not an exact or literal analogy’. No kidding! Why they even admit that, ‘People are not being starved in those facilities. They’re not being subjected to forced labor.”

Hey, it’s the Disneyland of Gulags... handing out free Qurans, water balloons, crappy music, eating meals that consist of ‘glazed chicken’, the freedom to worship and pray up to five times a day... makes you wonder what Amnesty International thought when Saddam gassed the Kurds or when he tortured and killed millions of Muslims!

Thank goodness for Vice President Dick Cheney. “The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantanamo are bad people,” he said. “I mean, these are terrorists for the most part. These are people that were captured in the battlefield of Afghanistan or rounded up as part of the al-Qaida network.”

And as such, they committed the crime of being enemy combatants and became prisoners of war. Human rights groups should applaud the simple fact that America is allowing them access to tribunals to determine their guilt or future threat status.

Instead, it is as it always has been. Liberals, the establishment media, and foreign organizations that are almost always against our military or economic decisions label America as the enemy and is the one who is guilty of crimes against humanity, not the actual terrorists and destroyers of freedom.

Just ask Joe Biden. America is creating terrorists five mishandled Qurans at a time.

Lee P Butler