Posted on 06/15/2005 1:49:40 PM PDT by OESY
There's a lot I don't understand about the current hysteria over our prison facility at Guantanamo Bay. At the top of the list is why no one has mentioned Louis Pepe or Mamdouh Mahmud Salim.
Salim, a reputed top lieutenant of Osama Bin Laden, was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a high security federal jail in lower Manhattan. Pepe was a guard there. On November 1, 2000, Salim plunged a sharpened comb into Pepe's left eye and three inches into his brain. Salim and a compatriot also beat Pepe savagely, in their effort to get the guard's keys and orchestrate an escape for himself and two fellow terrorists awaiting trial. Believing Pepe was dead, the attackers used his own blood to paint a Christian cross on his torso. Pepe was an experienced correctional officer, a member of the elite MCC Enforcers Disturbance Control, and he weighed in at 300 pounds. He survived the attack with brain damage, crippling disabilities and an unending stream of surgeries.
The reason Pepe and Salim are relevant should be obvious. There are good guys and bad guys in this story, and as much as it pains some to hear it, we are the good guys. We are not talking about confused teenagers caught up in events larger than themselves. We aren't talking about mistaken identities. We're talking about the cream of our enemy's crop in the war on terror.
Critics of the Bush Administration are fond of the argument that the war in Iraq is a distraction from the real war on terror. John Kerry, Howard Dean and countless others have argued that Iraq diluted our efforts in Afghanistan, the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, and the worldwide consensus on the need to destroy al-Qaida. That's an argument worth having - and we have had it many times over. But if it were all true and we had never invaded Iraq, we would still have Guantanamo and the problem of what to do with hardened, dedicated terrorists like Salim.
Of course, we could close Guantanamo, but if you actually support the war on terror you must recognize that we would still need someplace like it. A rose by any other name and all that. We can't summarily execute every al-Qaida member we capture. Not just because that would raise legitimate moral and legal problems, but because we can't win unless we interrogate these guys.
Senator Joe Biden said that while we should close Gitmo and release the occupants, we should also "keep those we have reason to keep." Huh? This is the logical equivalent of Solomon saying, "Hey, let's cut the baby in half after all." Imagine if, instead of Gitmo, the issue was the death penalty. "The death penalty should be abolished, but let's execute the folks there's a reason to execute."
If we kept the ones "we have reason to keep" - which would probably mean all 500 or so current detainees - but closed Gitmo, we could bring them to the United States. But this would be a legal quagmire, as it isn't clear what their rights would be on U.S. soil. And it would be a disaster to treat them like common criminals with all of the usual constitutional rights. Nobody read these murderers their rights when they were seized in Afghanistan, and it's not like the cast of "CSI: Kabul" or "Kandahar PD Blue" collected all the necessary forensic evidence to build a case against them. Does that mean we should just let them go? We certainly can't set them free on American soil. And if we send them back to Afghanistan or Pakistan, it would be like giving them a do-over.
Any new Gitmo would quickly gain the same reputation as the old one because a) al-Qaida is under strict orders to allege all manner of abuses for propaganda purposes, especially now that such tactics have proved so useful, and b) because the "international community" and other lovers of runny cheese desperately want such allegations to be true, regardless of the evidence. That the head of Amnesty International could call Gitmo, where we spend more money on the care and feeding of detainees than we do on our own troops, the "Gulag of our time" is all the evidence we need for that. Caving into such bullying would send the unmistakable message that American can be rolled.
Now, none of this is to say that the U.S. military should have carte blanche to torture or harass detainees. There must be rules, and it is perfectly fair to debate what those rules should be. But unlike the lawless calamity of Abu Ghraib, the evidence is sparse that Guantanamo is anything like the house of horrors depicted by its detractors. In other words, if there are abuses, remedy them. If allegations are propagandistic lies, rebut them as best you can.
But caving into a defamation campaign in order to please those who cannot be pleased and aiding those who must not be aided is no way to support the war on terror or prevent more victims like Louis Pepe.
What useful purpose would be served by closing it? Closing it suggests that we agree we are "bad guys".
Close Gitmo - send them all to Biden's house.
As if closing Gitmo would prevent abuse of detainees...real or imagined. Couldn't the same thing happened at FT. Hamilton in Brooklyn or Ft. Hood in Texas? By closing Gitmo, another dear friend of ours...the bearded one....would feel that he has attained a victory. We cannot give him that legitimacy. I admit to not being a big supporter of the boycott of Cuba or of restricting travel of Americans citizens there either. But in regards to a specifically military operation (closing of a base)...it cannot be allowed to happen.
The only thing I want to see shut is Biden's piehole.
Castro is very upset with his next door neighbor huh?
Makes a certain amount of sense. Pay the whiners a little lip service to shut them up without really changing anything. Of course, they'll still find an exscuse to whine.
Would all you Vets out there please remind the world what we did during WWII, Korea and Viet Nam when we captured enemy combatants? I was born in 1943, but I cannot recall in my life nor in any history I have read learning that the U.S. had brought POWs onto our shores from other venues in order to give them the rights and privileges of Americans. Isn't that why they fight with our enemies - they don't want to live our way?
BIDEN AND HIS BUNCH ARE ALL IDIOTS!!!!!!!!!!
Move the target. In the age of mobility it is amazing that the military would retain such a sitting target. Don't they think strategically all the time?
Biden is your typical misguided fuzzy headed liberal dinosaur. His true colors are showing. He wants to obstruct the president. He's a first class phoney.
nick
Crass remarks about Mr. Biden's hair implants are just mean spirited and uncalled for.
These dim witted dem senators want to close Gitmo? Ok! But let's build a new prison really really close to where these senators are living. Let these senators and their families keep an eye out. You know, just in case some of the prisoners where to escape.
We have, it's called San Francisco.
I guess he was just trying to get a "plug" in there...
Maybe we should release them into Cuba as payback for what castro did during the mariel boatlift.
Well, since his mouthpiece is talking, I'd guess yes. :-)
Dear Marines,
Please bring Castro a jello mold like a good neighbor ^-^
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