We're Treating Our Enemy Too Well

Read this account of Mark Davis' tour of Gitmo, and then pick your jaw up off the floor. To quote Mr. Davis: "It's this simple: Anyone characterizing Guantánamo as a haven for detainee mistreatment is either a fool or a liar."

Detainees Are Treated Well - Perhaps Too Well

...we religiously accommodate the detainees (five prayer calls a day, a fresh Quran for every guest, an arrow pointing to Mecca in every cell and exercise yard) and feed them well (at our lunchtime briefing, we ate what they ate that day - chicken, rice, pita slice, salad, yogurt, orange). But as we viewed closed-circuit video of two interrogations, with the subjects sipping coffee on soft couches, the officer giving us the tour told us that this kid-gloves approach is all we do.

That's a problem. I understand that plying some terrorists with kindness will yield results. I also understand, and the Department of Defense apparently does not, that sometimes you score points by thinking outside the box. Some detainees respond to a smile and a Subway sandwich (which they apparently snarf with gusto), but others might open up after a modicum of physicality or psychological intimidation.

As America engages the enemy within the gates of Guantánamo, they fight us by abusing guards - verbally each day and physically when they can - attempting to sneak messages out of the camp and even stooping to PR victories won with suicides.

Some would have you believe that three detainees killed themselves in June because they just couldn't take another unbearable day of captivity in U.S. hands. Poppycock. I accept the theory of task force commanding officer Adm. Harry Harris, who called it "asymmetrical warfare," a dark stunt designed to make the camp look bad.

I leave filled with appreciation for the daily risks that come with this tour of duty. A dedicated doctor - who has healed the wounds and sicknesses of people who would kill him with their bare hands if they could - asked me not to share his name or hometown, for fear of terrorist reprisals against his family.

For the same reason, the unfailingly upbeat active-duty men and women accompanying us on our tour performed a sobering ritual as we entered a maximum-security cellblock: They covered the names on their uniforms with tape or Velcro so that a vigilant detainee could not read a name, do a little homework and get word out for a terrorist hit against a family member.

Oh yeah, how those poor jihadists are suffering. F-ck them.

Then there's this little bit from Mark Steyn:

9/11 enemies are still hiding in plain sight

In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote: "The failure to prevent Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or coordination. It was a failure of imagination." That's not really true. Islamist terrorists had indicated their interest in U.S. landmarks, and were known to have plans to hijack planes to fly into them. But men like John O'Neill could never quite get the full attention of a somnolent federal bureaucracy. The terrorists must have banked on that: After all, they took their pilot-training classes in America, apparently confident that, even if anyone noticed the uptick in Arab enrollments at U.S. flight schools, a squeamish culture of political correctness would ensure nothing was done about it.

Five years on, half America has retreated to the laziest old tropes, filtering the new struggle through the most drearily cobwebbed prisms: All dramatic national events are JFK-type conspiracies, all wars are Vietnam quagmires. Meanwhile, Ramzi Yousef's successors make their ambitions as plain as he did: They want to acquire nuclear technology in order to kill even more of us. And, given that free societies tend naturally toward a Katrina mentality of doing nothing until it happens, one morning we will wake up to another day like the "day that changed everything." Sept. 11 was less "a failure of imagination" than an ability to see that America's enemies were hiding in plain sight.

Maybe the moonbats will finally realize something is afoot when Baltimore, Savannah, or Seattle are nothing more than smoking, radioactive craters... nah - who am I kidding?