By PLS
Veep Dick Cheney describes the Guantanamo detention center as if it were a state-of-the-art resort hotel—on the American Plan, of course.
Yes, guests are forced to take the meals along with the lodging, but this is a good thing, Cheney notes. Detainees aren’t gaunt and scrawny-looking like their relatives back in those poverty-stricken native villages. Lucky detainees!
Cheney talks about comfort, too. He rhapsodizes about the hot and cold running water, the showers the detainees might not have in their own homes.
Pretty soon we’ll be hearing about the sheets’ thread count.
And how about those designer uniforms! Smart new resort wear in tangerine. Or is it pumpkin? So much chicer than those floppy Afghan shirts and baggy pants.
Republican Congressmen on a whirlwind tour of Guantanamo this week played ditto to the Vice President and Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, who proudly manages the Guantanamo Hilton. Detainees, observed Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, enjoy “air conditioning and semiprivate showers.” According to Congressman Duncan Hunter of California, another enthusiast, they are “well-fed, given access to top-notch medical facilities and provided an opportunity to obtain legal representation.”
Sadly, detainees might need top-notch medical (and psychiatric) attention after a session with interrogators at the work over (sorry, I meant work out) center.
But legal room service, though considered unessential at first, is finally available, however patchily, thanks to appeals to the Supreme Court and other decisions by the judiciary.
You can imagine Tricky Dick Cheney’s puzzlement over the Court’s intervention.
Americans have been asked to trade longstanding freedoms for security. Too many have been willing to do so.
Why shouldn’t the Guantanamo detainees be delighted to trade freedom for a lifetime of tasty meals and creature comforts?
Shows how stupid they are, I guess. Dumb clucks don’t know a good thing when they have it.
But I’m puzzled.
If the deal at the Guantanamo Hilton is so terrific, how come Americans aren’t complaining about the pampering? How come they aren’t howling about tax dollars lavished on coddling these enemies of America?
I guess Americans aren’t so dumb, after all.
Sure, the conditions are a lot better than anything that shows up in pictures of Nazi concentration camps or the Soviet gulag. But only an idiot could imagine that hot showers and three squares a day could compensate for a lifetime in an American prison camp. Imagine: no charges, no trial, no release, which means never seeing your family again, never seeing your home town again. Dying in detention of old age, if not sooner from maltreatment.
The visiting Democratic Congressman who noted that the quality of the cuisine is beside the point got it right. As Jumana Musa of Amnesty International sniffed, “Whether or not people are being fed orange chicken, does not get to the heart of the issue.” The heart is this: the all too credible accusations that detainees are being badly treated and the effect such accusations are having on the US image in the world.
House Democrat Ike Skelton wants an independent commission to investigate. Nothing else will hold water, he insists.
Add this: the commission must have the right to visit the Guantanamo Hilton unannounced. Commission members must have full, free and instant access to the entire facility.
You know, the access the US wanted when it was looking for WMD in Iraq. Not the absurd, airbrushed view of detainee conditions this PR trip for Congress members would have entailed.
Those of us who have handled a CODEL know the elaborate preparations that go into ensuring that everything goes according to script. The phrase Potemkin village comes to mind.