December 20, 2006

Solvalogging: Do You Feel Their Pain?

Here's something else for the drive-by media to whine about. Under rules set by the new commander of the Guantánamo Bay task force, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., guards at Gitmo will start treating terrorists detinees as if -- well, as if they were terrorist detainees:

After two years in which the military sought to manage terrorism suspects at Guantánamo with incentives for good behavior, steady improvements in their living conditions and even dialogue with prison leaders, the authorities here have clamped down decisively in recent months.

Security procedures have been tightened. Group activities have been scaled back. With the retrofitting of Camp 6 and the near-emptying of another showcase camp for compliant prisoners, military officials said about three-fourths of the detainees would eventually be held in maximum-security cells. That is a stark departure from earlier plans to hold a similar number in medium-security units.

After analyzing the previous rules and the reaction to them by jihadis -- which was, predictably enough, to conclude that America was weak and soft and that the detainees could get away with murder, perhaps literally -- the Marines figured out that the only people left in Guantánamo Bay are the "worst of the worst", except for a few "released" detainees that no country will accept. Such unlawful combatants, being feral animals, understand only one language: brute force. There are some people on whom humane treatment is not only lost, it's tantamount to surrender.

"They’re all terrorists; they’re all enemy combatants," Admiral Harris said in an interview.

He added, "I don’t think there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist."

In 2005, the Marines had started to transition Guantánamo to a regular POW camp, where the detainees would be treated according to the Geneva Conventions, as if they were simple prisoners of war. They did not expect to do any more serious interrogations, merely hold the prisoners "for the duration," or until they determined they were no longer a threat.

But then the most hardcore jihadis abused their new privileges to convert a number of the more moderate prisoners, and the attacks on guards and suicide attempts by prisoners increased. The Pentagon eventually concluded that the two events were related: that lenient treatment led directly to more aggressive and violent behavior, towards guards, other prisoners, and even directed towards themselves:

[Adm. Harris] and [guard commander, Col. Wade F. Dennis] both asserted that Camp 4 -- where dozens of detainees rioted during an aggressive search of their quarters last May -- represented a particular danger.

Admiral Harris said detainees there had used the freedom of the camp to train one another in terrorist tactics, and in 2004 plotted unsuccessfully to seize a food truck and use it to run over guards.

“Camp 4 is an ideal planning ground for nefarious activity,” he said.

After three prisoners managed to hang themselves -- thus inspiring the rest to even more violence to avenge the "martyr's deaths" of their coreligionists -- the incoming commander decided to go the other direction... a lockdown. Gone were the privileges, even the privilege of company. Many more prisoners are now in solitary confinement; even the exercise yards are single-person.

"They have thrown away the key and forgotten him even though he is spiraling down physically and psychologically," Mr. [Saber] Lahmar’s lawyer, Stephen H. Olesky, said.

Perhaps you consider me a heartless grotesque, but I have to admit that "my give-a-damn's busted" when it comes to these unlawful enemy combatants. They weep great crocodile tears at their harsh treatment... but how many tears do they weep for their victims? Those blown to bits by these men or the cause they serve are confined even more tightly: they're in six by four foot holes in the ground... that is, if their loved ones could find all the pieces.

None of these men has ever shown the least bit of remorse; yet their attorneys want us to feel so sorry for their plight that we let them have all their privileges back -- the same privileves that they used to attempt to murder the prison guards earlier.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, and I may as well become a Democrat.

I would add only one thing: along with Paul Mirengoff (I think it was he), I believe the next order issued should be that henceforth, no guard at Guantánamo Bay shall be allowed to use kid gloves when handling Korans. Doing so sends the message that even we Americans believe we're "unclean" and unfit to touch a holy book... that we're dhimmi.

From now on, I wish we would just toss the Koran onto the cell floor. If the inmate wants to pick it up and read it, or let it lie where it is, it's all the same to us.

It's far beyond time we teach the Gitmo detainees how it feels to be the weak horse again.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 20, 2006, at the time of 4:36 PM

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Tracked on December 22, 2006 8:32 AM

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