NYT's Shocking Guantanamo Editorial

The end of the world is upon us, perhaps not in an immediately apocalyptic sense, but the signs of the times are increasingly bizarre, and inexplicable things are happening. What else can explain the publication in today’s New York Times of a guest editorial singing the praises of the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention center? After years of misleading and shallowly researched stories by its own staff recounting alleged torture and prisoner abuse by the U.S. military at Guantanamo, The New York Times revealed a glimmer of journalistic integrity by deeming Colonel Morris Davis’s “The Guantanamo I Know” as “fit to print.” Capital Cloak frequently decries liberal bias in the media, but is also fair in reporting when liberal media outlets like the Times make any effort to present both sides of an issue. If only it would happen more often!

Air Force Col. Davis, the chief prosecutor for the Defense Department in military commissions, which have come under fire from war critics and Bush administration opponents, provided specific details of the amenities afforded to terrorists housed at the Guantanamo detention center. Consider the following privileges prisoners there enjoy, keeping in mind that they are terrorists captured in battle with our troops or known to have plotted and carried out attacks worldwide, and decide for yourselves whether the notorious concentration camp-like descriptions of Guantanamo recklessly spoken by Democrats and gladly reported by the liberal media match the reality of life for prisoners:

The makeshift detention center known as Camp X-Ray closed in early 2002 after just four months of use. Now it is overgrown with weeds and serves as home to iguanas. Yet last week ABC News published a photo online of Camp X-Ray as if it were in use, five years after its closing.

Today, most of the detainees are housed in new buildings modeled after civilian prisons in Indiana and Michigan. Detainees receive three culturally appropriate meals a day. Each has a copy of the Koran. Guards maintain respectful silence during Islam’s five daily prayer periods, and medical care is provided by the same practitioners who treat American service members. Detainees are offered at least two hours of outdoor recreation each day, double that allowed inmates, including convicted terrorists, at the “supermax” federal penitentiary in Florence, Colo.

Standards at Guantánamo rival or exceed those at similar institutions in the United States and abroad. After an inspection by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in March 2006, a Belgian police official said, “At the level of detention facilities, it is a model prison, where people are better treated than in Belgian prisons.”

Critics liken Guantánamo Bay to Soviet gulags, but reality does not match their hyperbole. The supporters of David Hicks, the detainee popularly known as the “Australian Taliban,” asserted that Mr. Hicks was mistreated and wasting away. But at his March trial, where he pleaded guilty to providing material support to a terrorist organization, he and his defense team stipulated he was treated properly. Mr. Hicks even thanked service members, and as one Australian newspaper columnist noted, he appeared in court “looking fat, healthy and tanned, and cracking jokes.”

Given the descriptions offered by Col. Davis and from the firsthand accounts I have been privy to, it would seem that terrorists captured in Iraq and Afghanistan and held in Guantanamo enjoy far better living standards and hygienic conditions than media darling Paris Hilton recently experienced in Los Angeles County jail facilities. Where were the calls from the liberal media to close down the L.A. County jails for their inhumanity? Where were the arguments that America is losing its moral high ground through its substandard prison facilities for convicted celebrities? Celebrities should be outraged that terrorists receive better treatment at Guantanamo!

Col. Davis performed a further act of educational service for liberals who insist that military commissions do not comply with Geneva Convention articles. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration did its homework on the legalities of the powers of a commander in chief and came to the appropriate conclusion that military commissions do in fact provide all of the fundamental guarantees of Article 75 of the Geneva Convention Protocol:

Each accused receives a copy of the charges in his native language; outside influence on witnesses and trial participants is prohibited; the accused may challenge members of the commission; an accused may represent himself or have assistance of counsel; he is presumed innocent until guilt is established beyond a reasonable doubt; he is entitled to assistance to secure evidence on his behalf; he is not required to incriminate himself at trial and his silence is not held against him; he may not be tried a second time for the same offense; and he is entitled to the assistance of counsel through four stages of post-trial appellate review ending at the United States Supreme Court.

One myth is that the accused can be excluded from his trial and convicted on secret evidence. The administrative boards that determine if a detainee is an enemy combatant and whether he is a continuing threat may consider classified information in closed hearings outside the presence of the detainee. But military commissions may not. The act states, “The accused shall be permitted ... to examine and respond to evidence admitted against him on the issue of guilt or innocence and for sentencing.” Unless the accused chooses to skip his trial or is removed for disruptive behavior, he has the right to be present and to confront all of the evidence.

Despite all of these legal protections, none of which are offered to U.S. troops who have the misfortune of falling into terrorist hands, critics of Guantanamo have continued to argue that military commissions are unfair because hearsay evidence is permitted and considered for or against the defendant. U.S. criminal courts, where liberals apparently feel more comfortable about prosecuting terrorists, do not allow hearsay testimony. Col. Davis exposed the fallacy of this argument over the unfairness of military commissions and hearsay testimony by reminding critics of the following point:

…While this standard permits admission of some evidence that would not be admissible in federal courts, the rights afforded Americans are not the benchmark for assessing rights afforded enemy combatants in military tribunals.

There is no ban on hearsay among the indispensable rights listed in the Geneva Conventions. Nor is there a ban on hearsay for the United Nations-sanctioned war crimes tribunals, including the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Nuremberg trials also did not limit hearsay evidence. Simply stated, a ban on hearsay is not an internationally recognized judicial guarantee.

While Democrats, anti-war demonstrators, and the eager liberal media pummel the Bush administration for allegedly denying captured enemy combatants due process under Geneva Protocols at Guantanamo, they either ignorantly or intentionally disregard the fact that their sacred Geneva Protocols have been complied with in full and the prisoner facilities are superior in all respects to the standards of prisons anywhere in the world. Col. Davis’s guest editorial proved once again that when it comes to the ridiculous accusations from the left that President Bush and Vice President Cheney committed alleged “war crimes” related to treatment of enemy combatants in the War on Terror, there is plenty of hysteria but no substance.

Congratulations to the New York Times for doing, in this case at least, its job by publishing a conservative rebuttal to 4 years of misleading and inaccurate liberal reports of conditions at Guantanamo. Perhaps the Times will now run a series of editorials in which it will seek to repair the damage it has done to worldwide opinion of President Bush’s integrity on this issue after relentlessly impugning it for years. I won’t hold my breath for that to happen. That truly would be a sign that the end is near.

Technorati Tags:Guantanamo, Prisoner Treatment, Military Commissions, Geneva Convention, Bush Administration, Torture, Hearsay, Enemy Combatants

Post Editors and Columnist Absolute on Immorality of Torture: But What Would President Applebaum Do?

Apparently the only moral issue that liberals treat as an absolute is the faux-noble assertion that torture is always wrong, regardless of who is being tortured, or why. Today’s Washington Post editorial “Top-Secret Torture” meshes seamlessly with Post columnist Anne Applebaum’s commentary, “Tortured Credibility” to form a forked-tongued hiss against the Bush administration for allegedly torturing confessed terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Both pieces asserted that the alleged use of torture had destroyed America’s credibility in the war on terror. The Post’s editors and columnist, relying on the military tribunal testimony of Mohammed, accepted at face value Mohammed’s accusations of torture in “secret CIA prisons”, and interpreted the fact that the Bush administration was debating the legality and merits of torture immediately prior to the capture of Mohammed in 2003 as concrete evidence that torture had actually been performed. In essence, if the administration openly debated the issue, it must have done so out of guilt for current and future applications of torture.
On that flimsy premise, the Post’s editors sink their fangs into America’s interrogation methods as it related to terrorists captured in Afghanistan and Iraq:

Yet some of the harshest action taken against Mr. Mohammed has already been widely reported: He was treated to "waterboarding," or simulated drowning, an ancient torture method that every U.S. administration prior to this one has considered illegal. CIA detainees are also known to have been subjected to temperature extremes and sleep deprivation.

The Post editorial sanctimoniously declared that all previous U.S. administrations had considered “waterboarding” to be illegal, but typically failed to place such an accusation in historical context. Conveniently omitted was the fact that only one U.S. administration prior to the current one had experienced an attack on U.S. soil by Islamic terrorists: The Clinton administration and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. After that incident, terrorists were tracked down by law enforcement, jailed, tried, convicted, and sentenced. The perpetrators of that attack remain incarcerated and will continue to be for multiple life terms. What was the result of that “humane and dignified” counterterrorism legal approach? It encouraged al Qaeda and other groups to conclude that they had nothing to fear from our legal proceedings and ponderously slow law enforcement investigations. They continued planning and executing more spectacular attacks, including the bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the Khobar Towers, the Bombing of the USS Cole, and ultimately 9/11.

The fact that the Bush administration was, gasp, “debating the merits of torture,” demonstrates only that the administration was doing its job by exploring all options, not immediately taking any choices off of the table simply because the international community might find them distasteful. Comparatively, the civilized world would prefer that we never utilize a nuclear weapon in combat, but we won’t be beating those proverbial swords into plowshares anytime soon. There are no Geneva Convention rules that apply to international terrorists like al Qaeda that recruit and operate in a multitude of nations, wearing no uniform and fighting under no recognized governmental flag. Prisoner of war status, let alone full American legal rights, should not be afforded these opportunistic killers. They are fighting for an extremist religious creed, not a nation.

A credible commander in chief never rejects outright any options available to him or her in the defense of the nation, and it is liberal peacenik utopianism to declare, as Applebaum did, that torture:

. . . is not merely immoral. . . it is also ineffective and in fact profoundly counterproductive: There is no proof that it produces better information but plenty of evidence that it has discredited the United States.

Applebaum is not privy to the classified interrogation reports generated during terrorist detainee interviews, and thus has no real knowledge of whether interrogation or “torture” tactics are implemented. Likewise, she is in no position to judge whether the information thus gleaned is better than intelligence obtained through criminal prosecutions or Geneva Convention compliant prisoner of war “interviews”. Since the intelligence gathered from Mohammed and other detainees, regardless of the methods used to obtain it, will remain classified for two more decades, it is reckless to make absolutist blanket statements now about the efficacy of intense interrogation or even actual torture in the War on Terror.

The frequent and injudicious use of torture is distasteful to everyone, including those who may be asked to perform it. However, if liberals continue to insist that torture is always wrong and should never be utilized, they may eventually come to rue the day they had an opportunity to discover and prevent a catastrophic attack but could not stomach the method that would have exposed the plot.

It is quite a simple exercise to think up a scenario in which the resolute morality of the anti-torture absolutists would face its ultimate challenge. Imagine that U.S. President Anne Applebaum, who was elected on a platform promising an end to the Iraq War and condemnation of torture as immoral and ineffective, is reading to children at an elementary school in Washington, DC one late summer morning. As she reads, her Chief of Staff whispers in her ear that the FBI, following a tip from a concerned Muslim-American, has captured a known terrorist who appears to be suffering from severe radiation poisoning in his apartment in Alexandria, VA.

The Chief of Staff further whispers that the terrorist has admitted to planting an armed, timed-detonation nuclear device inside the District of Columbia, but refuses to reveal where the device has been placed. The Chief of Staff concludes with the words, “He told the FBI the device would detonate in 2 hours. We cannot evacuate the city in that time, Madame President.” President Applebaum politely excuses herself without alarming the children, and moves to a holding room where she can confer with her advisers.

The CIA director advises President Applebaum that the terrorist in custody was previously imprisoned by the Russians during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The CIA Director further advises that Russian intelligence received much useful information on Mujahideen movements from this terrorist because he displayed only moderate resistance to torture. Russian intelligence operatives had found “waterboarding” to be the single most effective method for extracting information from this individual now in FBI custody, usually requiring no more than 1 hour of the procedure before he broke.

The FBI Director reminds President Applebaum that the terrorist knows where the device is and how to disarm it, but laughs and shouts “Death to the Great Satan” when asked to reveal where the bomb is located. No one in the room wishes to be responsible for recommending it, but the question hanging in the air, to be answered only by President Applebaum, is, “Should we ‘waterboard’ this terrorist, find the bomb, and save Washington, or would that be immoral, further discrediting the United States in the eyes of the world?”

The Washington Post editorial and Applebaum’s column would indicate that the writers have not given sufficient consideration to the ramifications of declaring torture as an intelligence tool to be immoral and universally insisting that it should never be used. Sound advice in time of war would be to keep all available arrows in the quiver, no matter ho unattractive, sharp and prepared for flight. Moral absolutism as it applies to torture is convenient and noble in peacetime, but when potential death for millions hangs in the balance, as in the above hypothetical scenario, international opinion should not dictate what tools a U.S. president should utilize to “provide for the common defense” of the nation.