June 15, 2005

Those Poor, Downtrodden Gitmo Detainees

My heart just bleeds for these guys. Held in our all-American gulag, being questioned about terrorist activities, not allowed to go back to the Middle East in order to kill innocent civilians and coaltion soldiers...yes, it's a tear jerker with Hollywood-like proportions.

These guys are thugs. But you won't hear that from the hate-America left or the MSM (some say those two terms are interchangable).

Take the case of Louis Pepe and Mamdouh Mahmud Salim. According to Jonah Goldberg's column today,

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.

And this was before 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq. No, Salim wasn't being held at Guantanamo. But this is the kind of beast the guards deal with at Guantanamo on a daily basis. And Louis Pepe...who's worrying about his violated rights? Has Amnesty International called him and his family with condolences or advice?

How about this from the Washington Times. A sharpened metal object was found in a prisoner's cell at Guantanamo Bay while he was taking a bath elsewhere. (I wonder how many baths the soldiers get?) While the prisoner was being moved in order to search the cell more thoroughly,

"He was extremely aggressive from the moment we went in," said the 28-year-old guard, whose job it was to "push the detainee back" as another guard quickly handcuffed the prisoner.

Before the cuffs could go on though, things went wrong and the detainee forced his hands up under the first guard's plexiglass face mask and began digging for the eyeball.

"He tried to insert one finger into my eye socket, then he transitioned into a fishhook maneuver," the guard said. "He got his finger into my mouth and was trying to rip my cheek off." After another moment, the detainee's hands were forced down and into the cuffs.

Yeah, these guys are just misunderstood souls. How dare we try to get information from them by depriving them of sleep, playing obnoxious music or forcing them to bark like dogs? Gosh, you'd think we were electrocuting their private parts or passing them live through plastic shredders. (Oh, was that done already? Saddam Hussein, you say?)

To sing the tired refrain, we can't just do whatever we'd like to these guys. There are rules, and they are followed. Those soldiers who are found breaking them are punished...the military's kind of funny about following regulations. But whatever information we can get out of the detainees by a little humiliation, by a few sleepless nights, by a little warbling from Christina Aguilera...I'm all for it.

The alternative is to let these guys back out...and for them to rejoin al-Quaeda and other terrorist forces, killing American and coalition soldiers, and any innocent bystanders who happen to be in their way.

Or a prison guard just doing his job like Louis Pepe.

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