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2006-09-16 Home Front: WoT
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War Inside the Wire: you can handle the truth about Guantanamo Bay.
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by James Taranto, Wall Street Journal
You might call Rear Adm. Harry Harris a jailer. As commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, a job he has held for six months, he is in charge of one of the world's best-known detention facilities. But if you call this place a prison, he will correct you.
"Prisons are about rehabilitation and punishment," Adm. Harris told me in a phone conversation last week, reiterating a point he had made a few days earlier in a briefing for visiting journalists here. "What we are about is keeping enemy combatants off the battlefield. . . . The enemy combatants that we have here were captured on the battlefield or running from the battlefield, and they were engaged in combat operations against Americans, and in many cases killed Americans. What we're trying to do here in Guantanamo is simply keep them off the battlefield, because we know that many of them would go back to the fight."
In fact, Adm. Harris says, many of them have kept fighting even while in captivity. They are carrying out coordinated actions with the apparent goals of disrupting the camp's operations, furthering anti-American propaganda, and wounding and intimidating the servicemen who guard them. . . .
. . . Before Camp 1 closed, three detainees there--two Saudis and a Yemeni--succeeded in killing themselves. On the morning of June 10, guards found the trio, all in the same cell block, hanged with clothing and bedsheets.
Domestic foes of the war on terror wasted no time in trying to co-opt the detainees' martyrdom for their own cause. Human Rights Watch claimed that the detainees had suffered from "incredible despair" because they had been "completely cut off from the world." The New York Times editorialized that the suicides were "the inevitable result of creating a netherworld of despair beyond the laws of civilized nations."
Adm. Harris had a different view. "I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us," he said at the time--and he stands by that statement. In response, the Times scolded the admiral for displaying "a profound disassociation from humanity."
His case is the stronger one. The proximity and simultaneity of the suicides argue that they were coordinated rather than spontaneous. Although some detainees suffer from mental illnesses, for which they receive treatment at the camp infirmary, there is no evidence that these three did. "They recently had been given . . . a psychiatric evaluation, and they were all fine," Adm. Harris tells me. It may be hard to comprehend the mentality of one who would kill himself to make a political statement, but to doubt that these men could do so is to test the limits of fatuity. After all, that is exactly what 19 of their comrades did five years ago Monday. . . .
Go read it all. 
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Posted by Mike 2006-09-16 08:54||
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