Ghost Prisons Or Club Med?
Publication: IBD; Date:2007 Mar 01; Section:Issues & Insights; Page Number: A12
War On Terror: According to the George Soros-funded Human Rights Watch, the CIA tortured terrorist detainees. But pizza, chocolate bars, movies, chess lessons and a well-stocked library make for strange torments.
President Bush was leveling with the American people in September when he said he couldn’t describe the interrogation methods used against captured terrorist suspects held by the CIA in foreign prisons.
“If I did,” he said, “it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.”
Despite the claims in Human Rights Watch’s new “Ghost Prisoner” report that U.S. interrogation methods “included torture and other cruel and inhumane treatment — and were anything but lawful,” the organization provides nothing to disprove the president’s words, and much to support them.
As Bush said last year, “Questioning the detainees in this program has given us information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks — here in the United States and across the world.”
Clearly, more than five years without a terrorist attack on the homeland is in large part due to the information obtained through this commendable wartime innovation. We can thank the Bush administration and the intelligence community for this: tough grilling of terrorist enablers in overseas locales, thus avoiding having the equivalent of an ACLU lawyer standing watch.
“Ghost” in the title of the group’s report is apt, considering the vaporous nature of what it presents as evidence of mistreatment. It focuses mainly on Marwan Ibrahim Ali al-Jabour, a 30-year-old alleged al-Qaida financier born in Jordan and raised in Saudi Arabia, who was held by the CIA for about two years.
Now free, al-Jabour has reportedly admitted to the Washington Post that he helped al-Qaida and Taliban militants who fled Afghanistan as U.S. forces were hunting down those involved in the 9/11 attacks.
Readers will find themselves more than two-thirds the way through the Washington Post’s story covering the HRW report, however, before discovering that al-Jabour “was threatened with physical abuse but was never beaten” by his U.S. captors.
He was apparently beaten by the Pakistanis who first captured him. And in U.S. custody, apparently in Afghanistan, he was at various times kept naked, shackled so he couldn’t sit or stand, blindfolded, yelled at by a female interrogator, injected with a drug that made him “groggy,” and subjected to loud music “like the soundtrack from a horror movie,” as well as 24-hour lighting in his cell.
Human Rights Watch itself reports, however, that he was also eventually provided with “a movie once a week.” The report notes: “The facility had a list of 200-250 films, including big-budget Hollywood films, documentaries, cartoons, sports, horror movies, and wrestling.” Al-Jabour also enjoyed exercise in “a large gymnastics room,” a weekly shower, pizza, Snickers, Twix and Kit-Kat bars, as well as “a watch, a calendar and a prayer schedule.”
One of his guards even “taught (al-)Jabour how to play chess” and “about four months before he left, he was given a computer chess set, and a small video game.” According to HRW, “(al-)Jabour spent much of his time reading. The prison had a big library with . . . by the time he left, more than a thousand books in a variety of languages. The majority were in Arabic, but there were also books in languages such as Urdu, Persian, Indonesian and English.”
After his first six months, he was given a cell that was “about 5 meters by 7 meters in size, with a mattress, a pillow, a sink, some books of Koranic interpretation, and some strawberries.”
Ask Motel 6 for strawberries sometime. All in all, it may be the best treatment of enemy prisoners in world history.
And, combined with tough, effective interrogation methods, it proves that the Bush administration is as committed to humane treatment of terrorist prisoners (which, frankly, is too good for them) as it is to winning the global war on terror. |
