US ARMY SURRENDERS TO ENEMY, AGAIN

Well, first he's in the background, then he's in the front,
Both eyes are looking like they're on a rabbit hunt.
Nobody can see through him,
No, not even the Chief of Police.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
—Bob Dylan

We live in a political world
Where courage is a thing of the past
—Bob Dylan

WHILE THE PENTAGON DUMPS on Franklin Graham, here's a clarifying article from the Washington Times which shows us who's running the show nine years after the atrocities of September 11...

Since all of Guantanamo's inmates, mirabile dictu, happen to be members of the same famed band of Muslim extremists, the Army has seen fit to distribute Korans. So far, so good, I guess. But the Army doesn't just distribute its Korans like any other religious book. That is, the Bible may get passed around, rifled through, dropped, tossed and stuffed into hotel room drawers. But not the Koran. According to Army policy, the standard operating procedure is: "Handle the Koran as if it were a fragile piece of delicate art."

What's going on here? By official order, a whole lot of "respecting the dignity of the Koran." According to Section 6-5-c(3), should a Koran need to be removed from a detainee's cell—you know, carried somewhere—and the detainee is personally unable to move it (best option), and the Muslim chaplain, librarian and interpreter are also unable to move it (second-best option), then the U.S. Army guard, as a very last resort, may take action—but only "after approval by the DOC (who notes this in the DIMS)."

Then the insanity really begins. The guard is directed to don "clean gloves ... in full view of the detainees prior to handling." He must use "two hands ... at all times when handling the Koran in a manner signaling respect and reverence." Why "respect" alone isn't abundantly sufficient isn't mentioned. While signaling two-handed respect and reverence, however, the guard must be mindful that "care should be used so that the right hand is the primary one used to manipulate any part of the Koran due to the cultural association with the left hand."

It goes on. There's more "reverent manner," more instructions for conveying the book inside a "clean, dry detainee towel." The cockeyed picture is clear. But it doesn't explain what's going on.

At first glance, this scene may seem to exemplify a bizarre excess of good manners, an absurdly obsequious respect for a largely foreign faith. Since when does the United States specifically direct its soldiers to show two-handed "reverence" in the handling of any religious book? But it seems to me that there's more behind this charade. The "clean gloves" and "detainee" towels are the tip off. The fact is, under Islamic law, non-Muslims are deemed unfit to touch the Koran. That much is generally known. What is not usually considered is the reason: According to the Islamic law, we are unclean.

The term is "najis." On the multilingual Web site of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, the leading Iraqi Shi'ite cleric, there is a catalogue of Islamic laws (www.sistani.org). This includes a list of "najis things." There are 10, beginning with an assortment of excretions and body fluids—obvious stuff that really shouldn't need special mention. On the "najis" list with urine, feces, etc., are the pig, the dog and the "kafir." That means the Christian, the Jew, the unbeliever in Islam—and chances are, the Gitmo guard.

In effect, then, with its official policy of clean gloves and detainee towels, the military is promoting, enabling and accepting the Islamic concept of najis—the unclean infidel—a barbarous notion that has helped fuel the blood lust of jihad and the non-Muslim subjugation of dhimmitude. Our soldiers are many things: self-sacrificing, bold, loyal and true. They are not unclean.

Is this political correctness run amok? Not exactly. It's something else again, a new threat from within that needs vigilant redress. PC is about victimology, the elevation of perceived victim groups to the canonical pantheon. The Gitmo rules are more blatantly about surrender, a voluntary, self-extinguishment, a spreading condition of denial of what is right and worth standing for. Not what you expect from the United States Southern Command.

One doesn't have to be a Franklin Graham or even a Jesus Christ fanatic to recognize that this unfortunate move by the Pentagon only fuels the taqiyya-inspired oil-financed Islamic ascendancy increasingly marked by bolder and bolder encroachments into weakened kafir territories witnessed globally, territories crippled with jihad.

Mr. Graham is nobody's fool. We can applaud his unapologetic stance in choosing truth and love over submission to the duplicitous and wicked death cult as Islamic forces slither its power tentacles into every nook and cranny it seeks to paralyze, torture, and dominate with its sharia impulses...

What is the purpose of pretending that Christianity with all its faults is not diametrically opposed to Islam with all its faults. There's no reason to extrapolate here again what we can only interpret as pure evil, given the historical record, and as the History Channel puts it, history being made every day.

Muslims? Dunno. I'll take them as I find them, but with a strong dose of caution, not so much with a wink but with a scowl. Humans are the hardware. Ideology is the software, Evil gets its juice from many dark places? But in the case of the Religion of Peace, it's the ideology, stupid.

We don't have to return to the Inquisition days when bad acts were performed in the name of Christianity. The contrast between modern Christianity and Islam couldn't be more stark. Right now, this very day, tens of millions of Muslim women and young girls, and in some places, young boys, live in terror of the men of Islam.

Muslim females are subjected to unbelievable oppression while being treated as little more than chattel. Islam, as practiced every single day across the planet, sanctions female genital mutilation, honor killings, public flogging of women, and many more brutal, disgusting and degrading acts against women and children. All religiously and tribal sanctioned, without question for over 1400 years.

These terrifying acts against their own families and tribesmen are not anomalies. There is no freedom of choice, or protection by the law. This terror is the law, sharia law, the deeply ingrained by-product of a sick and perverted cult founded by a sick and perverted warlord from the seventh century.

The veracity of our time is the current struggle between Islam and the Western world where Judeo-Christian principles are dominant. All religions are not equal and are certainly not deserving of equal respect.

Our moral codes originated in religion. The Western world owes an immense debt of gratitude to the Judeo-Christian tenets which undergird our societies and way of life. Life is always a work in progress.

Look at how Muslim infiltration into Great Britain and France has divided those countries. Radical Islam must not be allowed to establish a beachhead in the United States. We should be comforted instead by the belief that most Americans would fight to the death to stop this madness disguised as the perfect religion called Islam. The election of Barack Obama and his shape shifting radical policies has placed our nation at the greatest peril we have faced to date as a free nation, bar none. May God be with us.

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don’t hate nothing at all
Except hatred

It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred
—Bob Dylan

You talk about day
I'm talking 'bout night time
When the monsters call out
The names of men
Bob Dylan knows
And I bet Alan Freed did
There are things in night
That are better not to behold
—Marc Bolan

RACHEL MADDOW NAILS OBAMA

THIS IS STUNNING NEWS. Election cycle Obama sycophant and MSNBC talking head Rachel Maddow has bolted from the herd in offering her poignant insights—the same poignant insights that many of us on the blogosphere have already declared as early as last August—about what the POTUS is now stealthily slipping into his record of hope and change with all this charming poetry his cult noisily adores. Unfortunately, what Ms. Maddow doesn't quite understand in her zeal to coddle the Guantanamo thugs is that Obama plans to execute this new presidential power against perceived personal enemies, which include lawful gun-owners, common cause right wingers, radicalized centrists, and hesitant liberals. Linking this plan to Guantanamo is pure technique. Bait and switch.

Maddow, along with her faithful sidekick Keith Obermann, of course, were vicious attack dogs for Barack Obama the candidate, and while I still don't think she sees the big picture—and one doubts she even cares, for her loyalty is to foreign nationals who threaten to strike with jihad against Americans, not loyal Americans—this critical analysis of Obama's latest wink and nod to the future he plans to dominate as the founder of prolonged detention earns Maddow a victory reprieve from me.

Props to Christopher Logan for this story...

OLD SCHOOL VALUES THAT WORK

Columnist Ralph Peters of the New York Post is Old School. Yes, DEFINITELY old school. But if we had more men minding the munitions depot today pumped with the same juice as men who led the American fighting forces as recent as a few generations ago, we would not have a worldwide terrorist problem, one keenly suspects. The world hasn't really changed, but the war equation has certainly become more complex.

WE MADE ONE GREAT MISTAKE regarding Guantanamo: No terrorist should have made it that far. All but a handful of those grotesquely romanticized prisoners should have been killed on the battlefield. The few kept alive for their intelligence value should have been interrogated secretly, then executed.

Terrorists don't have legal rights or human rights. By committing or abetting acts of terror against the innocent, they place themselves outside of humanity's borders. They must be hunted as man-killing animals. And, as a side benefit, dead terrorists don't pose legal quandaries.

Captured terrorists, on the other hand, are always a liability. Last week, President Obama revealed his utter failure to comprehend these butchers when he characterized Guantanamo as a terrorist recruiting tool.

Gitmo wasn't any such thing. Not the real Gitmo. The Guantanamo Obama believes in is a fiction of the global media. With rare, brief exceptions, Gitmo inmates have been treated far better than US citizens in our federal prisons.

But the reality of Gitmo was irrelevant—the left needed us to be evil, to "reveal" ourselves as the moral equivalent of the terrorists. So they made up their Gitmo myths.

Read it all.

IMPORTING TERRORISTS TO AMERICA

Old news, but American leadership is still are kicking around in the sandbox with its inconclusive parsing of this vital national security issue.

NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE DIRECTOR Dennis Blair said recently that some of the 240 prisoners who are still being held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base may be released into the civilian population in the United States. This bizarre news of course has started a firestorm across the country as the talking heads rush to interpret the official statement.

In a spurt of twisted logic Associated Press reports, "that this would only take place in the case of prisoners who are “deemed non-threatening” and yet whose “home countries…won’t take them.”

That leaves us reeling. If they’re “non-threatening,” why won’t their home countries allow them to come back?

Understand this in plain language. These enemy combatants will be released into a neighborhood near you if they are in danger of being tortured should they be sent back home. So it's not enough that we have American patriots being accused of torturing these same detainees by the disturbing Leftist radicals now in power, but the thought of the detainees possibly being tortured by their own governments is just too horrible to contemplate. But hey, they've got an idea. Let's punish the Republicans and send these jihadists into our own cities...

Spectacular logic. That's truly thinking outside the box. Generating some real change we can fear. Predictably, Blair offered up the typical humanitarian meme, following the British model, saying that the released prisoners would even receive welfare benefits, wincing, “We can’t just put them out on the street.”

Of course not. Unless, apparently, it’s Main Street USA.

We're expected to believe that Americans won’t really be in any danger. After all, the only detainees dispatched in this manner surely will be the “non-threatening” ones. The US government, we are assured, is building dossiers on each of the prisoners at Guantanamo.” Well then, silly goose, chin up, smiles and confidence blessing our hearts, we can all rest easy in our little brackish backwaters. Move along. Nothing of real concern to see here.

After all, if the government is compiling dossiers, what on God's Little Acre could ever go wrong? Now, a week or so later, the new official position is that most of the GITMO detainees would merely be relocated to maximum security prisons in the US, not our cozy little neighborhoods. Better than Plan A, or at least, more nuanced, but we might ask ourselves one question. No possibility of trouble in that scenario either, eh Hoss...

A perfectly good state of the art prison camp is Guantanamo Bay. Simple solution, nimrods. Keep it open.

Ain't politics grand?

Meanwhile, on the local front, only this morning did the Two-Fisted Quorum receive notice that Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) has been vocal in the House and has also introduced legislation aimed at keeping the terrorists out of his state:

As you may recall from recent newsletters, I have been making the case that trained terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay must not be released in the US. Over the last two weeks, I have spoken on the House floor six times challenging Attorney General Eric Holder to answer my questions about any pending decision to release 17 ethnic Chinese Muslims known as Uyghurs, in our area.  We have information that these detainees were trained at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and believed to be members of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement. I also have written several times to the attorney general and to President Obama about my concerns.

I offered an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2009 emergency supplemental appropriations bill that would have restricted the administration from moving any detainees until October 1, 2009, require 60 days notification to Congress before any move, and require approval from affected states before releasing or transferring detainees.  Although my amendment was defeated in committee on a party-line vote, much of my proposed amendment was ultimately included in the spending bill.  It is my firm belief that Congress and the American people deserve all the facts before any detainees are released or transferred to the US.

Thanks Congressman! That's change we can live with...

SOWELL SPEAKS CLEARLY ON TECHNIQUE

Syndicated columnist and economist Thomas Sowell shakes a few limbs of current uproar in the US concerning the CIA-sponsored waterboarding of certain GITMO detainees.

We at the Two-Fisted Quorum support the logic and the common sense Mr. Sowell displays here. The shameful loose thinking and outright hypocrisy on the Left continues to stifle a united American front against our enemies foreign and domestic.

As the columnist points out, perhaps one day the evidence for a strong conservative defense will be as requisite for victory as it was at other historical turning points, gut right now, the bitterness that separates Americans who even bother weighing in on this conflict is rather disappointing.

THERE IS A BIG DIFFERENCE between being ponderous and being serious. It is scary when the President of the United States is not being serious about matters of life and death, saying that there are "other ways" of getting information from terrorists.

Maybe this is a step up from the previous talking point that "torture" had not gotten any important information out of terrorists. Only after this had been shown to be a flat-out lie did Barack Obama shift his rhetoric to the lame assertion that unspecified "other ways" could have been used.

For a man whose whole life has been based on style rather than substance, on rhetoric rather than reality, perhaps nothing better could have been expected. But that the media and the public would have become so mesmerized by the Obama cult that they could not see through this to think of their own survival, or that of this nation, is truly a chilling thought.

When we look back at history, it is amazing what foolish and even childish things people said and did on the eve of a catastrophe about to consume them. In 1938, with Hitler preparing to unleash a war in which tens of millions of men, women and children would be slaughtered, the play that was the biggest hit on the Paris stage was a play about French and German reconciliation, and a French pacifist that year dedicated his book to Adolf Hitler.

When historians of the future look back on our era, what will they think of our time? Our media too squeamish to call murderous and sadistic terrorists anything worse than "militants" or "insurgents"? Our president going abroad to denigrate the country that elected him, pandering to feckless allies and outright enemies, and literally bowing to a foreign tyrant ruling a country from which most of the 9/11 terrorists came?

It is easy to make talking points about how Churchill did not torture German prisoners, even while London was being bombed. There was a very good reason for that: They were ordinary prisoners of war who were covered by the Geneva Convention and who didn't know anything that would keep London from being bombed.

Read it all.

OBAMA'S CAPITULATION TO THE LEFT

Dear Gabriel,

The column below by John Yoo, which appeared last Thursday in the Wall Street Journal, analyzes some of the decisions President Obama made in his first week as commander-in-chief. Taken together, these decisions, as Yoo notes, "will seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks."

For instance, interrogators of terrorist suspects will be so restrained in their tactics that they won't even be able to use "good cop/bad cop" techniques commonly used by police officers. In other words, interrogation tactics which have been legally used on our own citizens are, in Obama's new world order of fighting terrorism, too extreme to be used on terrorist suspects.

This absurdity would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous.

For the past few years Democrats assailed President Bush's foreign policies, arguing that they made us "less safe." Whatever one thinks of those policies, one incontrovertible fact remains: No terrorist attack was successfully executed in America on the President's watch after 9/11.

According to intelligence experts one reason is the coercive interrogation techniques used to extract information from terrorist suspects and enemy combatants. With those now effectively jettisoned from our arsenal of self-defense, President Obama has put the nation at greater risk.

Essay by John Woo

During his first week as commander in chief, President Barack Obama ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay and terminated the CIA's special authority to interrogate terrorists.

While these actions will certainly please his base—gone are the cries of an "imperial presidency"—they will also seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks. In issuing these executive orders, Mr. Obama is returning America to the failed law enforcement approach to fighting terrorism that prevailed before Sept. 11, 2001. He's also drying up the most valuable sources of intelligence on al Qaeda, which, according to CIA Director Michael Hayden, has come largely out of the tough interrogation of high-level operatives during the early years of the war.

The question Mr. Obama should have asked right after the inaugural parade was: What will happen after we capture the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Abu Zubaydah? Instead, he took action without a meeting of his full national security staff, and without a legal review of all the policy options available to meet the threats facing our country.

What such a review would have made clear is that the civilian law-enforcement system cannot prevent terrorist attacks. What is needed are the tools to gain vital intelligence, which is why, under President George W. Bush, the CIA could hold and interrogate high-value al Qaeda leaders. On the advice of his intelligence advisers, the president could have authorized coercive interrogation methods like those used by Israel and Great Britain in their antiterrorism campaigns. (He could even authorize waterboarding, which he did three times in the years after 9/11.)

Mr. Obama has also ordered that all military commission trials be stayed and that the case of Ali Saleh al-Marri, the only al Qaeda operative now held on U.S. soil, be reviewed. This seems a prelude to closing the military commissions down entirely and transferring the detainees' cases to U.S. civilian courts for prosecution under ordinary criminal law. Military commission trials have been used in most American wars, and their rules and procedures are designed around the need to protect intelligence sources and methods from revelation in open court.

It's also likely Mr. Obama will declare terrorists to be prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. The Bush administration classified terrorists—well supported by legal and historical precedent—like pirates, illegal combatants who do not fight on behalf of a nation and refuse to obey the laws of war.

The CIA must now conduct interrogations according to the rules of the Army Field Manual, which prohibits coercive techniques, threats and promises, and the good-cop bad-cop routines used in police stations throughout America. Mr. Obama has also ordered that al Qaeda leaders are to be protected from "outrages on personal dignity" and "humiliating and degrading treatment" in accord with the Geneva Conventions. His new order amounts to requiring—on penalty of prosecution—that CIA interrogators be polite. Coercive measures are unwisely banned with no exceptions, regardless of the danger confronting the country.

Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists. Every prisoner will have the right to a lawyer (which they will surely demand), the right to remain silent, and the right to a speedy trial.

The first thing any lawyer will do is tell his clients to shut up. The KSMs or Abu Zubaydahs of the future will respond to no verbal questioning or trickery—which is precisely why the Bush administration felt compelled to use more coercive measures in the first place. Our soldiers and agents in the field will have to run more risks as they must secure physical evidence at the point of capture and maintain a chain of custody that will stand up to the standards of a civilian court.

Relying on the civilian justice system not only robs us of the most effective intelligence tool to avert future attacks, it provides an opportunity for our enemies to obtain intelligence on us. If terrorists are now to be treated as ordinary criminals, their defense lawyers will insist that the government produce in open court all U.S. intelligence on their client along with the methods used by the CIA and NSA to get it. A defendant's constitutional right to demand the government's files often forces prosecutors to offer plea bargains to spies rather than risk disclosure of intelligence secrets.

Zacarias Moussaoui, the only member of the 9/11 cell arrested before the attack, turned his trial into a circus by making such demands. He was convicted after four years of pretrial wrangling only because he chose to plead guilty. Expect more of this, but with far more valuable intelligence at stake.

It is naive to say, as Mr. Obama did in his inaugural speech, that we can "reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." That high-flying rhetoric means that we must give al Qaeda—a hardened enemy committed to our destruction—the same rights as garden-variety criminals at the cost of losing critical intelligence about real, future threats.

Government policy choices are all about trade-offs, which cannot simply be wished away by rhetoric. Mr. Obama seems to have respected these realities in his hesitation to end the NSA's electronic surveillance programs, or to stop the use of predator drones to target individual al Qaeda leaders.

But in his decisions taken so precipitously just two days after the inauguration, Mr. Obama may have opened the door to further terrorist acts on U.S. soil by shattering some of the nation's most critical defenses.

Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting professor at Chapman Law School. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03 and is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

OBAMA'S MAN IN GITMO

IT'S FITTING THAT an ex-Muslim chaplain who once insisted there weren't any terrorists at Gitmo is a delegate for Barack Obama, who's itching to shut down Gitmo.

That Obama man is James "Yousef" Yee, a former Army Muslim chaplain charged with espionage while serving at Gitmo, who will represent Washington state for Obama at the Democratic National Convention, where he'll likely have a center-stage speaking role. The two are a perfect match. Obama promises to not only close Gitmo, but "reform" the USA Patriot Act. He apparently plans to take those steps in between tea parties with state sponsors of terror.

Since the Pentagon in 2004 dropped charges against him, Yee has become a poster boy of the anti-war movement. He's cashed in on his ignominy with a book claiming he was the target of "sheer bigotry" and was silenced for exposing "systemic" abuse of prisoners at Gitmo.

One of his biggest boosters in Washington is Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the Muslim convert who insisted on taking the oath of office on the Quran. Ellison is an Obama superdelegate who's been doing advance work for Obama's planned tea parties in the Middle East.

Last month, he told an Egyptian weekly that Yee's "case was dropped because there was no case to begin with."

Nice try. Here are the facts:

1. Yee was caught returning to the U.S. with maps of Gitmo prison facilities, among other classified materials, and was arrested at a U.S. airport.

2. He was charged with espionage, mishandling classified documents and lying to investigators.

3. He served hard time in a South Carolina stockade.

4. Two of his Muslim cronies at Gitmo were convicted of stealing or mishandling classified documents.

5. Far from being exonerated, the military dropped charges against him to protect national security.

Guantanamo commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who originally accused Yee of spying, explained that there were "national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence" if the case moved to trial.

There's no question that Yee, a captain who converted to Islam, was sympathetic to al-Qaida and Taliban captives at Gitmo. At times, in fact, he acted more like a defense attorney for the terrorists. He complained that guards subjected them to cruel "abuse" and "psychological torture."

Waterboarding? Electric shock? No, they committed the sadistic act of mishandling copies of the Quran that Yee had made sure each inmate received. He also saw to it that each copy of the Quran came with a surgical mask to cradle the Muslim holy book above ground to keep it safe and clean.

In addition, Yee convinced his superiors to provide the Muslim prisoners with prayer beads, prayer oils, prayer caps and up to half a dozen books on Islam from the library, which he stocked with some $26,000 worth of Arabic and English titles. Thanks to him, the terrorists have been able to brush up on their jihad as they await repatriation to Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Pakistan.

Read it all.

WARRIOR POETS, LORD BYRONS EACH OF THEM

"Poems From Guantanamo is a challenge for even overwhelmingly sympathetic reviewers," says online pundit Mark Steyn.

Well, I had occasion to pick up one of these books and browse through it just last weekend at Washington DC's ever so trendy Busboys & Poets diner and bookstore. The establishment is actually a hopping swell place to be, day or night, no matter what your take on world events, political dodge ball, or cheap but scrumptious food. Open mikes, poetry readings, diligent roundtables, sofa dining, locally-produced contemporary art on the walls, and extra friendly management all give dress up props to any controversy rolling in off the curb.

The book was thin, in hardcover, and driven with poems reeking of sentimental sour mash known to egg-eyed romanticists and incarcerated malcontents everywhere in a phenomenon generally known as the gnashing of teeth, in that former culturespeak now lost to multicultural scapegoating. Artistry? Perhaps. I can except these writings for what they are. I almost even laid out the sixteen bucks it would have cost me to walk out the door with those words. But I soon came to my senses when I leaned over to my wife with a whisper, "Yeah, well, you don't see any poems like these from coalition forces because they are all beheaded within days of their capture," and turned to put the book back on the shelf.

More from Mark Steyn...

The jacket of Poems From Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak shows a photograph by Paul J. Richards of Agence France-Presse: a close-up of the shackles that chain a man's ankles to the floor while he's being interrogated. But what rang a bell with me was the strip of carpet you can glimpse just above it. I visited Gitmo last fall—for Ramadan, as it happens—and, among other highlights, got to visit the interrogation room. The detainees are questioned while seated on a La-Z-Boy recliner or a sofa—blue plush with gold piping. I found this a sufficiently novel form of torture upholstery to ask the guard if he'd mind snapping a picture of me in the jihadist La-Z-Boy. It's sitting in a file at the Pentagon somewhere. But no doubt in 20 years' time I'll be running for public office and my opponent's oppo-research team will use it for an attack ad claiming I was a top al-Qaeda operative at the turn of the century.

There's no point debating Guantanamo anymore. Pretty much everyone's made up his mind. Some of us think the Americans have done the best they could given the unconventional nature of the enemy in this war (no uniforms, no serial numbers, all volunteers from many lands, including Canada). A much larger number of people think it's "the American gulag." Alain Grignard, who visited the camp on behalf of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, objects to the black hole of the detainees' legal status but declares that "it is a model prison, where people are better treated than in Belgian prisons." Still, there aren't many takers for that position. If you think the detainees shouldn't be there, you generally incline, as Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International U.K., does on the back of this book, to the view that the prisoners are pretty much routinely tortured.

So I mention the La-Z-Boy recliner not to make a political argument so much as an artistic one. Presumably when Paul J. Richards snapped his pic for Agence France-Presse, either the La-Z-Boy or the sofa was in the frame. But the Iowa University Press chose to crop the furniture out of the cover shot. Why? You can figure they'd have left it in if there'd been a rickety wooden chair under a bare lightbulb swinging on a frayed cord. But a book with a La-Z-Boy on the front doesn't exactly shriek "Death camp!"

When I was down there, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, who runs the joint, observed that most of what we know about prison camps comes from "bad movies and worse TV shows." And it's striking how reluctant the anti-Gitmo crowd are to abandon the clichés. There was a film out last year called The Road To Guantanamo, and the poster showed the usual emaciated husk hanging in chains from the dungeon wall. One trusts the actor in question did the full Robert De Niro and lost 40 lb. to get himself looking that cadaverous. Back in the real Gitmo, Admiral Harris invited me to sample some of the fresh-baked baklava his pastry chef had made the prisoners for Ramadan. They were truly scrumptious, but a week or two of those and the poster for The Road To Guantanamo would either be showing a dimpled blubbery bloated whale or the entire dungeon wall would have collapsed. It's the only death camp where you put on weight. Average gain: 18 pounds.

Read the entire article here.