The National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy was the lead Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Landmark Bombings plot and first World Trade Center attack prosecutions. He writes this morning:
A much-anticipated report laments that prisoners “live under conditions, rules, and policies designed” for “incorrigibly violent” detainees. The security controls were found to be “extraordinary,” employing “isolation and lack of in-cell as well as out-of-cell programs and activities.” Even allowing that these measures were in fact designed for some of the most savage of killers, the report nonetheless asserted that the strictures imposed were “pointlessly harsh and degrading.” They included “extreme” measures such as “lack of windows, denial of reading material, a maximum of three hours a week out-of-cell time, [and] lack of outdoor recreation.”
In sum, the report concluded, the detention conditions imposed by the United States government “can only be explained as reflecting an unwillingness to acknowledge the inmates’ basic humanity.”
In short, the federal penitentiary at Florence, Colo., is no Guantanamo Bay.
On the contrary, Gitmo — despite being repeatedly condemned as a blight on America’s reputation by the Obama campaign, congressional Democrats, alleged human-rights activists, European solons, and the legion of lawyers who’ve volunteered their services to al-Qaeda — is a model facility. According to a Pentagon investigation to be presented at the White House this week — a study ordered with great fanfare by Barack Obama in the first hours of his presidency — the detention camp, where about 245 alien enemy combatants are held, is in full compliance with the humane-treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions.
The Human Rights Watch report cited above was a study of conditions in American civilian prisons, including those maintained by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Specifically, it addresses “supermax” prisons, such as the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Colorado. In these prisons, the government houses convicted terrorists alongside some 20,000 of the most violent offenders in U.S. custody — many of whom are Americans, not foreign jihadists.
The HRW report was completed in February 2000, in the last days of pre-9/11 obliviousness. That fact should remind us of the danger we invite by allowing transnational progressives to define our national-security priorities — as the Left has been allowed to do with Gitmo.
It seems like ancient history but, since history is repeating itself, it’s worth revisiting: Before nearly 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on September 11, 2001, the great progressive crusade was against American incarceration practices. Putting criminals in jail and keeping them there for appropriate periods of time was the 1980s course-correction that led to dramatic declines in crime rates, which had skyrocketed after the criminal-rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.
The success of these reforms led to predictable caterwauling on the Left about root causes and rehabilitation, and to the claim that imprisonment causes more crime (in much the same way that we’re today told that defending ourselves against terrorists causes terrorism). This campaign against our effective anti-crime policies often took the form of maddening stories in the New York Times, which frequently and hilariously puzzled over the supposed paradox that crime rates had plummeted “and yet” prison populations were still high. The anti-incarceration campaign also was conducted through studies such as the HRW report, which posited that supermax prisons violated U.S. treaty obligations, that prison authorities were failing to “respect the inherent dignity of each inmate,” and that they were subjecting “prisoners to treatment that constitutes torture or that is cruel, inhuman, or degrading” — that they were, in short, operating prisons “in ways that violate basic human rights.”
It sounds familiar because, following 9/11, this litany was repackaged as the case against Gitmo … READ THE REST
I differ with McCarthy a bit; the extreme left’s lawyers could be satisfied. Yet they would only be satisfied if President Obama made a truce with the Taliban, Congress formally declared the WOT over, the DOJ released all the detainees with pardons and restitution, the Treasury paid their lawyers handsomely, and A.N.S.W.E.R got to perp-walk (in hood, orange jumpsuit, and shackles) the entire national security related G.W. Bush team on to the planes with those last 245 for al Qaeda to take home and play with.
That what we’ve come to, this nation divided and having forgotten the real enemy still out there and coming.
