SeekerBlog

Heather Mac Donald, Manhattan Institute fellow, wrote this
analysis for National
Review. Mac Donald is almost always on-point. She also writes for one
of my top-three journals, the quarterly City
Journal.

You gotta admire the liberal media’s modesty. For the last three years,
it has been promoting the story that the Bush administration has a policy
of torturing terror detainees. Now, such mouthpieces of the anti-administration
Left as the New York Times are calling for the closure of the Guantanamo
Bay detention facility on the ground that its reputation for prisoner abuse
is jeopardizing the war on terror. Take some credit, guys! It may be true
that Guantanamo Bay has become synonymous with lawlessness throughout vast
swathes of the Western and Muslim worlds. But no one is more responsible
for that reputation than the New York Times, Newsweek, the Washington Post,
and other mainstream media outlets, which have never encountered a prisoner-abuse
story that they didn’t find credible and worthy of broadcast.

This recent campaign for shuttering Guantanamo, which has been joined by
former president Jimmy Carter and Senator Joe Biden, began with a column
by New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman on May 27, “Just Shut It Down.” Friedman
claimed that it was “obvious” that the “abuse at Guantanamo
and with the whole U.S. military prison system . . . is out of control.” His
evidence? Headlines in Western newspapers about abuse and the claim that “over
100 detainees have died in U.S. custody.” “How is it that” such
deaths occurred? he asks sarcastically. “Heart attacks?”

Well, no, most of those deaths were in military self-defense or were accidental,
and most occurred at the point of capture — razor close to the heat of
battle, if technically considered “in detention.” I don’t
know where Friedman comes up with his “over 100” number. As of
March 16, the Army was reporting 68 detainee deaths. Of those, 24 were confirmed
or suspected criminal homicides, but again, a full 15 of those homicides occurred
at point of capture in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do 24 criminal homicides out of
the over 50,000 detainees taken as of September 2004 represent a criminal abuse
of power? How many enemy soldiers died at the hands of their captors in previous
wars? What proportion of al Qaeda captives survive detention? Friedman doesn’t
bother to ask.

Friedman also cites a headline in the May 8 London Observer: “An American
Soldier has revealed shocking new details of abuse and sexual torture of prisoners
at Guantanamo Bay” in proof of the rampant violence against Muslim detainees.
The reference is to Inside the Wire by Eric Saar, an Army sergeant who worked
as a translator at Guantanamo for six months. The centerpiece of the book is
Saar’s one story of prisoner abuse, already much recounted: A female
interrogator makes sexual advances to a resistant detainee in the hope of “separating
him from his God” and getting him to talk. Never revealed in the media
reports on the book, nor indeed in Saar’s own interviews on the subject,
is that the culmination of the female interrogator’s gambit — pretending
to smear menstrual blood (in fact red ink) on the detainee — was suggested
by a devout Muslim linguist working at Guantanamo at the time. So much for
uniquely American disrespect for Muslim customs.

Also left out of the reporting on the incident is that the interrogator
was disciplined for a patent violation of interrogation rules. Nor did The
Observer and its confreres in the media run a story off of Saar’s book with the
headline: "An American Soldier has revealed shocking new details of terrorist
intentions at Guantanamo Bay." The following exchange between Saar and
detainee Mustapha, with whom Saar had been conducting long heartfelt conversations
about religion, rather calls out for attention, however. Saar, showing a reverse
Stockholm syndrome, had asked the Syrian Mustapha for Mustapha’s opinion
of him. Mustapha replies coolly: "You are not how I thought an American
man or soldier would be. You believe in God and you love your family. In
a way I respect you. But . . . you are not a Muslim. In fact, you are an
enemy of the true God. If I were not in this cell I would have to kill you."

…

When the administration asserts that it has never had a policy of abuse — when
it asserts that the assaults at Abu Ghraib were the result of criminal guards
acting wholly in violation of prison rules — the liberal media and left-wing
advocacy groups are sure they are hearing a lie. Too bad they don’t
bring such skepticism to reports of abuse by prisoners who have been trained
to exploit American human-rights concerns and who know that the only place
in the world where such allegations will be seriously worried over and investigated
is in the land of the infidel.