Saturday, December 22, 2007

Huckabee Deluded About Guantanamo Reality


I see a lot of folks starting to think positively about Huckabee based on his bible thumping performance in Iowa. Someone on my street even has his yard sign up already! But if he seriously thinks prisoners at Guantamo have it better than those in his own state prison, he is hardly capable of being president of this country!

During a campaign stop in Iowa today, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee commented on the conditions at the military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying that “the inmates there were getting a whole lot better treatment” than “prisoners in Arkansas.” “I hope our guys don’t see this,” added Huckabee. “They’ll all want to be transferred to Guanatanmo.”

“If anything, it’s too nice,” said Huckabee:

“The inmates there were getting a whole lot better treatment than my prisoners in Arkansas.

Huckabee may have seen “nice” conditions when he visited Guantanamo. But FBI agents who worked at the facility have reported that detainees were subjected to harsh conditions, including “the use of growling dogs” to “intimidate detainees,” at least as recently as 2004:

Detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were shackled to the floor in fetal positions for more than 24 hours at a time, left without food and water, and allowed to defecate on themselves, an FBI agent who said he witnessed such abuse reported in a memo to supervisors.

A recently released operations manual for the prison, dated March 28, 2003, “indicates that some prisoners were hidden from Red Cross representatives.” Presumably, such “no-access” detainees would have been hidden from visitors like Huckabee as well.

And aside from how they are physically treated, the larger fact remains that the U.S. is so unsure whether any of the prisoners have done anything wrong that it is afraid to bring charges against them in a U.S. court and has instead created the phoney baloney concept of "detainee" so they can be warehoused indefinitely without trial.

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