Saturday, December 16, 2006

The military wises up

From The New York Times:

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, Dec. 10 — As the first detainees began moving last week into Guantánamo’s modern, new detention facility, Camp 6, the military guard commander stood beneath the high, concrete walls of the compound, looking out on a fenced-in athletic yard.

The yard, where the detainees were to have played soccer and other sports, had been part of a plan to ease the conditions under which more than 400 men are imprisoned here, nearly all of them without having been charged. But that plan has changed.

“At this point, I just don’t see using that,” the guard commander, Col. Wade F. Dennis, said.

After two years in which the military sought to manage terrorism suspects at Guantánamo with incentives for good behavior, steady improvements in their living conditions and even dialogue with prison leaders, the authorities here have clamped down decisively in recent months.
Security procedures have been tightened. Group activities have been scaled back. With the retrofitting of Camp 6 and the near-emptying of another showcase camp for compliant prisoners, military officials said about three-fourths of the detainees would eventually be held in maximum-security cells. That is a stark departure from earlier plans to hold a similar number in medium-security units.


Officials said the shift reflected the military’s analysis — after a series of hunger strikes, a riot last May and three suicides by detainees in June — that earlier efforts to ease restrictions on the detainees had gone too far.

The commander of the Guantánamo task force, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., said the tougher approach also reflected the changing nature of the prison population, and his conviction that all of those now held here are dangerous men. “They’re all terrorists; they’re all enemy combatants,” Admiral Harris said in an interview.

He added, “I don’t think there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist.”

Everybody there who didn't need to be there has been sent elsewhere and the ones who are left are hard core Islamofascist terrorists who will always be ticking time bombs. As long as their minds remain reasonably clear they will be as threat. Even when 99 years-old they will be willing and eager to put a bomb under their wheelchair and roll into a shopping mall or hospital in order to blow up infidels.

These people can never be set free. The best way to deal with them would be to squeeze all the information out of them that we can and then shoot them. Failing the will to do that we need to lock them away in a maximum security dungeon and forget about them.

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