I’m not convinced Anne Applebaum is correct regarding “the absence of any outside investigation into reports of prison abuse” at Gitmo, given the many known visits and political alignment of the Red Cross.
You also need to consider that our military is neither isolated from the news nor are they complete imbeciles (despite what Dick Durbin says).
I mean, if they are clever enough to torture jihadists under the nose of ICRC who claim it to be true anyway, don’t you think they’ve stopped by now?
This simply proves Applebaum is no apologist for the Bush administration.
Her commentary is worth a read. Amnesty’s Amnesia.
This bit from Jed Babbin, at the American Spectator, is also instructive about conditions in Gitmo:
We’re holding people there incommunicado? According to 1st Lt. Wade Brown, the chief mail man at Gitmo, every detainee at Gitmo, regardless of his conduct, is allowed mail privileges unless he can’t be trusted with a pen because he’s threatened to harm himself. Lt. Brown, in a sworn declaration dated March 17, 2005, said that from September 2004 through February 2005, 14,000 pieces of mail were sent or received by detainees at Gitmo.
Legal limbo? Some 800 suspected terrorists have, so far, been incarcerated at Gitmo. All of them have had their cases reviewed by military commissions. About 235 have been released, 61 are today awaiting release or transfer, and about 520 remain, having been given all the due process to which they are entitled by U.S. and international law, including the Geneva Conventions. They are enemy combatants. We are entitled to hold them until the war is over whether it’s tomorrow or in 2525