Thanks for reader David Towle, I decided to reprint an article I published in this month’s American Legion magazine entitled “None Dare Call Them Prisoners.”

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — Military officers here are forbidden to use the word “prisoner,” when describing the 440 terrorists housed here. (The preferred term is “detainee.”) But they talk about them constantly.

A favorite story: A detainee, who lost a leg fighting American forces in Afghanistan, was given a prosthetic leg. Now he is back in Gitmo’s base hospital – he broke his good ankle playing soccer.

This detainee tale, usually told with a chuckle by uniformed officers, sums up America’s absurd and politically correct exercise in terrorist detention.
There is little doubt this strange tale is true. Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris, Jr., who commands the joint task force that guards and interrogates the Gitmo detainees, confirmed it to me.

The military seems to like this story because it thinks it shows its good side. Look, free medical care! Soccer fields! Fun in the sun for hardened terrorists! See how we care! Our critics couldn’t be more wrong!

It also reveals something far more troubling. It reveals what happens when a president and his staff listen too closely to critics who have quietly lost their minds. Some have compared Guantanamo to the Soviet Gulag, others to Nazi Germany. Even a brief visit to Gitmo reveals how delusional some critics can be. Hint: The Gulag didn’t provide soccer fields and free dental care and concentration camp survivors did not gain so much weight that the Nazis had to treat them for diabetes.

Indeed, it sometimes seems that those compassionate conservatives in the White House have also lost their minds. Striking the balance between humane treatment for detainees and foreknowledge of deadly attacks to save Americans lives is difficult, but the Bush administration seems to lean too far in the direction of the detainees. That means that America might not be learning all that it could about future attacks – and thereby risking lives. When the nation is at war, shouldn’t the presumption tilt toward saving lives?

No reasonable person could say that these detainees are mistreated – let alone tortured. Detainees are entitled to bottled water anytime that they request it, day or night. Detainees are entitled to a full eight hours sleep and can’t be woken up for any reason, except fire. They enjoy three meals and five prayers per day, without interruption. They are entitled to a minimum of two hours of outdoor recreation per day (some get as many as 12 outdoor hours per day.) Forget convicts, these detainees live better than many working Americans.

Respect for the detainees religious rites could not be stronger. The caged terrorists hear the call to prayer five times per day. In a model cell I was shown, there was the Koran dangling from the bars inside a surgical mask. The military issues the Koran in 11 languages. When I asked if I could pick up at the Koran (I wanted to verify that it was too big to fit down the cell’s toilet), the guard told me I was forbidden to touch it. Why? He explained that non-Muslims are may never to touch Islam’s holy book. Funny, I didn’t know that Islam was now the established religion of the United States.

Of course, the American taxpayer generously pays Muslim chaplains to minister to the detainees. Orange pylons are placed in cell block halls to prevent guard from accidentally disturbing the Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners at prayer.

Finally, while the detainees hear the call to prayer five times per day, they objected to hearing the “Star-Spangled Banner” over the camp loud speakers, as has become traditional at sundown on America’s Cuban base. So the military brass agreed to turn it down. Another al Qaeda victory.

Food is strictly halal. (The guards eat the same chow as the detainees, unless they venture to one of the on-base fast-food joints.) Detainees have a choice of four halal meals (the Islamic version of kosher): standard, vegetarian, vegetarian with fish, and bland for those with digestive issues. A typical detainee meal, which I consumed at Gitmo, consists of rice, chicken, pita bread, a Arabic-style salad, Yoplait yogurt (mountain blueberry in my case), two juice boxes of Fruit Blasters brand orange juice, and a whole orange. I couldn’t eat it all, but somehow they do.

This diet amounts to some 4,200 calories per day. On this meal plan, one detainee, who arrived at Gitmo weighing some 225 lbs, ballooned up to 405 lbs. Gitmo medical personnel say that the average body-mass index has swelled from 23.3 to 26.4, from skinny to moderately obese. Weight gain is becoming major problem, a camp doctor admitted, adding that he is already treating a number of detainees for diabetes.

No expense spared for al Qaeda health care: Some 5,000 dental operations (including teeth cleanings) and 5,000 vaccinations on a total of 550 detainees have been performed since 2002 – all at taxpayer expense. Eyeglasses? 174 pairs handed out. Twenty two detainees have taxpayer-paid prosthetic limbs, mostly legs. Even depressed al Qaeda operating are prescribed prozac and so on.

What if a detainee confesses a weakness (like fear of the dark) to a doctor that might be useful to interrogators? I asked the doctor in charge: Would he share that information with them? “My job is not to make interrogations more efficient,” he said firmly. He cited doctor-patient privacy. (He also asked that his name not be printed, citing the potential for al Qaeda retaliation.) Like the lawyers we will meet later, he seemed to put his professional ethics ahead of national security. Given that the doctor is an American soldier, this is pretty misguided.

Interrogations are limited to four hours and usually last two hours. Yes, they are interrupted for prayers. A detainee can end an interrogation at any time. Interrogations are not video or audio taped, perhaps to preserve detainee privacy. It is forbidden to threaten one in any way. His food, water and Koran can never be taken away. All the military can do is take away his toothbrush and other “comfort items.”

The only tool left to interrogators is bribery. Of course, this means little to them – they didn’t use toothbrushes in Afghanistan. One interrogator actually bakes cookies for detainees, while another serves them Subway or McDonald’s sandwiches. Both are available on base. (Filet o’ Fish is an al Qaeda favorite.) No one seems to notice the “treat” offered to al Qaeda is non-Halal…

A multi-cell al Qaeda network has emerged in the camp, Admiral Harris admitted to me. Military intelligence can’t yet identify their leaders, but notes that they have cells for monitoring the movements and identities of guards and doctors, cells dedicated to training, recruiting, planning for making weapons and so on.
And they can make weapons from almost anything. Guards have been attacked with springs taken from inside sink faucets, broken fluorescent light bulbs and fan blades. Some are more elaborate. “These folks are MacGyver’s,” Harris said.

Accidentally or not, American lawyers are helping al Qaeda prisoners continue to plot.

Some 1,000 lawyers represent 440 prisoners which translates to almost 2.3 lawyers per detainee, all on a pro bono basis, and some of them toil away in the nation’s largest law firms. These attorneys sent more than 18,500 letters into Gitmo to their clients in the past year. Detainees use the envelopes sent to them by their attorneys to pass messages. Guards are not allowed to look inside these envelopes because of “attorney-client privilege” – even if they know the document inside is an Arabic-language note written by a prisoner and not a legal letter. So terrorists pass notes with impurity.

When I asked an intelligence officer if the lawyers were asked if they could simply staple their letters shut instead of using envelopes, he said such proposals were rebuffed. They could use envelopes to contact their criminal clients in America; they couldn’t see why their clients at Gitmo were deserved special treatment.

There is little doubt what this note-passing and weapons-making is used for. The military recorded 3,232 incidents of detainee misconduct from July 2005 to August 2006 — an average of 8.8 incidents per day. These include 432 bodily fluid assaults (urine, feces, or a mixture of the two), 227 physical assaults, 99 food or water assaults, and 90 other physical assaults, such as stabbings.

One detainee slashed a doctor who was trying to save his life; now the doctors must wear body armor to treat their patients.

The “Manchester Document,” an al Qaeda training manual found in the United Kingdom in 2000, spells out what “the brothers” should do if they are imprisoned by a Western government. The short version: lie about torture and mistreatment, constantly assert their innocence and use every legal loophole to tie the enemy (us) in knots. Does anyone doubt that al Qaeda has followed its playbook?

As of August 31, 2006, there had not been a new arrival in Gitmo in 2 years. But this is about to change. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9-11 attacks, and the 11-odd terrorists will be transferred there soon. This may be the start of a trend. The Bush Administration seems to be determined to give all al Qaeda terrorists a shot at legal tribunals.

Are we concerned that some detainees may be “innocent”? You can rest easy. Most were captured on the battlefield, gun in hand. They are innocent only in the legal sense that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. A small warehouse in Gitmo houses what intel types call “pocket litter” – a term that includes every thing that a detainee had in his hands or on his person at the moment of capture. One admitted al Qaeda financier, who said he moved some $168 million for the terror network over the years, was captured with more than $500,000 in cash, in various currencies. Another was captured with bin Laden’s personal satellite phone. Many were captured with notebooks containing bomb-making recipes. And so on. 20 detainees have direct personal knowledge of the 9-11 attacks, and nearly all praise the atrocity. At least 20 detainees released from Gitmo have been killed or re-captured fighting allied forces.

Do you suspect that the information that the detainee passes is stale? Think again.

Abu Musab Ubaydah al Masri, an al Qaeda Chief in the Kunar province of Afghanistan, was captured November 6, 2005, in Pakistan, based on information obtained from three Saudi detainees in Gitmo, according to Admiral Harris. They even guided a police sketch artist to draw his face.

Much has been written about the elaborate and unprecedented appeals process. Detainees have their cases reviewed once a year and get rights roughly equivalent to criminals held in domestic prisons. I asked a military legal adviser: In what previous war were captured enemy combatants eligible for review before the war ended? None, he said.

There is no solitary confinement at Gitmo. A detainee can and do talk freely to each other in other cells, even in the maximum security camp. When I asked a guard about this, his response was priceless and typical: “We can’t stop people from talking. It is inhumane.”

As the cased terrorists chatted freely around us, I looked at the young MP and thought “Even if they are plotting your death?”

Richard Miniter (richardminiter.com ^[1]) is a bestselling author of Losing bin Laden and Shadow War, fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Washington Editor of Pajamas Media.