Letters to the editor

Gitmo, the war and us

With all the talk about closing the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,holdingfacility (“Rumsfeld defends Gitmo,” Page 1, Wednesday), Washington seems to have forgotten its purpose.

A recording of former President Bill Clinton reveals that one reason he did not accept custody of Osama bin Laden — offered to him by the government of Sudan — was that he had no way to hold him. This allowed bin Laden to escape to Afghanistan with his top lieutenants, where he plotted and finalized the evil plans that came to fruition on September 11.

Well, President Bush has found a way to hold people like bin Laden, expressly to prevent them from attacking us. Yet, so soon after those horrific crimes of September 11, many seem to be dangerously shortsighted. Politicians must never forget that America is at war with evil people who will stop at nothing — including manipulating our legal and political systems — to destroy us and our way of life.

JAMES TERPENING

Midlothian, Va.

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It is appalling that Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, thinks that mishandling the Koran, which we print and provide at taxpayers’ expense, and playing loud rap music are the moral equivalent of the Holocaust (“Gitmo called death camp,” Thursday, Page 1). If Mr. Durbin considers getting the Koran wet to be the moral equivalent of Dachau, perhaps he would like to have the jihadists moved to Chicago’s Cook County jail.

Speaking on the Senate floor as hearings on purported prisoner abuses at Gitmo began, Mr. Durbin said that “describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by the Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or same mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings.”

As noted, about 9 million people — including 6 million Jews — died in the Nazi death camps; 2.7 million died in the Soviet gulags, where prisoners were literally worked to death; and about 1.7 million people died in the killing fields of Cambodia.

As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has pointed out, each of the Muslim prisoners of war at Guantanamo was given a prayer mat, a cap and a copy of the Koran. Each cell has a stenciled arrow pointing toward Mecca. Gitmo’s library is stocked with jihadist books.

The detainees at Guantanamo were not arrested for shoplifting or auto theft. They were taken prisoner in the middle of a war on terror, most of them after engaging U.S. troops in battle. They are not kidnapped members of the Afghan boy’s choir, but terrorists of the type that fly planes into American skyscrapers; fill mass graves with fellow Muslims; and detonate car bombs that kill fellow Muslims in schools, hospitals and waiting in line for jobs.

Those who say heads should roll over the treatment of jihadists at Guantanamo overlook the fact that heads have rolled — those of Nicholas Berg and others at the hands of the same people who deprived 3,000 people of their human rights on September 11.

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