Promoted from the diaries by bs

“How did our prison system become so cruel?” pfft!

Defense Secretary Robert “William” Gates was interviewed on NBC’s “Toady” “Today” show Friday May 22 where he called the Gitmo lockup “probably one of the finest prisons in the world today.”

Got that right.

Personally I’ve been hearing the liberal argument that to “bring the detainees to US soil would pose no problem” as Super Max prisons here have never had an escape.

Really? Has a thought or idea never escaped these detention facilities? Can radical Islamic detainees be seperated from the other dangerous inmates, legally or physically? Or would the radical infection be more likely spread to other inmates as happened recently in New York?

There is only one Supermax prison in the United States federal system, ADX Florence in Florence, Colorado.

The prison opened in 1994 with the aim of incarcerating its inmates in solitary confinement for most of the day and keeping them in extreme conditions. The result is debilitating, say security officials, leading former prisoners to describe it as a living tomb.

Most of the prisoners are held in solitary confinement for 23 hours every day. For one hour each day they are allowed to exercise in a concrete chamber, fettered by leg irons and handcuffs. Prisoners stay in sound-proofed cells measuring seven feet by twelve. Each cell is bolted shut with a steel door.

Stark cells are lit by neon lighting and contain a bed, desk and stool. A shaft of natural light filters through a narrow slit window.

US security experts describe a highly-controlled environment designed to cut the prisoner off from the outside world and one another.

“They are in a security envelope, a security bubble. Their environment is sterile, they are isolated from the outside world and from the prison world,” said James Aitken, a former US federal prison official.

“Moussaoui doesn’t know yet, but under such conditions as time goes by, they rot.”

Sounds like a better system than Guantanamo Bay where prisoners freely mix with one another, worship together, play soccer, conspire and share information?

Here’s where it gets dicey;

The psychological effect of long-term solitary confinement is profound, leading to prisoners suffering from hallucinations, anxiety, depression and self-harm. One former prisoner David Clark told The Guardian in 2002 of extreme restraint methods used by the prison, even during family visits.

“Your family has to look at you chained up like Hannibal Lecter or something. They have to look at you in pain, squirming,” he said.

Human Rights Watch has described the conditions at such prisons as being a violation of international laws on civil and political rights as well as torture conventions.

“Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph laments in a series of letters to a newspaper that the maximum-security federal prison where he is spending the rest of his life is designed to drive him insane. “It is a closed-off world designed to isolate inmates from social and environmental stimuli, with the ultimate purpose of causing mental illness and chronic physical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis,” he wrote in one letter to The Gazette of Colorado Springs.”

One group calls US Supermax “Torture in Our Own Backyards”

Wading through the lengthy article referenced above is the pertinent part, with italics added by me;

Prison activists across the country are working to shed light on this. Enlisting the support of lawmakers and lawyers who share their concern over the treatment of supermax prisoners — and the rationale behind it — they are fighting for legal precedents that would bring more services to supermax prisons, grant prisoners more mobility and opportunity and, ultimately, shut the facilities down. The Tamms Year Ten Campaign is one such coalition; it recently persuaded the Illinois House of Representatives to hold a hearing, scheduled for April 28, to consider arguments for and against the effectiveness and legality of Tamms.

As I mentioned above the liberal argument is “nobody has ever escaped Supermax”.

How long after Gitmo detainees arrive at ADX Florence will it take the left to switch targets from Cuba to Colorado in an effort to have the combatants released? And released to where? Back to that old argument again.

Groups like Human Rights Watch are working tirelessly to end Supermax detention, and with all the negative changes I’ve seen lately I have no doubt someone somewhere will take up their cause, and all our arguments against moving the detainees and closing Gitmo will have been proved correct.

Back to Bill Robert Gates, he also said on the Today show (again emphasis mine);

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the Obama administration had no choice but to order the shutdown of the prison at Guantanamo because “the name itself is a condemnation” of U.S. anti-terrorism strategy.

OK, I have the solution; rename the Guantanamo facility “The George W. Bush Overseas Contingency Holding and Daycare Facility”. The left (Obama included) should be thrilled they can continue to tag Bush with the “crime” of the dention.

Conservatives will hold it up as a tribute (albeit silently, we don’t want to spoil it) to the former Bush Administration’s wisdom in keeping terrorists off US soil, and the terrorists themselves wil continue to enjoy soccer, FrootLoops and a fresh weekly Koran delivered to their cells.

I’ll start painting the signs.