The other side of Gitmo

The ying to Dick Durbin's yang of Soviet Gulag's and Nazi concentration camps. It's still not pretty, but it adds the ever-important ingredient of 'perspective' to the mix.

From Saturday's AP story:

The prisoners banged on their cells to protest the heat at Guantanamo Bay. They doused guards with whatever liquid was handy, from spit to urine. Sometimes they struck their jailers, one swinging a steel chair at a military police officer.

And the American MPs at times retaliated with force: punches, pepper spray and a splash of cleaning fluid in the face, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press that detail military investigations and eyewitness accounts of abuse.

Military authorities have previously disclosed some incidents of guard retaliation, which resulted in mostly minor disciplinary proceedings. What emerges from 278 pages of the newly released documents is the degree of defiance by the terrorism suspects at Guantanamo.

Just so we're all clear, I wish to offer no excuses. If and when a detainee is indeed mistreated, I whole-heartedly believe those responsible need reprimanding or punishing if so deserved. I and the military appear agreed on that point.

What I do wish to offer is simply, as stated earlier, perspective. Perspective on who it is exactly that sits in those cells and how they treat those charged with supervising them. As this piece points out, some of these people are not so nice:

Some prisoners at the U.S. base in eastern Cuba have gone on the attack, as in April 2003 when a detainee got out of his cell during a search for contraband food and knocked out a guard's tooth with a punch to the mouth and bit him before he was subdued by MPs. One soldier delivered two blows to the inmate's head with a handheld radio, the documents show."

Several guards were trying to hold down the detainee, who was putting up heavy resistance," recounted a translator who saw the incident. "The detainee was covered in blood, as were some of the guards."

I only wish that the likes of Senator Durbin and others who so vocally disapprove of the US effort at Guantanamo would make the attempt at understanding what exactly the camp deals with in terms of who it is holding and how they act and not solely focus on what they deem inappropriate behavior on the part of US personnel.

There are always two sides to any story and I wish that important members of the US Government would stop long enough to consider both.