Yves Roucaute in Le Figaro: Guantanamo: enough with the anti-American propaganda
But where is the evidence of torture at Guantanamo? The famous UN Commission on Human Rights Report (of February 2005) on which these anti-Americans lean proves nothing. This commission, which counts among it’s members communist China, Castro’s Cuba and, Saudi Arabia… had found the military authorities that didn’t trust in them improper by accepting their arrival but not letting them question the prisoners. Consequently, they refused to put a foot in the camp and drew up his report thanks in particular to testimony of captive Islamists who were released.
What’s the latest form of propaganda? Poor “a documentary-fiction”, The Road to Guantanamo, with won the golden bear at the Festival of Berlin, with lines so large which they make put Sergeï Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl to shame. Was there really no reason to suspect why the three heroes of film were prisoners at Guantanamo? Can you really take them at their world when they say they underwent torture which leaves no marks? Victims of bad luck, they left for Pakistan to attend a wedding in Karachi, the disembarking point for the world’s Islamists on their way to Afghanistan. Then, they go another 1.200 kilometers to Kandahar, the center of Al-Qaida command. They continued to Kabul where many Taliban reinforcements arrived at the same time. During the Allied intervention our heroes are found at the Pakistani border with the Islamists. Fleeing, their bad luck continued when they are stopped by the Northern Alliance with armed members of the Taliban, who hand them over to the American authorities.
Each day anti-Americanism appears more and more like the new opiate of the masses. It is the heart of a world without a heart, where morality is excluded, the strange reference point for the consciences lost by the fall of the Berlin Wall. If the true force of a republic lies in virtue, as Montesquieu said, then virtue is measured by courage one has to fight for it. Guantanamo, it is this courage.
WSJ editorial on The Gitmo Suicides (by subscription):
The activists shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways. Either the Gitmo detainees are legitimate prisoners of war, in which case they can’t be prosecuted but can be held for the duration of the conflict as in all previous wars. Or they are unlawful combatants (because they fought out of uniform and targeted civilians), in which case there should be no issue at all about moving ahead and trying them in military tribunals.
