Two days before Barack Obama took office as president, the New York Times
weighed in with an editorial--not its first--denouncing the detention
facility at Guantanamo Bay for violating the rights of
terrorists. The Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten this Saturday published an anti-Guantanamo rant similar to that Times editorial:
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“
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Of
all the collateral damage America suffered on 9/11, none may have been
more catastrophic than the Bush/Cheney administration's rejection of
our established civilian and military legal systems to deal with the
country's criminal enemies. In fact, the murky, torture-ridden parallel
gulag they tried to create may have pushed some of the most culpable Al
Qaeda criminals--like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11
mastermind--nearly beyond the reach of justice.
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On that very day, both the the LAT and NYT were forced to print a news story carrying the headline "Guantánamo
Meets Geneva Rules, Pentagon Study Finds." And this is not a study from
the bad Bush Pentagon:
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“
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A
Pentagon report requested by President Obama on the conditions at the
Guantánamo Bay detention center concluded that the prison complies with
the humane-treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions. But it
makes recommendations for improvements including increasing human
contact for the prisoners, according to two government officials who
have read parts of it.
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This is not an isolated instance of the Left media getting things wrong. As James Taranto put it, “Everyone is entitled to his opinion, of course. But the Times
editorialists and Rutten seem to think that they are immune from Pat
Moynihan's dictum that no one is entitled to his own facts.” |
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