Delaware Senator Joseph Biden spoke wisely and foolishly on television this weekend. He repudiated the latest invective from Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean but matched that statement with another.
"I think more Americans are in jeopardy as a consequence of the perception that exists worldwide with its existence," said Biden, "than if there were no Gitmo." The senator is a level-headed partisan, probably responding to the noise his office received from leftist constituents and interest groups. Less noble colleagues will happily use the man's standing as justification for his excessive judgment but whatever the motivation, condemnation of the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has stepped ahead of the allegations that might support it; a call for recompense where there is no injustice and an admission to the American public of exactly who enjoys the left's benefit of the doubt.
A fortnight after the Newsweek story about a Koran-soaking fell to scrutiny, Amnesty International executive Irene Khan accused the United States of many crimes against humanity — one of them the operation of a "gulag of our times," all without evidence. Amnesty International's insult arrived politically like a freight train rear-ending a second one sitting dead on the tracks. Hyperbole, smashing into discredited sensationalism, has made farce — and it's the left's mess to clean up. The now-disproven Newsweek claim was important because of the prominence it received after a tenuous attribution to riot killings on the other side of the world. The article and its reaction were to be a reflection of military carelessness and the deadly consequences, not an appeal for hardcover rights. Did Amnesty expect infuriated Americans and Westerners to demand an explanation for "forced labor camp" when "bible in the bowl" was retracted? Apparently not. Guantanamo Bay has become the catch-all for a manifestation of the left's worst delusions where, no matter how broadly and deeply one may access its terrorist detention facilities, an atrocity limited only by imagination is presumed to occur behind that door or under that concrete slab. But a powerful meme in radical circles can lie so far below the standard of proof that its peddlers are surprised to learn that they in fact carry the burden. Amnesty director William Schultz said as much to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. Guantanamo a "gulag"? Not really, just an expression. Donald Rumsfeld an "architect of torture"? Another artful phrase, impossible to know but "fascinating" nonetheless. Schultz backpedaled to water's edge before Wallace, consigning any serious allegations of physical harm to the realm of what-if.
Spared from that capitulation was the matter of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, the book distributed by the United States military under no obligation but America's guileless altruism. Rules prohibit guards from direct contact with the tomes and meticulous procedures for handling and inspection, quite a consideration for the kind of apostate who would join the Taliban or al Qaeda. Both in response to criticism and, hopefully, in the hopes of settling "Koran abuse" as chock nonsense, Brigadier General Jay Hood conducted and released a report on holy books in the Bay.
What did he find? With about thirty thousand interrogations, over fifteen hundred Korans on hand, the men most responsible for defiling the word of Allah were detainees. Hood's report describes the terrorist star witnesses for agitators like Amnesty International to be rather inventive themselves, and far more concerned with the welfare of a book than the human lives they'd once helped destroy in Afghanistan. Even so, detainees are confirmed to have ripped up, thrown about, urinated on and — a nod to Newsweek — tried to flush their Koran down the toilet. American conduct is fastidious to the point of obsequiousness: every one of the five confirmed incidents involving the Koran was met with an investigation, an apology and where determined, corrective action.
John Hinderaker, reviewing Hood's publication for the Weekly Standard, noted one of the American infractions to be the tossing of water balloons at a cell block. Grab that thread and pull. Start asking questions about water balloons — How many? What color? What shape? Were their nozzles tightly knotted or left open for an insuppressible delivery of hydraulic payloads? — and an incomparably greater volume of authenticated information on the respectful, almost sentimental treatment of one-time terrorists to unsubstantiated and tendencious cries foul becomes overwhelming. American men and women, many of them youthful, a few you might know, are assigned to the naval base, something lost amid a stream of innuendo that can ride on radical politics whose devotees stand ready to believe in conspiracies committed by people who don't exist. These soldiers are the target of allegations involving — currently, as the more serious stuff is regularly debunked — books. Books. And water balloons, and incidents less traumatic than what takes place during high school class changes. No one can take half-cocked charges of malfeasance seriously; how can we, one step away from Monty Python's torture instruments of choice, the "Soft Cushions" and "The Comfy Chair"? Press the brass: Did a Guantanamo detainee get a pie in the face to a muted trumpet's four half-steps downward? Anybody slip on a banana peel?
This, the archipelago, the gulag: Senator Biden's animus for dismantling Guantanamo's new wing and sending captured terrorists to some other place. To where, Joe? State prisons? Rock quarries? Chain gangs? Host homes? Summer co-ops? The rural Afghan-Pakistani border to reconvene occupations of murder and destruction? Biden can offer terrible advice because he won't be the first man held responsible for following it.
But the senator assumed as much — too much — about the public's perception of Guantanamo Bay. When Biden reached into what he thought was a grab-bag of reasonable assumptions about Guantanamo, out fell books and balloons. Arbitrarily shut down a wartime detention center for disciplinary breaches? For slander? Senator Biden may regret his Sunday sound bite contribution. Americans want to know what they are entitled to know but are not so predisposed to outrage over books or, say, a female interrogator unbuttoning her blouse a ways in front of a man who, three-and-a-half years ago, would have killed her if he couldn't throw her into a burkha. And Americans won't appreciate being led to believe that Guantanamo Bay is much more than that.
Looking back at talk of Republican decline three weeks prior, it was a bit much to be drawn from the small tactical victory Democrats found in the fourteen-senator "compromise" on President Bush's judicial nominees. Democrats pulled it off against Senate opponents who have won and strengthened a majority in three consecutive elections — in spite of a shamed former majority leader and a reputation as the president's least reliable allies. If that's what one flimsy branch of the Republican Party can hold, what does it say of Democrats? The national conversation is about far more than D.C. repartee and will be for a long time. The left overplayed its hand at a time when divisions between it and the electorate, if momentarily, were exposed as sharp and fundamental. Moderate Democrats may wish to expand their policy sources. Relevance is better than propinquity.