$750,000 for a new soccer field at Guantanamo?

$750,000 for a new soccer field at Guantanamo?

By Marc Thiessen

The New York Times reported Friday:

Lawyers representing six of the highest-profile detainees at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, sent a letter on Friday to the Pentagon complaining that their clients’ living conditions have deteriorated since a new commander took over the prison last year.
In the five-page letter addressed to William K. Lietzau, the top detainee policy official at the Pentagon, the lawyers complained that some of the food, medicine, and hygienic items given to the prisoners has not been certified as halal, as required for observant Muslims. They also suggest that the amount of recreation time and access to educational and entertainment items, like Arabic newspapers, has been curtailed.

Before you shed a tear for KSM and his cohorts, read this item from the Associated Press today:

Some prisoners at Guantanamo Bay will soon have a new, larger soccer field to help keep them occupied during their indefinite detention.
The U.S. military has nearly completed a new recreation yard in Camp 6, the camp where more than 80 percent of the 171 prisoners are held. Besides a soccer field, it will have a walking trail and exercise equipment. Screened fences block the view of the nearby Caribbean Sea. A spokeswoman says the improvements cost nearly $750,000.

Now granted, high-value detainees are held in a different facility (Camp 7) than the one where this new soccer field is being built (Camp 6). But the idea that detainees at Guantanamo are suffering any sort of deprivation is patently absurd. When he was attorney general, Michael Mukasey toured KSM’s quarters at Guantanamo and observed that KSM had the same elliptical trainer he used in his Manhattan apartment building. The terrorists get the same medical care as our troops; in fact, their care gets higher priority. During a 2009 visit, one officer told me he was suffering from an impacted tooth, but his dentist appointment that day had been cancelled because the dentist had to go see a terrorist. A nurse at the detainee hospital—a state of the art facility for the exclusive use of terrorists—said the biggest health problems the terrorists face are sports injuries and becoming overweight from their 6,500 calories-per-day diet.
Indeed, the food the terrorists receive at Guantanamo is better than what American forces eat in the camp dining facility. According to one officer I spoke with, the military at one point spent $125,000 on baklava for the terrorists to eat each night during Ramadan. The chef in charge of detainee food showed me how she prepared exotic Middle Eastern meals six different ways to accommodate the desires and dietary restrictions of the terrorists—options include the “regular meal,” “soft meal,” “high fiber meal,” “vegetarian meal,” “vegetarian meal with fish,” and “bland meal.”
In addition, terrorists receive special communal “feast” meals twice a week. The chef told me that the food the terrorists get costs more than twice as much as the food served to our forces. One officer shook his head as we looked over the food and asked, “Whatever happened to bread and water?”
The terrorists have satellite television, with access to al Jazeera and Arabic news and sports channels. Camp officials actually TIVO the soccer matches of the terrorists’ favorite teams for them. One officer at Guantanamo told me, “I hope that if I am ever captured, I’m brought to an environment such as this.”  Indeed, in June 2009, one high-value detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, was transferred from Guantanamo to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City and actually requested that he be returned to Guantanamo while he awaited trial, because the conditions were so much better than those in federal prison. Imagine that: a terrorist complaining, “I want to go back to Guantanamo.”
Bottom line: there are plenty of towns and cities here in America that would love $750,000 to build a new soccer field. The fact that we are spending that money to build one for al Qaeda terrorists who would not hesitate to kill every single resident of those towns and cities is simply appalling.