But apparently, imprisoning al-Qaida warriors we catch on the battlefield is hampering our ability to fight the global war on terror.
Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin has compared Guantanamo to Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags, based on a report that some detainees were held in temperatures so cold that they shivered and others were forced to listen to loud rap music -- more or less approximating the conditions in the green room at "The Tyra Banks Show." Also, one of the detainees was given a badminton racket that was warped.
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert complained this week that detainees in Guantanamo have "no hope of being allowed to prove their innocence." (I guess that's excluding the hundreds who have been given administrative hearings or released already.)
Of course all the usual "human rights" groups are carping about how brutally our servicemen in Guantanamo are treating the little darlings who are throwing feces at them.
Democrats oppose the Patriot Act, the most important piece of legislation passed since 9/11, designed to make the United States less of a theme park for would-be terrorists.
The vast majority of Senate Democrats (43-2) voted against renewing the Patriot Act last December, whereupon their minority leader, Sen. Harry Reid, boasted: "We killed the Patriot Act" -- a rather unusual sentiment for a party so testy about killing terrorists.
In 2004, Sen. John Kerry -- the man they wanted to be president -- called the Patriot Act "an assault on our basic rights." At least all "basic rights" other than the one about not dying a horrible death at the hand of Islamic fascists. Yes, it was as if Congress had deliberately flown two commercial airliners into the twin towers of our Constitution.
They oppose profiling Muslims at airports.
They oppose every bust of a terrorist cell, sneering that the cells in Lackawanna, New York City, Miami, Chicago and London weren't a real threat like, say, a nondenominational prayer before a high school football game. Now that's a threat.
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