by James Glaser
August 2, 2006

I am talking about the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. Some are terrorists, and some were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course, if you are a real American, you have to believe that none of these people are guilty of anything.

Many of these prisoners have been sitting there for four to five years, with no trial, no charges filed against them, and with no rights at all. I don't know how they are housed now, but most of them had a couple of years living in wire cages... kind of like you would keep a dog.

Just in the past week there have been stories in the media about how these prisoners have been attacking their American guards. John Solomen, writing for the Associated Press reports, "The prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay during the war on terror have attacked their military guards hundreds of times, turning broken toilet parts, utensils, radios, and even a bloody lizard tail into makeshift weapons."

I remember how I admired our own POWs, who spent years in North Vietnamese prisons. It amazed me that they didn't all go nuts, with loss of hope and repeated torture.

Those we hold in Gitmo suffer torture also, and I can remember Donald Rumsfeld telling those prisoners that even if they were found not guilty, we were keeping them anyway. You want to talk about loss of hope.

You have to know that when any of these prisoners attack an American Guard, they get their butts kicked, and probably every other part of their body too.

These guys have guts and I admire that. I don't admire what any of the guilty ones have done, but these people have a belief system every bit as strong as our POWs in Hanoi did.

It is a real shame that we have to be at the other end of the spectrum from where these men are. In another time and in another place they would be great allies. Well if you think about it a bit, they were our allies. That was back when Osama bin Laden was our friend, and our CIA was helping him and his troops defeat the Soviets. Strange huh?

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