Kidnappees treated humanely, says VP

Vice-President Cheney claims that the people held at Guantanamo Bay are 'bad people.' How does he know?

He doesn't say for sure.

My guess is that most of them are too.

But it's just a guess. I don't know either.

How come I don't know? How come the vice-president can't say how he knows?

Our Republic has a long-established procedure for 'bad people' who try to do harm. We charge them with a crime. We present evidence against them in a court of law. And a judge or jury or some other legal tribunal finds them guilty or not guilty. If found guilty, they are usually sentenced to prison time as punishment.

None of this has happened to the Guantanamo Bay kidnappees (which I will continue to call them until they are given the most basic justice of being charged with a crime).

Yet, the vice-president insists that, "I think these people have been treated far better than they could be expected to have been treated by virtually any other government on the face of the Earth."

Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel is a Bush supporter but one who is somewhat independently-minded and who appreciates the damage the president's reckless foreign policy is having both on America's image and on its national security. He pointed out, "It's not at all within the standards of who we are as a civilised people, what our laws are... This is not how you win the people of the world over to our side, especially the Muslim world."

Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy noted, "We want other countries to adhere to the rule of law. And in Guantanamo, we are not,"

The Republican chair of the House Armed Services Committee raved about how well kidnappees are treated. "We supply every one of them with the Quran. We supply them with oil. We supply them with prayer beads. Five times a day on the prison system, we do the call to prayer with arrows pointing in the direction of Mecca and assist them in their prayer ritual."

We supply them with everything except a formal accusation and a chance to legally defend themselves.

They were captured, detained by someone outside their jurisdiction, not given a chance to defend themselves to secure their release. They remain totally at the mercy of their captors. No legal procedure is involved. How is this different from a kidnapping?

Ok, so they're probably fairly well-treated kidnappees. I'll concede that point. But since the administration insists they're not prisoners of war, then they must be kidnappees.

In typical fashion, the vice-president imperiously waved away any criticism. "And my own personal view of it is that those who are most urgently advocating that we shut down Guantanamo probably don't agree with our policies anyway."

What about those who simply want kidnappees to be given basic justice? If they're really guilty, give them a trial, let the evidence speak for itself and then lock 'em up and throw away the key.

Being detained without trial, without accusation and indefinitely until your kidnappers get around to feeling like charging or releasing you, no decent American should consider that humane. That the vice-president and his apologists think that it is humane says more about them than it does about the 'bad people.'.