Trying Times At Guantanamo

[Via Best Of The Web Today]

Mohammad Ismail Agha who spent 14 months in U.S. captivity at Guantanamo had a lot of praise for his American captors:

In a first interview with any of the three juveniles held by the US at Guantanamo Bay base, Mohammed said: "They gave me a good time in Cuba. They were very nice to me, giving me English lessons."

...

"At first I was unhappy . . . For two or three days [after I arrived in Cuba] I was confused but later the Americans were so nice to me. They gave me good food with fruit and water for ablutions and prayer," he said yesterday in Naw Zad, a remote market town in southern Afghanistan close to his home village and 300 miles south-west of Kabul, the capital.

He said that the American soldiers taught him and his fellow child captives - aged 15 and 13 - to write and speak a little English. They supplied them with books in their native Pashto language. When the three boys left last week for Afghanistan, the soldiers looking after them gave them a send-off dinner and urged them to continue their studies.

"They even took photographs of us all together before we left," he said. Mohammed, however, said he would have to disappoint his captors by not returning to his studies. "I am too poor for that. I will have to look for work," he said.

This is somewhat in contradiction to the terrors that these 'innocents' are supposedly subjected to. The media and human rights groups have been carping on non-stop about the conditions in Guantanamo since the U.S. starting sending detainees there.

Now I am somewhat sympathetic to the arguments about keeping detainees captive without due process but lets please stop it with the endless tirades about how cruel the U.S. is to send people there. Oh the heat... the bloody heat!