Darkness in Daylight - Los Angeles Review of Books

It's unfortunate that the author included the US military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay among her "gulags" and "concentration camps," as Gitmo is nothing of the sort. In fact, while I served there as the ranking US Army Medical Department Officer with the Joint Detainee Operations Group, Joint Task Force 160, from FEB-JUN 2002, International Committee of the Red Cross physicians I worked with there (and later in Iraq) told me, "No one does [detention operations] better than the US." I agree that the mission at Gitmo, originally under a split command (JTF 160 was for incarceration under a one-star general, and JTF 170 for interrogation, under a two-star general), was not what we planned. The "We" are professional Enemy Prisoner of War Military Police units. We trained and practiced for incarceration and battle field tribunals that never took place. One reason was the status of the detainees as unlawful combatants rather than lawful combatant POW's. An unlawful combatant under international and US law has no rights per se, and may be executed on sight on the battlefield. To remedy and then convolute this status, Donald Rumsfeld told us in 2002 that even though they were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions and the Law of War, we would "treat them within the spirit of Geneva." The author cannot begin to understand military war time detention by simply looking at a place. The assumptions she makes are wrongheaded at best, and unfair to those who serve honorably 24/7/365 at the finest military detention facility on earth. Americans are the best at what we do, and that extends to how we treat captives. There are always exceptions, i.e. Andersonville during the Civil War, and there have been abuses, i.e. Abu Ghraib, but the only institutionalized abuse at Gitmo was by detainees towards their MP guards, which continues today and rarely covered by biased media. Sincerely, Montgomery J. Granger, Major, US Army, Retired; author, “Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay.”