Guantanamo Is Becoming a Nursing Home for Its Aging Terror Suspects

MY COMMENT:

Katie Bo, stop! You're gonna make me cry! Are you kidding me? First of all, let's be clear, the Military Commissions currently in effect are from the Obama administration, not the Bush administration. Bush created the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Almost upon entry into the White House, Obama had the 2009 MCA enacted, which superseded the 2006 Act. The newer version gave the unlawful combatant Islamists who want to kill us virtually the SAME rights you or I would enjoy in a federal court of law, thus the tremendous delay in the court proceedings. If they had all just left it to International and US military law, the executions would have taken place within about two months after the detainee's usefulness wore off. All of the unlawful combatant detainees at Gitmo could have been lawfully shot dead on the battlefield. Then Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld, who knew none of the detainees were entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions or Law of War, told us we would nonetheless treat them "within the spirit of Geneva." We were trained to do nothing less. In the beginning, we were treating war wounds, as detainees were brought from the battlefield in Afghanistan. We also saw geriatric conditions in some of the elderly detainees. Nothing new at Gitmo, as there was a significant population of ageing Cubans who were granted asylum at Gitmo, but not allowed to immigrate to mainland USA, back in the 1950's. There is a hard building hospital that services the general population (but never detainees) on the base. Any additional skills or equipment necessary for the good treatment and care of a detainee was flown in. This was back in 2002. One of my beefs back then was that the bad-guy care was BETTER than the good-guy care. Good-guys had to be seen through their chain of command, which for routine conditions could take hours. A detainee with a hang nail was instantly seen and then properly triaged and then treated. Many detainees feigned injury or illness so that they would spend a least a little time in air conditioned medical treatment facilities. As we caught on, we tended to treat them more in their cells, and in open tents out of doors. Once we started to do this, detainee sick call diminished significantly. Detainees at Gitmo, and still to this day have ALWAYS received world class health care treatment. Having worked directly with International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) physicians, both at Gitmo in 2002 and then later in Iraq in 2004-2005, they told me, "No one does [detention operations] better than the US." The US Navy had set up a Fleet Hospital (think MASH unit) not far from Camp X-Ray, and next to the site for Camp Delta, the replacement for Camp X-Ray in April of 2002. The Fleet Hospital had surgical, x-ray and other specialty care units that were sealed and air conditioned. Gitmo has whatever they need to accomplish the mission, and can get whatever the mission requires. Our mission was to keep every detainee who came to our care safe and healthy. Not ONCE was any detainee ever seen with or treated for anything that could be construed as "torture." This is a MYTH perpetrated by Islamists and Islamist sympathizers. Sincerely, Montgomery J. Granger, Major, US Army, Retired, former ranking US Army Medical Department officer with the Joint Detainee Operations Group, Joint Task Force 160. Author, "Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior."