Save Gitmo

The meme of the week seems to be that the detention facilities at Quantanamo should be closed. But nobody has given any good reason for doing so other than the fact that our media seem obsessed with it. It's like an itch they can't scratch. They seem to be convinced that something inhuman or at least inhumane is going on there because they aren't given access to every inmate there. Their obsession with the "rights" of illegal combatants and their distrust of all things military would be laughable if so many of those who control our access to news weren't afflicted with it.

I've never gotten over the contempt I felt for these people after 9/11 when they could only complain that the government should have prevented this. Even if the FBI and CIA had shared information and had been tracking these terrorists, could they have singled them out and make arrests without a firestorm of criticism from the same media who were now attacking them for not doing so? It's practically an article of faith on the left and increasingly on the libertarian right that mere surveillance is a violation of one's rights. If we really believe that, let's just disband all our law enforcement and defense forces and see how much privacy we have.

Hugh Hewitt's phrase "asymmetrical skepticism," linked above, is so perfect for our age when not only the military and government, but the media just as much, come to rely on shorthand phrases that aren't immediately clear. In this case, all it means is that reporters are willing to give credence to claims from the most biased of sources, captured terrorists, while ignoring every negative investigation result from our own people.

Does some abuse go on in these detention centers? I'd like to see any organization staffed by human beings that doesn't have some personnel who don't follow instructions and even behave badly, including the news media. The difference is that the military investigates these reports and prosecutes those involved when the evidence warrants, while the news media either launch into paroxysms of auto-therapy, like the NYTimes did after Jayson Blair's phony "reporting" was discovered, or, more often, circle the wagons and dig for something to confuse or divert the attention of the public, as they did following Newsweek's retraction of the Koran-flushing story.
They might apologize, as Dan Rather did, but it's not repentant. It's just a technique for shifting responsibility: "Hey, I apologized, so it's your fault if you can't forgive me." Of course, things like this aren't matters of forgiveness, but trust. The MSM doesn't get that and hence doesn't understand why the public so readily turns to sources like talk radio, Fox News Channel and blogs.

Will they ever figure it out? Those who do will thrive, but those who don't will be remembered the way we remember the Ford Pinto. Here's a hint: when you have a massive public relations problem, you want to be Tylenol, not Nixon.

Update: Screedblog looks at the "coercive techniques" authorized by Rumsfeld and finds that they constitute "a general go-ahead for acting like a high-school gym teacher." Thank goodness it didn't get to the level of acting like a drill instructor. The media are in such a frenzy to proved that Newsweek's story was false but accurate, that they don't understand how silly they look to people who remember those little bits of debris falling from the top floors of the WTC which turned out to be people.