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Bennett Backs Guantanamo Prison
Thomas Burr
The Salt LakeTribune
May 24, 2006
WASHINGTON - Fresh from a tour of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, Sen. Bob Bennett said the prison is an essential tool in the fight against terrorism and is not the horrible place human rights groups have labeled it.
The Utah Republican, joined by Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., and two members of the European Union parliament, spent five hours at the detention center on Monday and all defended the military's operation at the prison, which houses 465 detainees alleged to have ties to terrorist activities.
"The focus was on how well run the facility was how humane it was, how it was done in the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, even though it's not covered by that," Bennett told reporters Tuesday "The take away I had was how dangerous these people are. How essential it is that they be held."
The GuantanamoBay visit comes on top of calls to shutter the facility by several groups, including Amnesty International and the United Nations Committee Against Torture. The latter group charges that in addition to holding people indefinitely without filing criminal charges, the prison using interrogation techniques amounting to torture and shipping inmates to other countries where they are tortured.
The committee urged closure of the facility and releasing prisoners or charging them in the court system.
That report followed a call earlier this month by British Attorney General Peter Goldsmith to close the facility. He called it an "unacceptable" symbol of injustice.
Bennett disputed the U.N. report, saying the panel hadn't visited the facility and that military officials showed them that Guantanamo is "in fact a model facility."
"They talked about how the prisoners showed up almost always undernourished," Bennett said. "Now one of their health problems is that they are tending toward obesity . . . They talked about the medical care that they received." And, he added, they mentioned that the detainees' favorite book from the library is "Harry Potter."
Bennett's group did not speak with any of the detainees, he said, but did eat the same food as those held at the prison.
Asked whether the camp should be closed, Bennett agreed it should, but did not want to give a time frame.
"Obviously, Guantanamo should be closed at some point," Bennett said. "The question is when and the argument is should we set a timetable now and say 'all right let's work toward that timetable and be through,' which I think some of our European friends are saying, or should we say these are the conditions under which it would be closed and we should be working toward those."
Bennett said he supported the latter.
Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice told Fox News Sunday that "everybody wants to close down Guntanamo" but the question is what would happen to the detainees with ties to al Qaida who might return to fight against the United States.
"We don't want to be the world's jailer," Rice said. "We will be delighted when we can close down Guantanamo."
Amnesty International, in a report released Tuesday, took the United States to task for GuantanamoBay, charging that inmates had been verbally and physically abused during a hunger strike last year and had been denied evidence of why they are being held.
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