Guantanamo Detainees Take a Cue from South Beach

If it's good enough for Osama. . . 


As if it weren’t clear to anyone not living under a rock, Donald Rumsfeld has proven himself yet again to be an elitist bastard and an ass. Politicians are well-known to make crazy, misleading statements on a regular basis, but Rummy’s latest gem is on par with such ludicrous gapes as U.S. senator and medical doctor Bill Frist’s assertion that you can catch AIDS from people’s tears. Asked at a press conference about hunger strikes being carried out by Guantanamo Bay detainees (yes, the mainstream American media finally decided to report on this issue after months of silence), Rumsfeld responded by saying, “There are a number of people who go on a diet”. Unbelievably, the U.S. Secretary of State compared the hunger strikes, where 24 prisoners are being restrained, sedated, and fed “a diet of protein, glucose and fat. . .with tubes pushed into their stomachs through their noses, to keep them alive”, to being on a diet.

Rumsfeld went on to belittle the detainees’ strike by suggesting that, “what they're trying to do is to capture press attention, obviously, and they've succeeded.” Clearly Rumsfeld and the American government adopted a none-too-subtle plan to keep the detainees out of the press and the public mind from the very beginning. I guess if I was depriving a group of people of any legal rights, not to mention their rights as human beings with daily humiliation and degradation, I wouldn’t want anyone to know about it either. But those blank-eyes optimists who can actually listen to Rumsfeld’s comments with a straight face can rest assured that the detainees now look like the models in a fashion magazine, free from those unwanted extra pounds and love handles, in their day spa of a military prison.

Stay tuned to major news outlets to see how this story unfolds, just give them a few years to issue a short blurb about how it all ended up. The government’s hard-handed intent to keep the detainees confined to the oblivion of the center of a block hole makes it rather difficult to stay informed of their situation. Actually forget about the media altogether, what we really need is for Stephen Hawking to start theorizing as to what the prisoners’ legal status really is.