WASHINGTON (AP)-- Two Democratic senators, just back from Guantanamo Bay, said Monday that Congress should come up with concrete rules for handling detainees at the U.S. prison there.
It's interesting that the AP leads the article with that piece of information. For all the attention abuse at Gitmo has received recently, you'd think that the focus of the story would be the impressions that the Dem senators had of the facility. The main news should be their evaluation of what's going on there. One can just imagine the torture, the gulag, that the senators witnessed while there.
Unfortunately, the news did not provide the type of headline AP likes to run with. The senators' story of Gitmo didn't embarrass the Bush administration. The best AP could come up with was stressing the need for "rules." Even that is very misleading, suggesting the absence of any "concrete rules" already in place.
Wyden, a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, and Nelson, of the Armed Services Committee, said they were impressed with Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of the joint task force at Guantanamo Bay. They came away from their visit convinced that prisoners are being treated fairly, the senators said.
"There was not torture, not deprivation," Nelson said, adding that he based on his comments on his own observations and on conversations with troops from Nebraska.
"I know I can trust Nebraskans to tell me the truth," he said. "I'm comfortable that the mistakes of the past have been corrected."
Wyden agreed, but he said Congress still has a responsibility to set standards for prisoner treatment into law.
The report of Wyden and Nelson doen't mesh with the Dem party line, that Gitmo should be shut down. No wonder the story is getting so little attention.
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