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The actual U.S. policy toward prisoners’ religion
As Paul Sperry explains today at FrontPage Magazine, the most that U.S. interrogators at Guantanomo were ever authorized to do regarding religious items of jihadist prisoners, in order to encourage them to give information, was to deprive them of their Korans and make them shave their beards. And interrogators had to ask for written permission from their commanders in order to do either of these things. After August 2003 the U.S. authorities dropped even these mild inducements to cooperation and automatically handed out Korans to everyone. Meanwhile, U.S. troops in Moslem countries are ordered not to do anything to express or display their religion in the presence of Moslems. As Sperry sums it up, “So the bad guys behind barbed wire can be religious—but not our soldiers guarding them.”
It would have been nice if our Secretary of State had made these important facts clear to the world instead of acting as though a single failure by a single U.S. serviceman to be exquisitely sensitive to our enemies’ sensibilities was a horrible national crime—a notion that cripples us in dealing with our enemies. Email entry |