As I mentioned yesterday, my column today responds to the chicken little hyperbole regarding Guantanamo Bay. Have there been abuses? Yes. Is it the “anti-Statue of Liberty?” Get a grip.

Despite the MSM’s allergic reaction, White House spokesman Scott McClellan was right when he suggested that the media could do more to “talk about policies and practices of the United States military. Our United States military goes out of its way to treat the holy Koran with great care and respect.” Far too much, I think. I note some of those ways we bend over backwards to accommodate the detainees at Gitmo:

Erik Saar, who served as an army sergeant at Gitmo for six months and co-authored a negative, tell-all book about his experience titled “Inside the Wire,” inadvertently provides us more firsthand details showing just how restrained, and sensitive to Islam to a fault, I believe the officials at the detention facility have been.

Each detainee’s cell has a sink installed low to the ground, “to make it easier for the detainees to wash their feet” before Muslim prayer, Saar reports. Detainees get “two hot halal, or religiously correct, meals” a day in addition to an MRE (meal ready to eat). Loudspeakers broadcast the Muslims’ call to prayer five times a day.

Every detainee gets a prayer mat, cap, and Koran. Every cell has a stenciled arrow pointing toward Mecca. Moreover, Gitmo’s library yes, library is stocked with Jihadi books. “I was surprised that we’d be making that concession to the religious zealotry of the terrorists,” Saar admits. “[I]t seemed to me that the camp command was helping to facilitate the terrorists’ religious devotion.” Saar notes that one FBI special agent involved in interrogations even grew a beard like the detainees “as a sort of show of respect for their faith.”

My conclusion:

Guantanamo Bay will not be the death of this country. The unseriousness and hypocrisy of the terrorist-abetting Left is a far greater threat.

Lots of good discussion around the blogosphere on Gitmo, Amnesty International, and next steps:

Austin Bay: Fisking Amnesty, Persevering After Moral Compromise
Villanous Company: What to do about Gitmo, which responds to analysis at QandO.
Rivkin and Casey: Amnesty Unbelievable
Roger L. Simon: What happened to Amnesty
Mudville Gazette catches the MSM rewriting Newsweek’s Koran-flushing claims.

Finally, here’s a report on SecDef Don Rumsfeld’s comments today about Amnesty International’s “gulag” smear–comments President Bush should have made more passionately at his own Rose Garden press conference yesterday:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended U.S. military men and women accused of running a “gulag” at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The secretary spoke during a Pentagon press conference today.

“Those privileged to live in free countries are forever in the debt of those who make that freedom possible,” Rumsfeld said. “No force in the world has done more to liberate people that they have never met, than the men and women of the United States military. That’s why the recent allegation that the U.S. military is running a gulag at Guantanamo Bay is so reprehensible.”

Gulags were a series of forced-labor camps in the then-Soviet Union where millions of Soviet people were literally worked to death. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin set up the gulags in the late 1920s and 1930s, and they lasted till the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

Amnesty International released a report equating the American detainee system with the Soviet gulag. Rumsfeld said the group would have been better off focusing on the past abuses of the regime of Saddam Hussein that tortured, mutilated and killed “untold numbers” because they held views unacceptable to the regime.

“To compare the United States and Guantanamo Bay to such atrocities cannot be excused,” Rumsfeld said.

The secretary welcomed oversight and criticism on human rights issues. “But those who make such outlandish charges lose any claim to objectivity or seriousness,” he said.

My sentiments exactly.

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Letter of the morning: What about Castro’s gulags?
In defense of Guantanamo Bay
Guantanamo Bay: The rest of the story