Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [307]
After a thorough examination by the Defense Department, the individual believed to have made the original allegation recanted. We then asked Newsweek to withdraw its story, but its editor would only express “regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and [we] extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst.”46 A number of those to whom Newsweek extended its sympathies were already dead. And the reputations of those military personnel serving at Gitmo had been besmirched again, as was the reputation of our country—to the benefit of the terrorists.
It was a grim irony. We deliberately made the facility transparent, which made the repeated inaccuracies all the more irresponsible. Almost from its inception, the Defense Department arranged for regular and well-attended visits by members of Congress, representatives of news organizations, opinion leaders, and other visitors and observers from around the world. In the five years After detainees began to arrive, some 145 members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, took advantage of the Department’s open invitation to visit Gitmo. There were representatives from across the executive branch—the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and a whole host of DoD agencies and organizations—stationed there. Over time, more than one thousand U.S. and international journalists visited. We arranged for high-level European parliamentary groups to visit. Hundreds of lawyers were given access to the detainees there, as was the International Committee of the Red Cross on a regular basis.
Nearly every observer who visited Gitmo recognized that it was safer, better, cleaner, and more professionally run than most American federal, state, and local prisons, and certainly better than most foreign prisons. A senior Belgian government official said After visiting Gitmo, “At the level of the detention facilities, it is a model prison, where people are better treated than in Belgian prisons.”47 More money was spent on religiously sensitive meals for detainees at Gitmo than on meals for the American troops stationed there. The average weight gain per detainee was twenty pounds. Detainees were given Korans in their native languages. Five times each day the Muslim call to prayer sounded across the facility, and numerous arrows indicated the direction of Mecca. Detainees had access to a basketball and volleyball court, ping-pong tables, and board games. Some detainees chose to take classes in Pashtu, Arabic, and English. There were even movie nights, featuring popular Hollywood fare (which I suppose could raise a host of troubling questions). They watched sports events like the World Cup. The library had thirty-five hundred volumes available in thirteen languages (Harry Potter was the most requested). They received medical, dental, psychiatric, and optometric care—health care equal to that provided to our troops.48
Critics nonetheless continued to denounce Guantánamo as a “law-free zone” and “legal black hole.”49 Amnesty International called it “the gulag of our times.”50 The number-two Democratic leader in the U.S. Senate, Dick Durbin, compared American behavior at Guantánamo Bay to that of “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings.”51 It would have been a disgraceful comment from someone who hadn’t known better, but coming from a senior congressional leader speaking on the Senate floor, it was particularly damaging and inexcusable.
As the issue of detainees became increasingly politicized, even some senior administration officials, including ones who had been involved in the discussions that led to the administration’s detention and interrogation policies and the establishment of Gitmo, were less than supportive.52 They were anonymously cited in news reports “on background” concurring with President Bush’s