Prisoner Abuse

Jesus christ, what the hell is wrong with these people?  They’re so desperate to avoid being wrong that they don’t care if they avoid reality.  Referring to a recent Pentagon report on prisoner abuse against guards at Gitmo (via BelgraviaDispatch and TPM):

The Landmark Legal Foundation, a conservative legal group that fought to force the Pentagon to release the reports under the Freedom of Information Act, said it hopes the information brings balance to the Guantanamo debate.

"Lawyers for the detainees have done a great job painting their clients as innocent victims of U.S. abuse when the fact is that these detainees, as a group, are barbaric and extremely dangerous," Landmark President Mark Levin said. "They are using their terrorist training on the battlefield to abuse our guards and manipulate our Congress and our court system."

Apparently to conservatives, it really does work like that.  If they can show that some prisoners are abusing guards, then the guards must not be abusing them.  More specifically, these guys aren’t victims of abuse because they fling poop at guards and scratch them under their masks.  And we all know that abused prisoners never do that sort of thing.

As the article says:
While serious assaults requiring medical attention are rare, the detainees' attacks can be unnerving, according to the guards who currently endure them.

Hmm, let’s see.  The article says “unnerving” while Levin says “extremely dangerous”.  And as I mentioned, most of the attacks seem to be of the throwing poop variety.  I wonder which one of these is overstating things a little bit.

And is it possible that Levin could have any semblance of an explanation on how this use of their “terrorist training” is helping to manipulate Congress and the courts?  If anything, these attacks would seem to undermine their cause, not support it.  But what do I know?  I’m the type of guy who would rather be a prison guard than a prisoner.  But perhaps that’s just because I haven’t received the terrorist training required to fling poop and scratch people.