Dhimmisty International

Newton's First Law of Motion says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

I thought of this when I came across this story:

In a few years, Pentagon officials say, the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, will have undergone a radical transformation.

The sprawling detention site known as Camp Delta, with its watchtowers, double-wide trailers housing rows of steel cells and interrogation rooms will be mostly demolished.

Instead, a sharply reduced inmate population of those the military considers the most hard-core will inhabit two nearby hard-walled modern prisons. The newest of those, which is still under construction, is modeled on a modern county jail in Michigan and is designed to counter international criticism of Guantánamo as inhumane and, to some, a symbol of American arrogance.

The first step in changing the character of Guantánamo, officials say, is to relocate many of the 520 detainees. As part of that effort, Defense and State Department officials said this week that they had reached agreement with Afghanistan to transfer 110 Afghan detainees to their home country. Eventually, the population will be reduced to 320, the capacity of the permanent prison buildings. [emphasis added]

What do we learn from the above? First, that all the left-wing caterwauling about Gitmo and its being a "gulag" has, finally, worked. The Pentagon is retreating. It isn't the rout that the anti-war crowd seeks, but they have succeeded in forcing the Bush Administration to react to their criticism and demands in a way that cannot help but be at least somewhat detrimental to American national security.

The other thing we learn is that whenever the Left sees its enemies retreating, they don't dispense praise and gratitude for the concessions they've received, but instead go for the throat:

This relocation has raised the ire of Amnesty International, which demands a halt to this effort. This, of course, is the same organization which claimed that Gitmo (and Bagram in Afghanistan, which will also release Afghanis to Kabul) formed an "American gulag" earlier this year in its annual report. AI says that because Afghanistan practices torture - a charge certainly true under the Taliban, less certainly under Hamid Karzai - the US should not and cannot release Afghani citizens to Afghanistan.

On the other hand, they [still] want them released from Guantanamo.

But if Amnesy International doesn't want them remanded to Afghan custody, to whose custody would they see these jihadi animals transferred? Here's where Cap'n Ed's logic becomes relentless:

So where, exactly, would AI like us to send them? If we don't release them to their home countries, we would have to select a neutral country and get them to detain these people. The problem with that is twofold. First, these detainees not only conducted unlawful wartime operations against American forces, but also committed crimes in Afghanistan, not in some neutral territory. The neutral territory would have no jurisdiction to keep them detained and would have to release them instead.

Second, since AI and other critics have insisted that America give these terrorists the same protections as uniformed soldiers under the Geneva Conventions, the GC requires released POWs to get repatriated to their home countries at the end of hostilities. It doesn't provide for third-party detention. [emphases added]

Any parent should recognize the dynamic involved here: if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. The militant pacifists do not want Gitmo to be remodeled; they want it to be closed (and preferably ceded back to Castro). They don't want captured enemy illegal combatants to be reshuffled or relocated; they want them turned loose to continue the "holy" war against the West. All of them.

And if they were to get what they want, and it led to a mass-casualty WMD strike against an American city, these very same people would blame the Bush Administration for allowing it to happen.

Mr. Morrissey condemns AI and its fellow travelers as "appeasers" and "junior Chamberlains." I think that's cutting them too much slack. Appeasers believe that peace can be purchased through concessions and retreats. The (Bill) Clinton years proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that Islamic fundamentalists cannot be appeased, because any concession we offer short of unconditional surrender to the global caliphate and sharia law will be insufficient. It isn't what we do that condemns us in their eyes - it's what we are. That is, "infidels," "crusaders," "people of the Book."

There cannot be reasonable, honest disagreement about this point. It is inarguable. Heck, it's in the Koran itself. And for there to be those like Amnesty International, ostensibly "on our side," who eviscerate both international law and the laws of war overtly on the terrorists' behalf leads inexorably to one of two conclusions: either they are clinically insane, or they are enemy sympathizers.

These are the people to whom the Bush Administration is, if grudgingly, yielding ground. And they are only going to push harder.

Doesn't matter that they have no credibility - when did they ever? What matters is that, apparently, the squeaky wheel really does get the grease if it squeaks long and loudly enough.

My hunch: we'll eventually transfer all the "detainees" to their home countries on the implicit grounds that they ultimately be liquidated, in order to both keep them from returning to the battlefield and keep them out of our civilian court system, where left-wing judges would render the GWOT unfightable and unwinnable.

Keeping Iran from going nuclear isn't the only race against time in this war. It's a bitter sign of the times that the other race we have to run is with ourselves.