They Don't Think Like Us

The terrorists in the Guantánamo Bay anomaly have demonstrated their ability to bruise and contusionise their guards using weapons improvised from ordinary household items such as "lights, fans and pieces of metal". According to the base commander, the violence began when prisoners set upon guards who were trying to "aid ... a detainee pretending to hang himself". Presumably they were trying to save him for future interrogations rather than help him renounce his inalienable right to life; in any case, the calculating use of suicide to entrap military humanitarians in a potentially deadly situation is certainly characteristic of the New and Unprecedented Threat. As if that were not evidence enough, two other prisoners have this very week "made suicide attempts by swallowing prescription medicine they had been hoarding" - suicide and drugs combined in a lethal talibanistic terror tactic.

Nevertheless, human rights activists, civil liberties lawyers and other bleeding hearts continue to see these calculated acts of aggression as "a sign of growing despair among the prison's inmates". That such wilful naïvety can still exist, after all we have heard from such experts on terrorist psychology as the Vicar of Downing Street and his mission-accomplishing chum in the White House, is disturbing in the extreme. We know that terrorists hate freedom, and we know that the inmates of the anomaly are terrorists. How, then, can they be despairing over the lack of what they hate? On the contrary, the forty-one suicide attempts and twenty-three instances of "self-injurious behaviour" since the anomaly's opening will be seen by all right-thinking people as continuing proof of the need to keep the world safe from these bad guys, at least until the war for universal democratisation has been won.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, anonymous officials claim to have captured a leading Taliban commander who is thought by somebody or other to have masterminded a recent wave of suicide bombings. The leading Taliban commander, who has only one leg, in the tradition of leading suicide bomb masterminds, claimed in December to have two hundred suicide bombers ready to attack the forces of goodness. This presumably explains the relevance of his possible capture to the malicious suicide attempts at Guantánamo Bay.