Shall we send them to your house, Mr Friedman?

Shut it down. Just shut it down. I am talking about the biased, anti-American screed known as the New York Times. Just shut it down and then plow it under. It has become worse than an embarrassment. I am convinced that more Americans are dying and will die if we keep the New York Times open than if we shut it down. So, please, Mr. Sulzberger, just shut it down.

As proof of this assertion, you only need to view the demented drivel emanating from mind of NY Times Op-Ed columnist Thomas Friedman.

Guantánamo Bay is becoming the anti-Statue of Liberty. If we have a case to be made against any of the 500 or so inmates still in Guantánamo, then it is high time we put them on trial, convict as many possible (which will not be easy because of bungled interrogations) and then simply let the rest go home or to a third country. Sure, a few may come back to haunt us. But at least they won't be able to take advantage of Guantánamo as an engine of recruitment to enlist thousands more. I would rather have a few more bad guys roaming the world than a whole new generation.

Friedman is terribly worried about how the foreign press depicts the United States in its War on Terror, and in particular the treatment of terrorist suspects housed at the Guantánamo Bay facility in Cuba. Never mind that Newsweek's claims of Koran-flushing and desecration has been retacted by the magazine, or that the detainee who claimed that U.S. personnel there had flushed a Koran in a toilet recanted his original allegation when questioned this month by military investigators.

Prisoner claims of abuse at the hands of Americans are nothing new, Mr. Friedman. In TR Fehrenbach's Korean War book "This Kind of War", the author describes how North Korean and Chinese POWs were told by their leaders to make accusations of torture to Red Cross officials against their American captors. In fact, they were so badly "mistreated" by the Americans that nearly one quarter of 100,000 Communist POWs declined to return home to North Korea and China.

Captured Al-Qaeda manuals appear to take a page from their Communist counterparts, albeit with an Islamic twist. According to the manual, terrorist trainees were coached to makes claims of torture and mistreatment. From the Telegraph (UK):

The men's claim that they were tortured at Guantanamo should also be set in the context of the al-Qa'eda training manual discovered during a raid in Manchester a couple of years ago. Lesson 18 of that manual, whose authenticity has not been questioned, emphatically states, under the heading "Prison and Detention Centres", that, when arrested, members of al-Qa'eda "must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security investigators. [They must] complain to the court of mistreatment while in prison". That is not, of course, proof that the Britons were not tortured in Guantanamo. But it ought to encourage some doubts about uncritically accepting that they were – which seems to be the attitude adopted by most of the media.

So there you have it, the Western media and Thomas Friedman taking accusations of torture from terror suspects at face value, and ignoring Pentagon claims of humane treatment. Ultimately, shutting down Guantánamo Bay would have no effect on prisoner claims of abuse or the propensity of the Western press to write stories that put the United States military in a negative light. Heck, these terrorists--most of whom just happened to be caught wandering around in Afghanistan, Northern Pakistan and Iraq at the wrong time--would be complaining about "mental torture" even if we put them up in the Bellagio for the next decade or so, and the Friedmans of the world would no doubt plead their cases ad infinitum.

Finally, just what are we supposed to do with these enemy combatants who are captured fighting US troops on foreign battlefields, Mr. Friedman? Keep them on Guantánamo Bay until the War on Terror is over, or bring them to the USA, where the liberal court system will turn them loose, and then they can go on resuming their merry ways of death and destruction. Let's hear it straight from Mr. Friedman:

Shut it down. Just shut it down. I am talking about the war-on-terrorism P.O.W. camp at Guantánamo Bay. Just shut it down and then plow it under. It has become worse than an embarrassment. I am convinced that more Americans are dying and will die if we keep the Gitmo prison open than if we shut it down. So, please, Mr. President, just shut it down.

How about a deal, Mr. Friedman? You shut down the New York Times, and we'll shut down the camp at Guantánamo Bay. We'll even throw in Abu Ghraib if you stop publishing your sister paper, the Boston Globe. That sounds like an even trade.