Gitmo prejudice causes General's reassignment

NY Times:

When the Pentagon announced in March that Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood would become the senior American officer based in Pakistan, it reflected the military’s aim to put a crisis-tested veteran in a critical job at a pivotal time in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

But nearly two months later, the military has quietly canceled the assignment of General Hood, a 33-year Army veteran who was excoriated in the Pakistani news media for one of his previous jobs: commander of the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

During General Hood’s command from 2004 to 2006, military authorities force-fed with tubes detainees who were engaging in hunger strikes at the Guantánamo prison, a step they justified as necessary to prevent the prisoners from committing suicide to protest their indefinite confinement. Also during General Hood’s tenure, reports that an American guard may have desecrated a Koran stirred wide protests in the Islamic world.

The decision to withdraw General Hood’s assignment has not been announced, but it appears to reflect the widening shadow that the military prison at Guantánamo is casting over American foreign policy. While the United States considers Pakistan a close ally in its counterterrorism efforts, the accounts by Pakistanis who have returned to Pakistan after being held at Guantánamo Bay have added to anti-American sentiment in the country.

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What it really reflects is the effectiveness of the liberals' demonizing of the facility at Gitmo and those associated with it. There has been an unrelenting campaign by the terrorist rights crowd to denigrate the job done by our forces at Gitmo. The facilities there are clearly better than anything in Pakistan and the treatment received by the inmates is superior to that in Pakistan. The false attacks on the facility are the problem.

That said, it probably was insensitive to select a former commander of the facility given the false portrait of it in Pakistan and at the NY Times. Gen. Hood no doubt does have special knowledge of the problems in Pakistan and he can apply that in his new role at Centcom.