In the advance copy of his fine essay, “Guantanamo’s Unhappy Campers” (Feb. 11), The Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash offers a quirky glimpse inside Gitmo’s Camp X-Ray. The whole piece is well worth the read (especially if you’re fascinated by descriptions of furiously masturbating al Qaeda detainees cartwheeling about with toothpaste in their asses — and let’s face it, who isn’t?), but here’s a bit of editorializing I found particulary instructive:

It’s hard to imagine anyone who has actually read the Geneva Convention wanting to confer POW status on alleged al Qaeda members. Doing so would not only make the terrorists eligible for repatriation to their home countries, but also would forbid their being punished for trying to escape, allow them to receive “scientific equipment” from home, and even confer upon them the right to dentures–in case they lost their teeth while, say, biting a guard. Most ludicrous, they would be afforded “advances of pay” in an amount “never . . . inferior” to that which we pay our own armed forces. If you’re a terrorist from Central Asia, it’s not a bad deal: Kill Americans, get arrested, then get a pay raise from America.

Labash reports on other oddities, drawn mostly from anecdotes told him by Camp X-Ray personnel: the ICRC’s gladhanding and cookie-doling; the eating habits of some al Qaeda members as viewed through a rifle scope — 2600-calorie homages, really, to Richard Dreyfus and his mashed potato sculptures in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Fascinating stuff. And who knows? — perhaps on the strength of this article, Human Rights Watch will actually bother to pay a visit to Gitmo before issuing its next knee-jerk condemnation of the barbaric conditions these poor souls are forced to endure…