Barrel Strength

Washington Examiner finds a gem buried in a blog post by Newsweek’s reporter Michael Isikoff, in relation to a proposed move of detainees from Guantanamo to a new prison in Obama’s home state of Illinois.

But the final irony is that many of the detainees may not even want to be transferred to Thomson and could conceivably even raise their own legal roadblocks to allow them to stay at Gitmo.

Falkoff notes that many of his clients, while they clearly want to go home, are at least being held under Geneva Convention conditions in Guantánamo. At Thomson, he notes, the plans call for them to be thrown into the equivalent of a “supermax” security prison under near-lockdown conditions.

“As far as our clients are concerned, it’s probably preferable for them to remain at Guantánamo,” he says.

That is not the first time that the detainees at Gitmo have basked in tropical comforts.  A Slate report in 2003 noted this.

Is America the only country in the world that could run a prison camp where prisoners gain weight? Between April 2002 and March 2003, the Joint Task Force returned to Afghanistan 19 of the approximately 664 men (from 42 countries) who have been held in the detention camps at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay. Upon leaving, it has been reported, each man received two parting gifts: a brand new copy of the Koran as well as a new pair of jeans. Not the act of generosity that it might first appear, the jeans, at least, turned out to be a necessity. During their stay (14-months on average), the detainees (nearly all of them) had gained an average of 13 pounds.

A 2006 ABC report noticed the same.

Fueled by a high-calorie diet, detainees at Guantanamo Bay are becoming fat.

Most of the prisoners arrived at the military prison in southeast Cuba slightly underweight but have since gained an average of 20 pounds (9 kilograms), and most are now “normal to mildly overweight or mildly obese,” Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand, spokesman for the detention facilities, said Monday.

One detainee’s weight has almost doubled to 410 pounds (186 kilograms), Durand said.