Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

Here's the menu for a restaurant I've been checking out. Unfortunately, the facility doesn't offer an early bird, but it does have a price fixe dinner for a modest $12.68 (tax and tip included

• Starters - Fresh Fruit Roupee
• Entrée - (choice of) Lemon-Baked Fish or Orange Glazed Chicken
• Sides - Rice Pilaf or Steamed Peas and Mushrooms
• Beverage - Iced Tea, Coffee, Soda (unlimited fill-ups)

The surprise here is not the modest price, but that this is taken from the actual menu for the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. And just to give you a yardstick, the Miami/Dade Correction Department spends three bucks and change per inmate, per day, to feed its clientele, which includes the labor costs to prepare and serve the meals.

Interestingly, the Bush-Bashing mainstream media consistently offers no comment on this, or on the clutch of Senators and Representatives who consider serving MRE's to the detainees as a form of abuse. MRE's if you don't know, is the Army acronym for "Meals Ready To Eat," and is the standard fare for soldiers in the field. Good enough for our service men and women, but apparently to some politicians and reporters, not good enough for the terrorists.

As I checked this story out on a few websites I kept finding a strange looking apparatus - sort of a tiny hammock - in all of the prisoner's cells. No matter how hard I looked trying to figure out what the heck it was, I was stymied; it drove me up the wall. So don't even try to guess folks; you'll never work it out. The hammocks were supplied by the Pentagon to hoist the 1500 Pentagon supplied Korans off the cell floor thus keeping the holy book clean, which then enables the detainees to pray properly - and are called to do so by their captors five times a day - in accord with Muslim rituals and traditions. And, oh yes, one more thing: the Army Corps of Engineers expects to have a new, fully air conditioned facility, complete with rec room and gym ready by next year.

I offer this column in keeping with George Orwell's profound observation: [that] "propaganda is what's not in the news."