Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - L.A.R.K Program
A lady libertarian wrote many letters to the White House complaining about the treatment of a captive insurgent (terrorist) being held in Guantanamo Bay. She received the following reply from Donald Rumsfeld:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D. C. 20016
Dear Concerned Citizen,
Thank you for your recent letter roundly criticizing our treatment of the Taliban and Al Quaeda detainees currently being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Our administration takes these matters seriously and your opinions were heard loud and clear here in Washington. You will be pleased to learn, thanks to the concerns of citizens like yourself; we are creating a new division of the Terrorists Retraining Program, to be called "Liberals Accept Responsibility for Killers" program, or L.A.R.K. for short.
In accordance with the guidelines of this new program, we have decided to place one terrorist under your personal care. Your personal detainee has been selected and is scheduled for transportation under heavily armed guard to your residence next Monday. Ali Mohammed Ahmed bin Mahmud (you can just call him Ahmed) is to be cared for pursuant to the standards you personally demanded in your letter of complaint. It will likely be necessary for you to hire some assistant caretakers. We will conduct weekly inspections to ensure that your standards of care for Ahmed are commensurate with those you so strongly recommend in your letter.
Although Ahmed is a sociopath and extremely violent, we hope that your sensitivity to what you described as his "attitudinal problem" will help him overcome these character flaws. Perhaps you are correct in describing these problems as mere cultural differences. We understand that you plan to offer counseling and home schooling.
Your adopted terrorist is extremely proficient in hand-to-hand combat and can extinguish human life with such simple items as a pencil or nail clippers. We advise that you do not ask him to demonstrate these skills at your next yoga group. He is also expert at making a wide variety of explosive devices from common household products, so you may wish to keep those items locked up, unless (in your opinion) this might offend him.
Ahmed will not wish to interact with you or your daughters (except sexually) since he views females as a subhuman form of property. This is a particularly sensitive subject for him and he has been known to show violent tendencies around women who fail to comply with the new dress code that he will recommend as a more appropriate attire. I'm sure you will come to enjoy the anonymity offered by the burka over time. Just remember that it is all part of "respecting his culture and religious beliefs" as described in your letter.
Thanks again for your concern. We truly appreciate it when folks like you keep us informed of the proper way to do our job and care for our fellow man. You take good care of Ahmed and remember . . . we'll be watching.
Good luck and God bless you.
Cordially,
Don Rumsfeld
I picked this up from an unknown source, so can't give reference credit due. It is my earnest hope that our Secretary of Defense at least has pleasant dreams of writing such letters. The United States would be the better for it if Mr. Rumsfeld and more like him actually had the moxy to hit their critics between the eyes with poignant rhetorical humor like this. Better yet, why not just do what this letter proposes? Maybe the critics would then "get it".