Jon Frankel

HBO Can't Resist Hostile Guantanamo Cliches in Piece on Diving Rehab

HBO's Real Sports promised a look at an “inspirational therapeutic program” in which wounded warriors are able to go diving in the “pristine” coral reefs off of the Guantanamo Bay detention camps in Cuba, but Bryant Gumbel and correspondent Jon Frankel couldn't resist piling on left-wing cliches about “one of the most controversial places on Earth,” “the most infamous military base in the world” where “the heat here, this month, will reach a hundred degrees, [and] the glare of world criticism is even hotter” since “Gitmo is notorious for the detention camps put here after 9/11.”

Frankel, a veteran of CBS, ABC and NBC, wasn't done as he explained the detention camps were “put here by the Bush administration on the notion that this place is not America after all and thus not under the purview of U.S. law. The result: Hostile detainees on the inside and international anger from without.”