Posts with the tag 'Afghanistan'
Back on that day the Towers crumbled, who saw that we’d have in 2008 armies of Iraqi and Afghan Moslems fighting on our side?
KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan National Security Forces fought off several insurgents in the Bak district of Khowst province August 20.
The insurgents attacked a group of construction workers. Citizens from a nearby village notified the district centre, and ANSF responded to the site and engaged the militants.
And ISAF ground element responded to assist the ANSF, and U.S. forces sent attack helicopters. More than a dozen insurgents died during the fighting.
This is what the critics don’t understand but what President Bush - backed by John McCain - saw clearly; that the people of the Moslem world are, indeed, people and thus not inclined to kill and destroy but to live and to build. People like Senator McCain understood that the reason for terrorism isn’t Israel or American policy, but the fact that wicked men, backed by wicked governments, were able to have the field all to themselves, with the peoples of the Moslem world cannon-fodder for Islamist ambitions. Get the people away from the wicked men, even for a moment, and the idea was that they would choose living over dying, and that is what happened…and not only did they choose to live, but plenty of Iraqis and Afghans have chosen to risk their own lives so that their peoples can have a better future.
Victory is ours in this War on Terrorism, provided we just keep fighitng and, more to the point, fighting to provide a better life for the people of the Moslem world. The only thing which can stop us is ourselves, should we be so foolish as to elect a President who thinks you can sit down with evil and come to an agreement.
Tags: Afghanistan, John McCain, Terrorism
August 22nd, 2008
While Obama whines about mythical attacks on his patriotism, John McCain speaks the blunt truth:
Though victory in Iraq is finally in sight, a great deal still depends on the decisions and good judgment of the next president. The hard-won gains of our troops hang in the balance. The lasting advantage of a peaceful and democratic ally in the heart of the Middle East could still be squandered by hasty withdrawal and arbitrary timelines. And this is one of many problems in the shifting positions of my opponent, Senator Obama.
With less than three months to go before the election, a lot of people are still trying to square Senator Obama’s varying positions on the surge in Iraq. First, he opposed the surge and confidently predicted that it would fail. Then he tried to prevent funding for the troops who carried out the surge. Not content to merely predict failure in Iraq, my opponent tried to legislate failure. This was back when supporting America’s efforts in Iraq entailed serious political risk. It was a clarifying moment. It was a moment when political self-interest and the national interest parted ways. For my part, with so much in the balance, it was an easy call. As I said at the time, I would rather lose an election than lose a war.
Thanks to the courage and sacrifice of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines and to brave Iraqi fighters the surge has succeeded. And yet Senator Obama still cannot quite bring himself to admit his own failure in judgment. Nor has he been willing to heed the guidance of General Petraeus, or to listen to our troops on the ground when they say — as they have said to me on my trips to Iraq: “Let us win, just let us win.” Instead, Senator Obama commits the greater error of insisting that even in hindsight, he would oppose the surge. Even in retrospect, he would choose the path of retreat and failure for America over the path of success and victory. In short, both candidates in this election pledge to end this war and bring our troops home. The great difference is that I intend to win it first.
Once we got into Iraq, the fundamental question for each American to answer was, “do you want to win, or do you want to lose?”. There is no “end” to a war - a war is won or a war is lost. Vietnam didn’t “end” - we lost. The enemy won. Those who relied upon us to keep our word were coldly betrayed and subjected to a horrific fate because the controlling powers in the United States decided to lose the war. John McCain answered the question: he wants to win. Barack Obama answered the question: he wants to lose.
Oh, to be sure, Obama will never say it that way - in fact, he might not even be aware he’s advocating the defeat of the United States, the country he proposes to lead. So disconnected is the left from reality and so ignorant are most leftists of the way the world works, it is very possible that Obama really thinks you can “end” a war, no harm and no foul, and go forward without any consequences of your defeat. He may think, that is, that after he scuttles Iraq that the enemy will take him seriously about Afghanistan and that Iran would be ready to meet us on the square after we cut and ran from Iraq. Its an absurd way to view the world, but Obama just might think like that - and there’s the really frightening thing about the prospect of a President Obama.
As noted earlier regarding Afghanistan, there is still plenty of fight left in the enemy and the curious nature of the War on Terrorism is that no matter how bad off the enemy is, as long as he can preserve any part of his power, he can rebuild. We must keep battling in this war until the enemy - which is really the States who sponsor and shield terrorist groups - become convinced that terrorism is a losing prospect and that America will never quit until every last terrorist is dead or taken. When President Bush said at the start of this war that it was a generational fight, he was dead on - and McCain also understands the long term nature of this war; Obama seems to think that we can fiddle around with a little battle here, a little diplomacy there and leave it to the cops and regular legal procedure and all will be well. The folly of Obama would eventually be writ large in the number of dead as a revived terrorist enemy strikes hard at a United States perceived as weak and divided.
McCain is the man who can lead us through the next four years of war - the man we can rely on to keep fighting, and never lost faith. He’s proven this by word and deed throughout his life, and we’d be worse than fools to choose Obama over McCain this November.
Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Iraq, John McCain, liberal lies, Terrorism, Troop Surge
August 20th, 2008
We give the French a lot of grief, but lets not forget that they are with us in Afghanistan, and under President Sarkozy they are getting ever more aggressive in fighting the enemy:
KABUL, Afghanistan - Ten French ISAF soldiers were killed and 21 injured when about 100 insurgents attacked a patrol in Kabul Province on Aug. 18. Afghan security forces were also involved in the patrol.
Fighting began in the late afternoon 18 Aug. and continued into Tuesday, 19 August. The initial patrol was reinforced with quick reaction forces, close air support, and mobile medical teams. During the engagement a large number of insurgents were killed.
“This is a difficult time right now for the families and friends of those who died or were injured, and we offer them our sincere condolences and sympathies,” said Brigadier-General Richard Blanchette, ISAF spokesperson. “The lives of these soldiers are irreplaceable, but this loss does not deter ISAF from supporting the people of Afghanistan in their fight against the enemies of peace and stability.”
The enemy also attacked a US base with a force of suicide bombers - the enemy, defeated in Iraq, seems to making a stand in Afghanistan. This really is a long war, and while Obama says he will fight it out in Afghanistan, the plain fact of the matter is that he’s an untried quantity, and for the long war we need a President who has proven he can take the worst and carry on - John McCain is that man, and lets hope we make the right choice in November.
Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, France, ISAF, John McCain, Sarkozy, Taliban, Terrorism
August 20th, 2008
This is what gets serious discussion on the left, as NRO’s The Corner points out:
At the Netroots Nation gathering in Austin, Texas last month — that is the successor to YearlyKos — Dahlia Lithwick, of the Washington-Post-owned website Slate, did an interview with the Talking Points Memo site in which she described a panel discussion she had just taken part in on what is known as the “first 100 days of accountability.” Among Lithwick’s observations:
We’re already falling into this trap of either positing Nuremberg-style war crimes tribunals, or nothing, immunizing everyone from John Yoo up and down…but everybody says there’s a lot of gray area in between that, and that accountability doesn’t necessarily mean Nuremberg, it doesn’t necessarily mean nothing, it means possibly a truth commission, possibly appointing a special prosecutor to look at it…
Lithwick recommended a massive retrospective investigation of the Bush administration, going through every piece of paper, before moving forward:
Certainly long before we make a decision to do what Stuart Taylor suggested this week, which was immunize everybody in advance, or alternatively make a decision to trot them out before a war crimes tribunal before the whole world, we should really find out what happened…
But Lithwick recognized that there are those who argue such an action might be divisive:
We talked a lot about this notion that it’s bad for America, that it will rip America apart if we have hearings or we have criminal trials or if we have war crimes tribunals. And I think it’s really worse for America if we don’t…
The level of insanity here is breathtaking - and while one can attempt to dismiss this as the paranoid ravings of screwball lefties, the problem is that these screwball lefties will have a large say in any potential Obama Administration. These people appear to be quite serious in thinking of President Bush and his Administration (a moderate, center-right, constitutional American government) as akin to Nazi Germany. And do keep in mind that by implication those of us who support President Bush are criminals, too - at least in the minds of the left. These are not people who view me as a fellow American - they view me as a pestilence to be at least thwarted, and destroyed if possible.
It is imposisble for us to reach these people, but we can rest completely assured that we must stop them from gaining power - the plans they have, the lunatic assumptions they hold, are the stuff with which civil wars are made. Essentially, the left wishes to criminalise non-leftist actions and ideas, and as we on the right won’t ever agree to that, push may very well come to shove if the left gains power and seeks to prosecute us for what they consider to be crimes. I wish never to see anyone who is a fellow citizen of the United States as an enemy - but anyone who thinks putting President Bush et al up on war crimes charges - or even attempting to set up a truth commission - is someone who has definitively set themselves up as my enemy. Not a fellow citizen with ideas I think wrong, but an enemy I’ll fight.
Tags: Afghanistan, Conservatism, FISA, Gitmo, Iraq, liberal lies, political ideology, Signals Intelligence Program
August 7th, 2008
Interesting opinion piece over at Opinion Journal:
A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .
Oh, wait a minute. That’s not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a “W.”
There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society — in which people sometimes make the wrong choices — and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell…
…Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense — values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right — only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like “300,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Narnia,” “Spiderman 3″ and now “The Dark Knight”?
The moment filmmakers take on the problem of Islamic terrorism in realistic films, suddenly those values vanish. The good guys become indistinguishable from the bad guys, and we end up denigrating the very heroes who defend us. Why should this be?
The answers to these questions seem to me to be embedded in the story of “The Dark Knight” itself: Doing what’s right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified…
…When heroes arise who take those difficult duties on themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, “He has to run away — because we have to chase him.”
Being a coward is, pro-tempore, easier than being a hero - being a coward only requires that one do nothing; being a hero requires that one act. Of course, failure to act can land you, eventually, in much worse trouble than the immediate risk of acting, but a coward can always rationalise away future risks if it gets him out of the particular spot he’s in. While those who act are those who make things happen (good or bad, depending on the actor), it is only those who act nobly who are subjected to the calumny of the cowards. To insult the efforts of a wicked man, you see, is to take a brave stance - so much easier to call Marines in Haditha cold-blooded killers than to take on the cold-blooded killers the Marines are fighting.
The dichotomy between President Bush and the man who wants to replace him cannot be more stark - Obama is lauded for doing nothing; Bush is condemned for doing something. What did Obama do to garner support which eventually awarded him the Democratic nomination? He spoke out against liberating Iraq before the liberation was attempted. What did President Bush do to earn the hatred of the left? He ordered the liberation not of Iraq, but of Afghanistan. Oh, I know - we’ve spent so much time on Iraq that it seems that Iraq triggered leftwing hatred of Bush…but if you think back on it, you’ll remember that the first “anti-war” campaign post-9/11 was to keep us out of Afghanistan…because the Taliban hadn’t attacked us, because we shouldn’t get into the middle of a civil war, because it is impossible to defeat a terrorist enemy on his own ground, because it would be a humanitarian catastrophe. It wasn’t Iraq; it was the fact that President Bush proposed to do something - that is the source of the hatred.
Had President Bush made a few heart-rending speeches and merely promised the full weight of American law enforcement, he would still be disliked on the left for various reasons, but the hatred wouldn’t be there because in such a response there is no challenge to the cowardly. The coward, being able to look at a mere indictment of Osama bin Laden, can take all sorts of exception with what President Bush did…heck, the coward could even say that invading would be better…but there is no challenge; no forcing of a choice. No contrast between right and wrong. Obama doesn’t challenge - he tells the cowards that they were right, that we shouldn’t have acted - that being afraid to confront evil is the smart thing to do. He tells the coward that he never has to shoulder a heavy burden - that the UN, EU and everyone else on God’s earth will take care of it, but he’ll never be asked to sacrifice, save perhaps in a higher tax bill.
President Bush looked at the rubble of the Pentagon and WTC and was filled with a terrible resolve - that this shall not stand, and that those who did it will be made incapable of doing it again. For a while there, the overwhelming majority was with him - but as hard decision followed hard decision the siren song of defeatism and cowardice took its toll until, now, President Bush is in many ways the most unpopular man in the United States. All too many just wish he’d go away and stop demanding of us a hard courage to face the difficult tasks. Millions who hate President Bush will want him again, if we’re ever attacked like 9/11 again…but for now, they just want him get out, and allow a coward to stroke the ego of cowards.
And the only thing which may prevent this unhappy outcome? Another man of courage - John McCain. We’ll see in November if there is a majority of Americans still in favor of doing what is right, rather than talking about what is right and acting like talking is doing.
Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Defeaticrats, Iraq, John McCain, liberal lies
July 25th, 2008
This counts as “What Media Bias? Part 117″.
The New York Times rejects a McCain Op-Ed responding to Obama - the offending document, via Drudge:
In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.
Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”
Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.
Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City—actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.
The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his “plan for Iraq” in advance of his first “fact finding” trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance…
…Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his “plan for Iraq.” Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be “very dangerous.”
The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we’ve had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the “Mission Accomplished” banner prematurely.
I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.
The Iraq issue will be, I think, key for McCain - not in the sense that a majority will vote based just on that issue, but that it is the easiest issue for McCain to question Obama’s judgement and further question Obama’s fitness to carry Afghanistan to victory. Obama is staking his foreign/military policy meme on a “get out of Iraq, win in Afghanistan” proposal - the narrative will be that Obama will “end” the war in Iraq so that we can, finally, win in Afghanistan and thus repair all the damage President Bush has done and McCain proposes to continue. But this is a two-edged sword Obama is wielding - McCain can point out that Obama’s defeatism when the going got tough in Iraq indicates that Obama will also flunk the test when things get rough in Afghanistan. Obama ran up the white flag once entirely un-necessarily, what can he say to demonstrate to us that he won’t surrender, again, in Afghanistan?
Obama is nothing but a story - a fraud wrapped up in an illusion. As long as no one points out the nakedness of this would-be Emperor, he’ll be fine. McCain’s job is to force people to see what Obama really is - an ambitious non-entity with no requisite experience justifying installing him in the most powerful position in the world. If the election revolves around which man has the better story, then Obama will be our next President - if the election revolves around who is best able to be President, McCain will be sworn in on January 20th. We’ll have to see if Obama can hide in plain sight until November, or if McCain will force him, naked, into the public view.
Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Iraq, John McCain, liberal lies, Troop Surge
July 22nd, 2008
Seems we’ve gone some place the enemy prefers we stay away from, and they are determined to keep us out:
A multi-pronged militant assault on a small, remote U.S. base killed nine American soldiers Sunday in one of the deadliest attacks on U.S. troops since the 2001 invasion, a Western official said.
Militants fired machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars from homes and a mosque in the village of Wanat in the northeastern province of Kunar, a mountainous region that borders Pakistan, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said in a statement.
The attack on the relatively new outpost began at 4:30 a.m. Sunday and lasted throughout the day.
Nine U.S. troops were killed in the attack, a Western official said on condition of anonymity because the deaths had not yet been officially announced.
Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green, the top U.S. military spokeswoman in Afghanistan, said she could not comment because the battle was ongoing. She referred calls to NATO headquarters in Kabul.
NATO said in a statement that there have been casualties on both sides but accurate numbers could not be confirmed because the fighting was ongoing. (emphasis added)
The cruelty and fundamental cowardice of our enemies in Afghanistan is on display here by their use of homes and a mosque as cover for their assault on our troops. We’ll have to wait developments, but I’m confident that our troops will quickly win this battle. Meanwhile, pray for our soldiers, and the long-suffering Afghan people.
Tags: Afghanistan, Terrorism
July 13th, 2008
In spite of what you might have heard from the left, under President Bush’s leadership, we have vastly improved our ability to track terrorists and keep America safe:
In the six-and-a-half years that the U.S. government has been fingerprinting insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials said. They have criminal arrest records in the United States.
There was the suspected militant fleeing Somalia who had been arrested on a drug charge in New Jersey. And the man stopped at a checkpoint in Tikrit who claimed to be a dirt farmer but had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon.
The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here, officials said. The matches also reflect the power of sharing data across agencies and even countries, data that links an identity to a distinguishing human characteristic such as a fingerprint.
“I found the number stunning,” said Frances Fragos Townsend, a security consultant and former assistant to the president for homeland security. “It suggested to me that this was going to give us far greater insight into the relationships between individuals fighting against U.S. forces in the theater and potential U.S. cells or support networks here in the United States.”
The fingerprinting of detainees overseas began as ad-hoc FBI and U.S. military efforts shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has since grown into a government-wide push to build the world’s largest database of known or suspected terrorist fingerprints. The effort is being boosted by a presidential directive signed June 5, which gave the U.S. attorney general and other cabinet officials 90 days to come up with a plan to expand the use of biometrics by, among other things, recommending categories of people to be screened beyond “known or suspected” terrorists.
Fingerprints are being beamed in via satellite from places as far-flung as the jungles of Zamboanga in the southern Philippines; Bogota, Colombia; Iraq; and Afghanistan. Other allies, such as Sweden, have contributed prints. The database can be queried by U.S. government agencies and by other countries through Interpol, the international police agency.
Couple points:
1. The “dirt farmer” in Tikrit who turned out to be wanted in the US: all through this post-liberation battle in Iraq we’ve heard endlessly from the left that those fighting us are just Iraqis who want us out…and how do they know this? Because it was reported in the news…as if a western MSMer who spends most of his time in the Green Zone can tell the difference between an Arab from Tikrit and an Arab from Damascus. Certainly, plenty of Iraqis - for a while - joined the fight against us and the Iraqi government, but the vital leaven in the enemy forces, the thing which kept the fight hot, was the foreigners who came in with money, expertise (its not like Saddam actually trained his people to defend themselves, ya know?) and the will to fight. One wonders how many “Iraqis” in the news voicing opposition to the US were really Iraqis…
2. The fact that many of these people have turned out to be wanted in the US for various crimes gives one pause about claims of innocent people winding up in Gitmo - once again, how would an MSMer really be able to find out that the “innocent detainee” he’s interviewing is really someone innocent? Obviously, if someone is wanted in the US but is out and about in, say Somalia, then he’s already tangled with the law and got out of it by one means or another. Unless one wants to subscribe to the theory that our soldiers and intelligence agents are stupid thugs, one must give the benefit of the doubt to our side and discount media stories about allegedly innocent detainees. Not that an innocent person cannot have been picked up, but that the chances of a completely innocent person winding up in Gitmo are very small and would be the exception proving the rule.
3. What a good idea, huh? Everyone who is detained by us is fingerprinted and we gather forensic data from terrorist attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere and slowly build up a picture of who is doing what to whom. Over time this would give us a very good picture of what we’re up against (in terms of numbers, skills, effectiveness, etc) and allow us to subvert the terrorist groups from the outside and derail their efforts through misdirection.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama and his Democrats are saying that we have to get out of Iraq - at least, they’re saying it “pre-refinement”; we’ll probably see a changed tune soon, however - because Iraq has distracted us from the “real” war on terrorism…thing is, under President Bush we’ve managed to win in Iraq, win in Afghanistan, kill or capture many thousands of terrorists, build up a data base on global terrorism, de-fang Libya, end Pakistan’s “Nukes R Us” market, secure a growing alliance with India, Eritrea, Djibouti, Georgia and Poland, watch as France, Germany and other European States figure out that we’re doing the right thing in the War on Terrorism, increase the size of our military, re-equip our forces with the most modern weapons and materiel available, beef up our intelligence agencies, start to secure the border…and this is just the stuff we know about; there’s probably a lot which is still classified and we might not find out about for 50 years. Not a bad job for the man the left considers to be an evil idiot.
HAT TIP: NRO’s The Corner
Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, border security, Defeaticrats, intelligence, Iraq, John McCain
July 7th, 2008
Can be read here, Torture is a Moral Issue, A Catholic Study Guide (PDF). While I have not considered the document in its entirety, nor spent any long time in contemplation of what it teaches, I’d like to put out a few observations of my own.
In what will surely please the critics of the Bush Adminisration, the document says we must stop using euphemisms in our discussion - no more “enhanced interrorogation” when we really mean something quite harsh. This will please the left - but only up to such time as they actually start thinking about it and realise that this means we’ll also have to stop using “pro-choice” as a euphemism to cover up “pro-abortion”. This is an important thing to keep in mind, because at bottom the issue of torture is a life issue, and thus intrinsic to the whole debate on whether or not human beings have an inherent dignity which must be respected at all times, no matter what the particular human being has done. If we have an inherent dignity then we can’t torture - but we also can’t kill the unborn or, indeed, allow such things as the degradation of pornography to continue unabated (side note: when you start getting into Catholic teaching, dear readers, you’re going to get a lot of things like this: “narrowly focused” is not something which applies to Catholic teaching…the Church isn’t universal for nothin’, ya know?). As a very strong pro-lifer, I have to put myself down, then, as opposed to torture - and this would include the sort of torture which might be used to elicit information on a bomb set to go off.
As we carry on this war against a cruel and wicked foe, we must always conduct ourselves as best we can. Realising that we are fallible humans and, especially, that it is a tricky business to second-guess a soldier in the field, we still must ever strive for the highest standards possible in our conduct. But there are some things to keep in mind:
Irregular combatants are not covered by the Genevea Convention - unless an armed enemy is part of a clearly and immediately identifiable military organization, such a person is liable for a quick court martial and swift execution, all fully in accordance with the Convention. Given this, the fact that we take prisoners at all - and then almost invariably treat them very well while in captivity - is already a sign of our respect for the inherent dignity of those human beings who have chosen terrorism as their means to an end.
While a regular soldier can only be required to state his name, rank and serial number if captured and a civilian law enforcement official is carefully bound by the provisions of the Constitution and long-held US law, an irregular soldier doesn’t really even have a rank or serial number to provide, and to provide lawyers and the full panalopy of US law to captured terrorists is actually unworkable if our goal is to eliminate the terrorist threat. A captures enemy combatant is at our mercy, in a very literal sense.
A captured enemy is still a human and still has an absolute and non-negotiable right to insist that we treat him with the dignity inherent to man and endowed by God - on the other hand, a captured terrorist must not be given a right to remain silent. Once captured, they must tell us all we need to know, or we must in some way compel them to do so. And here we get into that grey area - not really covered in the linked document - of just what is torture. I cannot hold that an act by the interrogator which does no physical harm can be considered torture. Feeling bad about it afterwards isn’t good enough - there has to be a bruise, a broken bone…something, anything to indicate that someone applied brute force to the body of the terrorist. Keeping a terrorist up all night would make him quite exhausted, but it doesn’t actually rise to the level of torture.
The balancing act is to figure out how far we can go, and then work out systems to ensure that we never go any further. Most Democrats are worse than fools in their demands for closure of Gitmo based on flimsy evidence of torture. In the end, we need a prison like Gitmo and we need the ability to ensure that the terrorists give us all the information we require. Providing a statute for the military to work from would be the best idea, but one step at a time - and that first step must be in keeping Gitmo open, and rather unpleasant to be in. But however harsh we might make it and however painful (in a mental sense) interrogations might prove, the dignity of the people incarcerated must be maintained, even for those who accord us no dignity at all.
Tags: Afghanistan, Gitmo, Iraq, Terrorism, torture
June 28th, 2008
Once again the Democrats back down…
Democrats in the Congress, who came to power last year on a call to end the combat in Iraq, will soon give President George W. Bush the last war-funding bill of his presidency without any of the conditions they sought for withdrawing U.S. troops, congressional aides said on Monday.
Lawmakers are arranging to send Bush $165 billion in new money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, enough to last for about a year and well beyond when Bush leaves office on January 20.
“It’ll be the lump sum of money, veterans (funding) and that’s it,” said one House aide familiar with the negotiations on the legislation.
Sorry Democrats, looks like the troops will get funded.
Tags: Afghanistan, Iraq, troop funding
June 16th, 2008
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