UPDATED AGAIN BECAUSE ANDREW NEEDS A LASHING: Andrew Sullivan is just about the worst offender of the don’t use torture bunch. And today he attacks Dean Barnett’s defense of mere waterboarding a technique mild enough that we demonstrate it on our very own soldiers. But effective enough that not a single hard assed terrorist was able to stand up to it for more than a couple of minutes. Naturally Andrew wants us to stop.
UPDATE: Brought this post up from June 13 2005 because…well because this latest bit on ABC News proved me correct in declaring that torture works. Now we can well and truly laugh at the absurdity that is Senator Grandstand McCain. Sorry I have lost my respect for him after his theft of my 1st Amendment rights and his repeated Grandstands that put my family at risk. To say that Andrew Sullivan is irrelevent is redundant but finding out that torture does indeed save lives means that the next time he suggests not using torture he ante up his family as hostages to be sacrificed for his morality. Not real fond of those who feel like it is ok to sacrifice others so they can sleep well at night. But more on that below.
Updated Blackfive is talking about how we should act towards our enemy. I think this post is relevent and so will move it up to the top again. I also think this and this are relevent.
Updated again as more folks join in with relevent posts. Cadillac Tight is not impressed and though she isn’t involved directly in these discussions I don’t think Michelle Malkin is very impressed either. Thanks to Cadillac Tight for the linkage.
“We are now in this war. We are all in it–all the way. Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories–the changing fortunes of war.” Franklin D. Roosevelt December 8, 1941
KILL JAPS! KILL JAPS! KILL MORE JAPS! You will help to kill the yellow bastards if you do your job well ”
Admiral Halsey’s famous billboard at the entrance to the Tulagi Naval Base during WW2.
Burning down the house and the rules of war
Rules of war? I’m just a simple right-wing country boy, but aren’t rules supposed to be for games not war? In those two quotes above do you see any hint of rules or do you see a rational call to defeat the enemy at all costs? What has changed in our country since those times when we realized how important it was to just win the damn war?
I understand rules for football, baseball and cricket but rules for war? Who does that? Who advocates rules for war, what are their qualifications, motives and exactly whose side are they on? What does that say about a society that believes it can make rules for war? Who obeys the rules of war and what are the consequences for obeying the rules when the opponent chooses to win at any cost? What constitutes winning a war? Who fights a war they aren’t willing to win at any cost?
On one hand fighting a war with rules is exactly the combination of idiocy and luxury you would expect from our country. After all we are rich, powerful and most importantly we haven’t had anyone seriously threaten to destroy our village (country) in a very long time. Having your village to your rear while you stand athwart an enemy who desires to burn, rape and murder everything in his path probably tends to concentrate the mind regarding rules. In that position it probably might be far more important to simply win the damn battle then to invent rules intended to show that you are worth saving. A dispassionate observer might wonder if we believe that winning the war against Radical Islam is a foregone conclusion no matter how much we limit our ability to fight those intending our destruction. He might also wonder why we allow citizens whose agendas to destroy this country are clear, to set those rules, and report when they are broken.
“War is terrible”, Is a cliché for most of us in the United States at least it is for those who have not lost a loved one in a war. Our wars since the Civil War have been fought to uphold principles and to defend other groups of people, never us, from some terrible fate. All of them in the last 140 years have been fought elsewhere. Because of the insulation of our oceans we have not faced the sort of enemy who burn our crops, rape our women, murder our children and burn our villages. It follows that we haven’t as a country, felt the fear of extinction that faces those who lose wars on other continents, this is one factor that has driven us to believe that war can be fought with rules. I suspect that if one is facing an enemy across a battlefield whose intention is to rape, pillage and burn the village you are from and now stand to defend your willingness to adopt rules that might hinder your victory is very limited.
Our enemies are not playing cricket
On September 11, 2001 we were shown in the starkest terms that we have finally become the targets of those who can reach across our oceans to murder our innocents on a scale that should have shocked us out of our quaint beliefs in rules for war. On that day everything changed because finally an enemy had reached into our country murdering thousands and threatening to murder millions more. This enemy is not interested in negotiation, appeasement, or simply ignoring us, they seek our total elimination. We are the worst sort of people to these throwbacks to the Middle-Ages, we are apostates and as such only deserve death by the most horrible means. In their mind they are totally justified in murdering every single one of us, in the most brutal fashion.
Hatred of the West and America in Particular as the Leader of the Free World The U.S.
is seen as an infidel force that has declared total war on Islam. The first steps in its war were seen in Afghanistan and Iraq. Americans are viewed in a particularly bad light, not just as modern crusaders waging a religious war in the name of Christianity against Islam, but as an infidel people who believe in a new infidel religion – democracy – that is striving to achieve world hegemony and sees Islam as its prime enemy.
Finally the village was at our backs and a vicious uncompromising enemy driven to madness by religious zeal lay directly in front promising in loud terms to murder us and destroy our cities. This was not immediately obvious to many in the ivory tower segment of our population.
Left or Right, Ivory Towers are cozy and safe eh?
If you live in an ivory tower, supposedly oceans away from danger, then your willingness to avoid the unpleasantness of a war fought in your name may be fairly high. If you, while residing in your ivory tower, are for the war effort you may desire a huge set of burdensome rules just because you feel uncomfortable knowing that someone is brutally sticking a foot long knife to some terrorist thugs throat to gain information. You are used to rules and since you don’t have the brutal fear of staring into your enemies eyes you may seek haven from the brutality required in dispatching your enemy in rules. You may even dive into the swamp of moral equivalency pronouncing that we are becoming like the terrorists if we attempt to win by any means. In my view to accept this sort of logic forces a person to look upon the police officer who shoots the madman rampaging through the house attacking their family in the same light as the madman, since both used the same tactic to achieve their ends, killing. Surely this is mad. We are never going to become as evil as our enemy, it is a philosophical impossibility.
Both on the left and right, these groups will frame the issues of torture around the morality of their rules as if defending your life was somehow farther down the list of moral value than playing by the rules. Indeed some will even go so far as to state that they would rather die than to win the war by breaking the rules. The selfishness of such an attitude is monumental and certainly those who state such foolishness have only themselves in mind. I will state it clearly; I will live with the guilt of my shameful murder of terrorists by the vilest means if that insures the safety of my family. My guilt means nothing to me when I stare into the eyes of my children. Of course it is worth noting that I would not feel guilt in attacking my enemy in any fashion to win. I know what my enemy has planned; he has been kind enough to televise his most spectacular achievements. I am slow and stupid but I don’t need to be clubbed to understand this fight is to the death. If guilt were to be felt by me in this war it would be the guilt of watching one of my fellow citizens being beheaded and discovering that I could have stopped it had I just acted more ruthlessly.
If you are against the war you may want a set of rules because having rules gives you more tools to fight those who are waging the war. Every rule is a potential violation to be used against those who find themselves all alone defending people unworthy of defense from an enemy the anti war folks have never imagined possible. That there are many people amongst the Anti War crowd with valid questions about the war does not forgive the fact that also amongst that crowd stand people who do not wish this country well. They travel along the same roads of the Islamofacists and those who honestly disagree with the war but love this country owe it to their movement to name these groups and not accept their help.
E’ tu Brutus or how long is a 5th column?
We would be severely remiss if we were to believe that our enemy was so primitive as to not realize that an opening existed to insert rules that would hinder the exploitation of his troops after they are captured. Naturally the Islamofacist leaders will not stand up and argue their case themselves, they will instead support those many groups that have existed in this country who wish it ill. No doubt only a minority of these groups would agree with all of the goals of the Islamofacists but certainly the affects of all of those groups’ efforts whether they agree or not with the goals of the Islamofacists would be advantageous to the war effort of the Islamofacists.
Our country has had its internal enemies quite apart from the Islamofacists, for sometime and it matters little to those groups who brings this country down as long as this country is ultimately humbled. Indeed part of our enemy’s efforts surely must be to exploit this seam in our defenses as this 5th column is embedded in our society in ways that would take the Islamofacists decades to duplicate. Many of these groups have splinter groups that act as the political mouthpiece of those groups too radical to be considered openly. We must realize that our nation is a target of a great many truly bad people.
Since so much of our enemies efforts rely on secrecy and stealth, insuring that his plans are not exposed by the capture and interrogation of key individuals would be very high up on his list of things to do. Hindering our efforts at gaining information from his soldiers once they are captured is paramount and conversely it is paramount that we gain information from those we capture. That we are willing to give our enemies the advantage of our following rules he doesn’t acknowledge must seem like manna from heaven to his war effort.
Torture doesn’t work and other fables of those in the Ivory Towers
About this point Glenn Reynolds, whose keyboard is so often so much mightier than a sword, will be claiming that he doesn’t believe in torture because it doesn’t work. This, without even the slightest attempt at goggling torture, will seem naive to those who have faced force on a regular basis. Naturally those who understand the use of force and how it affects those threatened by it will laugh at the naiveté of believing torture doesn’t work. If it didn’t work it wouldn’t be used. We can put aside for a moment that oft time’s torture is used as a useful education to those who are not the recipients, of what happens when you cross those who are in power.
The plain fact is that torture does indeed work. In fact it works against the very enemy we are fighting. “In 1995, the police in the Philippines tortured Abdul Hakim Murad after finding a bomb-making factory in his apartment in Manila. They broke his ribs, burned him with cigarettes, forced water down his throat, then threatened to turn him over to the Israelis. Finally, from this withered and broken man came secrets of a terror plot to blow up 11 airliners, crash another into the headquarters of the CIA and to assassinate the Pope. ”
This bit of violent torture is how we also ended up gaining information that led to the capture of Ramseh Yousef the bomb maker who attempted to blow up the WTC in 1993. He was using this apartment to construct his ingenious altitude detonated miniature bomb he intended to use in his attempt to blow up 12 US Airliners in a plot called the Bojinka or big bang. Torture doesn’t work?
If we aren’t careful our enemies will start being very mean
“Our enemies unburdened because of our use of torture will begin using terrible tactics themselves” Those who actually believe our enemies will all of a sudden start using torture against our soldiers should we be so bold as to break our own rules are in hopeless denial of the enemy we face. How can anyone watch the beheading of Nicholas Berg, with his horrible screams for mercy, then run straight to believing that our enemy is restrained by anything on the battlefield? It is worth remembering that our enemy is given sanction by his interpretation of his religion to murder us wholesale by any means up to and including the most harsh and painful. Some might say he is even encouraged to find the most painful ways. Furthermore it would be easy to spend some time showing that our willingness to avoid using certain tactics only encourages the use of those same tactics by our enemies. Here is but one example of the efficiency of proving that ones willingness to use the worst sorts of tactics avoids the use against you of those tactics.
In Lebanon Sept. 30 - Four Soviet diplomats kidnapped in Lebanon, 1 killed but other three released unharmed after a relative of the terrorist leader’s was kidnapped and killed by the Soviet KGB. Left unsaid in this article is that the Soviets cut the man’s balls off stuffed them in his mouth and then dropped him off in front of the headquarters. The Soviets never suffered another incident.
Harsh? Absolutely, but harsher than 4 aircraft being hijacked and run into buildings murdering thousands? We aren’t playing cricket here. And don’t lets not try and say that its easy for civilians to be tough because y’all aren’t facing the bad guys. Five characters answer that charge, Flt93. No doubt that our military is brave and competent beyond all of our greatest hopes and because of that perhaps they shouldn’t be asked to conduct the sort of sessions with the enemy that might bring us the information we need to break up our enemies plans.
What sort of enemy do we face now?
“We are now in this war. We are all in it–all the way. Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories–the changing fortunes of war.” Franklin D. Roosevelt December 8, 1941
At the time of that statement neither the Germans or the Japanese had invasion plans for the United States. Agents of the Axis did not have as their goal the murder of every single mother, child and father in these United States. Do I mean in minimize the horror of the Germans and Japanese, absolutely not, I intend to emphasize the magnitude of our fight now. It is worth noting that those who do battle with us now do actually intend to try and murder us all. Many of us deal with this fact in many different ineffectual ways. We ignore it, we forget it, we play like we misunderstand their goals, we blame our government, we blame each other, we blame every single person except those who are actually intent on such mass murder.
Its almost as if we are afraid of offending their delicate feelings between bouts of mass murder and beheadings. Sometimes we even believe that they are incompetent and cannot achieve their goals. You might want to take a quick look at the score card of the last 1400 years before getting cocky. You might also want to consider that so far they have managed quite a lot with so very little. Remember this one point, how many enemies have been able to attack our central headquarters of our military and the seat of our government. How wise is it to underestimate the folks who have already accomplished both of those goals?
To our backs lie our children and our elderly, all of our riches, our homes and our lives, to our fronts lies an enemy driven to madness by a religion gone corrupt. Exactly which rules are you willing to abide by in your effort to win and prevent our destruction?
To be continued…
Michelle Malkin: ONCE MORE, INTO THE TOILET
Belmont Club has more…
Instapundit with more…
Check out this Bill Whittle Post over at Eject Eject Eject.
being forcibly ripped from his family’s hands by Agents of Janet Reno. Opponents of efforts to stop illegal immigration want to conjure up the ugliest pictures in our minds so that they can continue to take advantage of people who have no more rights than slaves in our workplaces.
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