No quarter in dealing with terrorists
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/Editorials/opnOPN69092106.htm Daytona Beach News-Journal, FL - On the subject of how to treat terrorists once caught in our fight against Islamofascists, the mainstream media would have us believe that we are torturing the ...
No quarter in dealing with terrorists
By KARL WEINBERG
COMMUNITY VOICE
On the subject of how to treat terrorists once caught in our fight against Islamofascists, the mainstream media would have us believe that we are torturing the captives by using sleep deprivation, loud rock'n' roll music, female interrogators and such. Many Americans, including me, do not believe this is torture at all. Instead, we believe that much harsher treatment should be used to get information from these terrorists.
While the U.S. Supreme Court, Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham have said these terrorists are covered under Common Article three of the Geneva Conventions, I and many other Americans with any common sense are not so sure. We do not believe in what should be called an "al-Qaida Bill of Rights."
According to article three, "persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely." I contend the Geneva Conventions do not cover these terrorists. There are three points of contention in Common Article three:
· These people are not part of an armed force from a nation-state or country. They do not belong to an "army" as such. They are terrorists. They wear no uniform; conform to no laws except their jihadist, Islamofascist religion.
· They were captured "taking part in the hostilities." They are in fact spies because they blend into the civilian population. They should be treated as spies. Spies are not covered under the Geneva Conventions. These people should be interrogated to the fullest extent; if that means a form of torture, so be it. We already know how they treat their captured -- they behead them.
· These people are trying to take over the civilized world. They do not care if we are civilized to them or not. They believe in a culture of death, not life, like those of the civilized world do. They do not follow the rules of the Geneva Conventions. All one has to do is remember the pictures from Somalia when one of our Blackhawk helicopters went down and our brave soldiers were tortured, killed and dragged through the streets for all to see. Or just a couple of months ago when one of our checkpoints in Iraq was attacked and two of our soldiers were taken, tortured and dismembered. So much for our enemies going by the Geneva Conventions.
The media would have us believe these terrorists will be nice to us if only we leave their soil and stop supporting Israel. I believe they will attack us wherever there is a civilized culture. The reason is that they are not civilized, nor is their version of their Islamofascist religion. These terrorists live in the sixth century in their minds.
All civilized countries should stand up to the Islamofascists. If we don't pay attention to what they are doing, through informants in their mosques, tracking them throughout the country and listening in on their conversations, we are going to be in a world of hurt. This is not Bush's war, it's a war on all civilized peoples brought to us by the Islamofascists.
Weinberg lives in Port Orange.
McCain’s Dubious High Ground National Review Online Blogs
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjRiNGIzYjE3ZjcxNzJiMGMyNTVhMGJhYjQ0MDNhNzk=
September 19, 2006 5:57 AM
McCain’s Dubious High Ground
John McCain and his band of Republican rebels defying President Bush on the issue of interrogation have a strange attachment to confused argumentation.
By Rich Lowry
For people supposedly occupying the moral high ground, John McCain and his band of Republican rebels defying President Bush on the issue of interrogation have a strange attachment to confused argumentation.
McCain’s Dubious High Ground 09/19
They maintain that the United States can’t define more precisely its obligations for the treatment of unlawful combatants under the vague language of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to allow the tough interrogations of terrorists, as Bush proposes, lest our troops in turn be tortured upon capture. McCain warns that such a definitional exercise risks “the lives of those Americans who risk everything to defend our country.” What pleasant, alternate reality does the Arizona Republican inhabit?
Perhaps he missed the story a few months ago about the two American soldiers captured by al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Qaeda released a video of them, described by the British newspaper The Guardian: “One of them, partially naked, had been beheaded and his chest cut open. The other’s face was bruised, his jaw apparently broken, and his leg had long gashes. Fighters were shown turning the bodies over and lifting the head of the decapitated man.”
This is savagery immune to a domestic legal debate in the U.S. Maybe McCain and Co. think that the U.S. debate at least will influence our more reasonable adversaries. But since when have we fought a regime — Saddam’s Iraq, Milosevic’s Serbia, North Vietnam, North Korea, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany — that is not barbarously committed to repression and murder?
No one in the U.S. had broached clarifying Common Article 3 in 1967 when McCain was shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese, who proceeded to beat him routinely and keep him in solitary confinement for years. The North Koreans were equally disgusting. As a U.S. Senate committee concluded: “American prisoners of war who were not deliberately murdered at the time of capture or shortly after capture, were beaten, wounded, starved and tortured.”
Ah, if only the North Koreans had known how committed we were to giving the widest possible Common Article 3 protections to terrorists, maybe they would have re-thought their detention policies. McCain and Co. have a case of treaty fetishism. That is the belief that a piece of paper will alter the behavior of thugs. But a government will abide by the Geneva Conventions only if it is civilized; and if it is civilized, it is unlikely we will be fighting it, which is why we don’t have to worry about defending ourselves from, say, the Danes.
McCain and his allies, however, apparently have trouble distinguishing between civilization and barbarity. “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in a widely circulated letter to McCain. “To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts.” So American troops fighting to establish decent governments halfway around the world can be confused morally with terrorists? What a slander, and how disgusting that a former secretary of state would give it any credence by repeating it.
The irony is that, for all his preening, McCain supports what he would call “torture” if the conditions are right. He has said of a ticking-time-bomb scenario — a terrorist has information of an imminent attack — “you do what you have to do. But you take responsibility for it” (i.e. get sued or prosecuted). In other words, McCain wants to make it legally problematic for interrogators to undertake the very interrogations that he supports.
In real life, the closest we get to a ticking-time-bomb scenario is the one that prompted the CIA interrogation program — the capture of high-level al Qaeda operatives with knowledge of ongoing plots. McCain can’t bring himself to say that he opposes the program outright, so he professes to support it, but refuses to give the program the legal cover necessary for it to continue. And this is the moral high ground?
— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.
© 2006 by King Features Syndicate
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