Recently, our new "Change" President announced that the government would release photos and documents that showed the "cruelty" of American military members when interrogating prisoners. Apparently we, the only country who appears to do so, did not follow the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war (by the way, those we have captured do not meet the criteria of a POW, so are not technically protected by that convention). I do not condone killing or maiming detainees...but I do condone our Intelligence people using whatever means necessary to get the information from them that will protect Americans. Here is an excerpt from an article I read in the Washington Times called Loose Lips or Loose Pics, Equally dangerous to national security. It compared the Nation's attitude now with that back during WWII. Here it is:
In an act that would have been unheard of during World War II, the Pentagon, in response to a lawsuit by the never-vigilant American Civil Liberties Union, will release by the end of May photos depicting the purported abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan by American personnel. No doubt this will make people who regard America - or at least the Bush administration - as a greater evil than al Qaeda feel better. It also is bound to encourage our enemies and discourage intelligence officers who risk their lives daily in faraway places to protect Americans and our way of life.
In any game, much less a war, when one player plays by a set of rules and the other plays by no rules at all, it does not take a genius to conclude who will win. America's enemies know how to play us and how to use our Constitution, legal system, the media and public opinion to advance their ends, while frustrating ours.
America-haters expect the public to recoil at tactics far less severe than the ones they use. They want us to believe our behavior is directly linked to theirs and that if we don't use techniques to extract information from suspected terrorists - information that might save American lives - then they won't torture Americans who might have information they need to help them kill more of us.
In any game, much less a war, when one player plays by a set of rules and the other plays by no rules at all, it does not take a genius to conclude who will win. America's enemies know how to play us and how to use our Constitution, legal system, the media and public opinion to advance their ends, while frustrating ours.
America-haters expect the public to recoil at tactics far less severe than the ones they use. They want us to believe our behavior is directly linked to theirs and that if we don't use techniques to extract information from suspected terrorists - information that might save American lives - then they won't torture Americans who might have information they need to help them kill more of us.
I can honestly say that if I were about to be captured in Iraq or Afghanistan, I would shoot myself in the head...because if I didn't do it then, after much torture and suffering...my enemy would. How many "POWs" have been returned alive from those two theaters? I'll tell you.....ZERO!!! The only ones who have returned have been headless or rescued. We are lying to ourselves if we think that if we treat them better they will treat us better. That is old school thinking that no longer applies. They need to be scared to get captured. Our enemies want all Americans dead, not just uniformed ones, at any cost...so we had better do what we need to do to defeat them!
