Shut It Down

This is really getting ridiculous.

Now the headline is:

Jailers splashed Koran with urine - Pentagon

Which is false. It shouldn't be plural, and it implies it was intentional, when it was not.

But gee, shouldn't these "jailers" then be getting an NEA grant?

In the incident involving urine, which took place this past March, Southern Command said a guard left his post and urinated near an air vent and "the wind blew his urine through the vent" and into a cell block.

It said a detainee told guards the urine "splashed on him and his Koran." The statement said the detainee was given a new prison uniform and Koran, and that the guard was reprimanded and given duty in which he had no contact with prisoners.

And in other news, somewhere a leaf fell from a tree...what's your point???

People are disgustingly stupid.

They will eventually reap as they sow.

As Wretchard points out at Belmont Club,

Even if the US were to disappear entirely from the planet an unabated growth in terrorism would destroy Islam on its own. Once politics by violence, without restraint and without limit, becomes general it will eat out even those who spawned it.

You can imagine an alternative history where America never existed but in which the same terrible compound of nihilism and mass destruction capabilities obtained and the same tragedy would impend.

Force has utility along only part of its cost/benefit curve. At the extreme limit force is futile: using force to arrest a child molester has utility but by the time we get around to using nuclear weapons the utility of force is dubious. The entire goal of Cold War strategy was to keep the level of force from escalating too far up the curve. The tragic outcome of today's liberal strategy, with its "Abu Ghraib" fixation, is to guarantee that we cannot find stable solutions in the useful part of the curve. In place of a curve, they've created a discrete step function, where civilization is to endure every outrage uncomplaining while the threat grows until, at last, something snaps. Cool it, or lose it. Some may call it principled pacifism, but its real name is reckless cruelty.

He elaborates later:

Humanitarian law then, should theoretically do everything in its power to enhance this process, just as in the past century, it highlighted the practices most likely to assist civilians given the battlefield modalities of the day. However, humanitarian law in its current form sometimes does the very opposite and hinders this process. A captured terrorist is only obliged to state his name, rank and serial number. Tom Friedman of the New York Times argues that Guantanamo Bay should simply be shut down because it is so contrary to humanitarianism.

[Friedman writes:] I believe the stories emerging from Guantánamo are having a similar toxic effect on us - inflaming sentiments against the U.S. all over the world and providing recruitment energy on the Internet for those who would do us ill. Husain Haqqani, a thoughtful Pakistani scholar now teaching at Boston University, remarked to me: "When people like myself say American values must be emulated and America is a bastion of freedom, we get Guantánamo Bay thrown in our faces. When we talk about the America of Jefferson and Hamilton, people back home say to us: 'That is not the America we are dealing with. We are dealing with the America of imprisonment without trial.' " Guantánamo Bay is becoming the anti-Statue of Liberty.

What Mr. Friedman does not quantify is how many innocent civilians might die from mistaken engagement, friendly fire, bad targeting and what have you, if an alternative means of obtaining intelligence is not found. Would it be greater or less than the hundred or so Jihadis said to have died in US custody? Would it matter to those who regard Gitmo as the anti-Statue of Liberty? This is not an argument for torture: there are more effective ways than hostile interrogation to obtain intelligence including spying, wiretapping, surveillance and tracing through bank accounts. But it is an argument to recast humanitarian law to allow the gathering and application of that intelligence. Much of the historical impact of humanitarian law stemmed directly from the ability to gather and apply intelligence to discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. The devices of open cities, clearly marked ambulances, zones of safe passage, armbands for humanitarian personnel, etc are usages whose practical utility has expired under the deceptions of terrorist warfare, but their intent -- that of marking the limits of licit violence -- is sound. It is a distinction which can be based only on intellgence. Without that, humanitarian law is form without function on the modern terrorist battlefield, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

Sure, Friedman, let's shut it down tomorrow -- right after we execute every inmate according to the usual practice of dealing with illegal combatants such as pirates, spies, saboteurs, and terrorists.

We could do it tomorrow after a brief military tribunal.

Ought to do it, too.

This whole "held without charge" nonsense keeps getting repeated too.

If POWs don't get lawyers and charges but are held indefinitely for the duration of the war, without ANY access to courts, then how can these people, who don't even rise to the level of POW status, get more preferable legal treatment?

It's insane.

Commenter Pierre Legrand observes,

All of the sound and fury of Gitmo and Abu Garib are nothing more than attempts to weaken us by the enemy. Our main problem being that we havent as yet officially identified all of our enemies. Marxists, Earth Firsters, and various other loony moonbats of the left have banded together with the most unlikely of allies the Nazis and Islamic Fanatics to confront the biggest enemy of them all, Civilization. And we being the strongest representative of Civilization means we have a target on our backs. Defeat us and you win the world.

We allow them to define how the war is supposed to be fought then natually failing those unrealistic standards we fail. They have defined everything from victory to defeat and somehow the US is always standing at the finish line ahead of anyone else according to them. And we all allow this nonsense, in the middle of a war that can turn to our incredible disadvantage at any moment, we allow this fifth column to dominate the discussions.

And husker_met adds,

Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, if anything, are just one more set of recruiting tools...

Along with other egregious U.S. monstrosities and cultural violations as religious freedom, pork chops, cold beer and Madonna CDs.

Those who would fight the West don't need prisoner abuse to make their case to new recruits. Nearly everything we do or stand for adds to the mythology of the "Great Satan".

They were hating us long before either detention facility was open under U.S. ownership. What was the excuse then?

Bottom line: Who gives a big rat's ass about international law, Amnesty International, and A-Q recruitment websites? It's not like toeing the line in the eyes of these various outlets will stop Islamists from hating us. So why bother?

Why indeed?

And Cosmo eloquently writes,

Only a culture which considers free range chicken a demonstration of higher morality . . . one habitually accustomed to opting out of unpleasantness and sacrifice . . . one routinely spared the consequences of its most irresponsible behavior . . . could make the fantastic demand that the timeless brutality, injustices and moral quandries of war be somehow set aside -- like an entree ordered in a restaurant -- to suit its fussy sensibilities. And even more delusional -- to have these standards apply to only one combatant in a fight to the death.
...
Thank God Marines who waded into the barbarism of Tarawa or Iwo Jima -- good men who did what was necessary, made peace with themselves and went home to raise families and build the world we know -- weren't harassed with the hot house morality of liberal arts majors yipping and yapping about 'fairness' or insults to Bushido.

I note in passing that Irene Khan, the head of Amnesty International, who is not backing off claims that Gitmo is the "gulag of our time", happens to be a Muslim.

The MSM should spend a fraction of the time investigating the real scandal of our times, the UN's massive Oil-for-fraud program, that it does on monitoring the mental health of fascist killers.

Because their credibility is crumbling and their vicious propaganda is failing!

WASHINGTON, June 3, 2005 – The American public has more confidence in the military than in any other institution, according to a Gallup poll released this week.

Seventy-four percent of those surveyed in Gallup’s 2005 confidence poll said they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military - more than in a full range of other government, religious, economic, medical, business and news organizations.
...
The Gallup organization noted that public trust in television news and newspapers reached an all-time low this year, with 28 percent of responders expressing high confidence in them.

Take that, MSM! Ha ha ha ha ha!