The full title of the email I got from NewsMax.com was really NewsMax.com but what caught my eye was something that had nothing to do with the US Supreme Court.
And in a conversation about the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, the former POW said as a result of the abuse revelations he'd "hate to be the next American captured by the enemy."
Is there anyone with the slightest bit of intelligence that really believes that what did or did not happen at Abu Ghraib has any bearing whatsoever as to how our troops would fare should they God Forbid fall into Terrorist hands?
I mean did the world at large and the forces arrayed against us pay
This is from the same cloth as the outrage over suspected mistreatment of theQuran in Gitmo. Those who shrieked the loudest about that were totally silent when in Saudi Arabia, demonstrators held up Qurans for futile protection and were run down by Security Forces and the Qurans trampled under foot.
This is like the outcry in the Media and other venues when the Uzbek authorities fired upon demonstrators, The US had a base there so our faces became blackened , Not much was reported in the Major Media when after the incident created tensions between the US and that government we were asked and agreed to remove our base.
You see folks it is NOT about the things we have done are purported to have done, or have been done by those associated with us have done.
It is about us. the US , no matter what we do or do not do something can always be found to rabble rouse in the MidEast and Europe and in the Political Left in this county> You can take that to the Bank.
If it were really about Abu Ghraib then there would be some consideration to perspective such as that presented by Christopher Hitchens in A War to Be Proud Of
From the September 5 / September 12, 2005 issue: The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied?
by Christopher Hitchens
09/05/2005, Volume 010, Issue 47
LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."
I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner? And where should one begin?
Oh you see a lot of solemn head shaking somber words of condemnation, but on the reality, on the alternatives to our actions of going into Iraq? Silence, the silence of the ashamed and the spleen of the rhetoric is in part more bitter because we are succeeding despite the constant repetition that we are failing and that is the one thing that galls the Left the worst. That is the reason they have abandoned their moral stance of generations and are vehemently supporting Fascistic Fanatic Thugs.
The world has changed that much. The same voices that used to be raised against the Right for supporting Fascistic Dictatorships and Oppression are now raised in support of the same and against those who have deposed them. Michael Moore calls Minutemen those who walk into a crowd of children getting candy from American GIs and blow them into scraps of bloody dead meat. Who would have thought during the great upheaval of the 60s that the same political forces would one day stoop to such venality?
If I could have stood before Senator McCain when uttered those words, he'd "hate to be the next American captured by the enemy I would have liked to ask him where he got the idea that anything we do or do not do would affect how they treat us or anyone else for that matter?
I mean, if we are speaking about conditions mandated by the Geneva Convention? Civilians are supposed to be Protected Persons what manner of protection has the Geneva Convention given to Iraqi Civilians, Women and Children?
For that matter, what level of protection has the Geneva Convention ever given to our own troops?
Did it protect them from the Nazis?
Did it protect them from the Japanese?
Did it protect them from the Koreans?
Did it protect the Senator himself from the Vietnamese?
Who has ever honored that Convention?
Aside from the UK and the US?
It did not protect the captured German troop from the Soviets did it? Nor did it protect the captured Polish Army officers and Cadets from the Soviets in the Katyn Forest Massacre
Someone please if you can source when and where the Geneva Conventions were honored by other powers besides the US and the UK please leave the information in the comments section.
To my mind Abu Ghraib has no bearing whatsoever on how our troops will be treated if captured and the Geneva Convention is a meaningless piece of paper ignored by everyone except us and some of our allies.
It is a set of rules that no one plays by but us and we are held strictly to account devoid of any rational logic.
Abu Ghraibs happen in War, and we PUNISH those that do so if they are our own, NOT because the Geneva Convention says so, but because OUR Law says so.
Because there are some thing AMERICANS do not do.
I will have to admit making murdering scum stand with underwear on their heads, or terrifying them is not what I think of as torture. Feeding a young athlete into a woodchopper for losing an International Contest? Police Stations with meathooks in the ceiling for questioning prisoners? Those are the things I think of. Those are some of the things we put an end to. Those are some of the things that would have continued has the Political Forces arrayed against our Intervention prevailed.
THAT is the real truth of Iraq.
And Senator McCain's statement?
It is a fatuous political cheapshot.
OR I wrong him and his statement is a sincere expression of his true convictions.
In which case in my opinion the man has a blind spot of the reality of the world so broad as to make him completely unfit for the Presidency.
Posted by ky/kentuckydan
at 6:35 AM CDT
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Updated: Monday, 17 October 2005 7:10 AM CDT
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Updated: Monday, 17 October 2005 7:10 AM CDT