Chumming The Waters

Well, prepare yourself for the media shark frenzy, everyone.  Mark my words, the liberal panty wastes are gonna swoop in on this little development.  No sooner did I spout off about how little I care about the human rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees, when I learn that one of them went and committed suicide.  I suppose he figured he was tired of waiting for his fourteen virgins in paradise, so he stepped up the timetable.  31 year-old Mohammed Ahmad Abdallah Salih (a.k.a. Al Hanashi) was found dead during a routine check by guards.  That’s really too bad – I was really hoping that he and I could have a nice game of chess over tea and crumpets.

On a quick tangent, did you ever notice how all of these terrorists have names as long as one of my blogs?  And even when you’ve gotten to the end of their ACTUAL name, there’s always the “alias” that inevitably follows.  I suppose if I were going to introduce myself to a group of Muslims, in order to “fit in”, I’d introduce myself as Maximilian Bartholemew Rufus Xavier Sasparilla Vanguard, a.k.a. WonderBoy.  And that’s still a lot shorter than most Islamic names I’ve seen in print.  I can’t imagine how in the hell they address each other in the Middle East when having a conversation.  I have a theory on this:  the reason that there’s never any successful or meaningful dialogue amongst warring parties in the Middle East is because they spend all their time introducing themselves to each other.  Here, we say, “Jim, this is Ed.  Ed, this is Jim.  Let’s get down to brass tacks and hash this out.”  In the Middle East, they spend the first fifteen minutes announcing their names, and the rest of the time yipping and yapping “Allah be praised,” “by the word of Allah,” or “by the blessing of Allah.”  By the time they’re ready to begin conversing, they’re all so annoyed and pissed off at each other that they end up wanting to kill one another.  Okay, so it’s a lame theory, but it was worth a shot…

Anyway, so now we have a dead detainee at Gitmo.  I can already hear the crybabies coming down hard on the concept of Gitmo, and how the institution is an atrocity by its very name, as if the words “Guantanamo Bay” themselves somehow motivated Al Hanashi to kill himself.  I could really care less about his motivation(s) for suicide.  We must keep in mind, folks, that most of these guys are suicidal to start with.  There have been dozens of reported suicide attempts at Gitmo since its inception, with around four successes prior to Hanashi’s.  Is that our fault?  Frankly, no.  These guys chose a path in life, and that path is death.  They chose to embrace an ideology that involves murder, oppression, intimidation, and coercion.  Nearly any one of these assholes would murder you or me in an instant.  And they would have done so long before they ever became a guest at Gitmo, so it’s a weak argument to say that their experiences at Gitmo have “created” the monsters that they are.  These monsters were created in the madrassas and terrorist training camps found in the barren wastelands of Afghanistan and Pakistan.  They were monsters long before we ever came upon them.  If they’re suicidal, it’s because they were trained to be so.

So again we come to the argument that Guantanamo Bay “must be closed”.  Why?  For what purpose?  The argument I keep hearing from “legalize my pot” liberals is that we must do so to improve our standing in the court of world opinion.  But here’s the thing:  if we do not intend to free the detainees, but simply relocate them, then what have we truly accomplished?  We’ve simply dispersed the true gripe that the “court of world opinion” has with Guantanamo Bay:  that these men are supposedly innocent and should be set free.  I don’t see what difference it makes whether these prisoners are detained at Gitmo, or whether they’re detained somewhere else.  As long as these men are still detained, we are never going to improve our standing in the court of world opinion.  The nations doing the most complaining are the ones that hate us anyway, and probably always will.  We can’t appease everyone.  We need to do what’s right, here.  And what’s right is to keep these animals from killing anyone else.  It’s already been proven that when we set these bastards free, they end up right back on the same battlefields from which they were captured.  And why were some of these guys set free?  Because the liberal lefties and their ACLU lawyers insisted that they be freed.  Why would they want them freed so badly?  Well, the argument has been that these men were never given fair trials.  Now mind you, most of these guys were plucked right off the smoldering battlefields of Afghanistan, with AK-47s and grenades still in hand, but why should that matter to the ACLU?  Let’s not forget the folks that back the ACLU.  I’m talking about such gentlemen as Mullah Louis Farrakhan and the “good” Reverend Al Sharpton, as well as everyone’s favorite media opportunist, Jesse Jackson.  You see, it’s all about the civil rights of the detainees, so they say.  Apparently it’s more important to worry about the civil rights of people who’d kill us all in a heartbeat than it is to step back and look at the situation in its proper perspective.

You know, I wonder how badly the ACLU would fight for me and my civil rights if I were a vicious mass murderer?  I’ll venture a wild guess and say that as long as I were only killing white people, the ACLU probably could care less.  I doubt I’d have Jesse or Reverend Al calling news conferences and staging protests for me to have my precious civil rights protected.  And I’m sure that the fact that I am white would have “nothing” to do with their blissful ignorance of my plight.  But you see, the dark-skinned fellows in Guantanamo, well, they deserve to have their civil rights protected.  Never mind that they’d behead you or me without hesitation, or strap on a C4-packed suicide belt loaded with nails, glass, and ball bearings, and detonate it on a bus or train or playground.  Never mind that if given access to a nuke, they’d take out millions without even giving it a second thought.  Their rights must be protected, or we look like “bad people.”  Excuse me, but, umm, aren’t the guys with the murderous intent the bad guys here?  By locking them up, we just want to keep them from doing any more harm.  Doesn’t that make us the protectors?  The defenders of freedom?  How is it so terrible to try and protect human life?  If that means locking up some really nasty people to do it, then what the fuck is the problem?  If it makes us unpopular, then LET US BE UNPOPULAR.  This isn’t a popularity contest, this is life and death.  Fuck world opinion.  What has any of these nations ever done for us?  We send billions of dollars in aid to all of these nations, trying to “buy” their respect.  And when we lock up terrorists, we’re demonized for it?  Cut off the money, and let ‘em keep complaining.  If they hate Americans, they hate Americans.  All the money and appeasement in the world is never going to change that.  When we keep reaching out to other nations of the world with money, we end up with one obvious result:  debt.  The other result is that these nations never figure out how to become self-sufficient.  Wanna fix this economy?  Let’s keep some liquid capital here and make it work for us.  It’s not doing much to help Pakistan, is it?

Gitmo should stay open, period.  And I think it should stay open in blatant DEFIANCE of all those people and all those nations who are so quick to accuse the U.S. of being such horrible “captors of the innocent.”  These detainees get three square “culturally sensitive” meals a day, the right to wear their religious garments, the right to a Koran, and a prayer mat to pray on five times a day.  Hell, we’ve even put up signs pointing East so that these arrogant killers can face Mecca when praying for our demise.  I’m sure Gitmo isn’t a beautiful resort, but prison isn’t supposed to be.  That’s why it’s called prison.

A high school acquaintance of mine recently put up the argument that Obama doesn’t intend to release the detainees.  My friend pointed out that, “…we’re just looking for the right place to put them.”  I shot back, “but we’ve already got a good place to put them:  Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”  Besides, aren’t most of our domestic prisons already full?  Yet another reason to keep Gitmo open.  Do we really trust other nations to keep these guys locked up?

In other related news…

I also read today that a new audio tape of Al Qaeda’s #2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri (no nickname was given), was released to the press.  Apparently old man Ayman has criticized Obama’s planned visit to Egypt this week, where Obama will attempt to appease, capitulate, and reach out to the Muslim world.

One of the more interesting tidbits from Zawahiri’s tirade was when he sarcastically claimed that Obama’s message came through to Muslims when, “…his administration continued to reject the appliance of the Geneva Conventions regarding Muslim prisoners in the crusade war against Islam that they call the war on terror."  This is obviously a direct reference to Guantanamo Bay, and/or possibly Abu Ghraib in Iraq.  He’s implying that we failed to observe the Geneva Conventions with regard to our detainees.  This is the same argument all of the Gitmo detractors have been using all along, this silly notion that we “can’t be a beacon of hope for freedom, democracy, and human rights” in the world when we don’t observe the Geneva Conventions ourselves.

Okay, that’s a cute argument, but I always love to counter it with another one.  When, in all of our experiences with the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or the insurgents in Iraq, have ANY of THEM ever observed the Geneva Conventions?  And why on God’s green earth would we ever let Al Qaeda attempt to use the Geneva Conventions as an argument against us?  It’s completely ludicrous.  We’re not lopping off heads, chopping off limbs, throwing acid into people’s faces, etc.  We got some water up Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nose.  Was that a nice thing to do?  Nope.  Was it anything CLOSE to the kinds of torture that Al Qaeda is responsible for?  Nope.  It’s all a matter of perspective, people, and I think those who keep harping on Gitmo’s closure have completely lost all perspective.  Al Qaeda horrifically tortures victims just for fun.  We harshly interrogated detainees to extract valuable intelligence to further our fight against terrorism.  KEEP IT IN PERSPECTIVE, people.  It’s night and day when you step back, take a deep breath, and look at the circumstances.  Learn to ignore the hype and the rhetoric, and look at the facts.

Let’s do some comparisons.  The Taliban takes random hostages, tortures them, uses them as human shields, beheads them, etc.  We take enemy combatants as prisoners, and try to extract information that we can use to save lives.  Al Qaeda suicide bombs public marketplaces or buildings to inflict as many innocent casualties as possible just to make “good press” for their cause.  We strategically precision bomb targets based on the best intelligence we can get so that we can surgically remove vicious killers from the earth a few at a time.  The Taliban and Al Qaeda do not observe the Geneva Conventions when they dress in civilian clothing and hide amongst the civilian population, making them impossible to detect.  Our soldiers proudly and bravely wear the uniform of our nation, often times at their own peril because they become obvious targets.

Why am I going through the exercise of making these obvious comparisons?  Again, it’s all about keeping it in perspective.  For whatever “horror” waterboarding may be, it doesn’t hold a candle to the horrors that our enemies have inflicted upon us.  We are nowhere near sinking to their level, so quit making the pathetic argument that “we’re no better than they are.”  What an insult to our armed forces.  We have rules of engagement, the enemy does not.  We’re fighting this war with one hand tied behind our backs, and the people looking to tie back the other hand are all of the liberal crybabies that have no fucking clue what it takes to defeat our enemies in this war, a war that we never asked for.

I’ve about had it with all of the political bullshit with regard to “torture”, “enhanced interrogation techniques”, and Guantanamo Bay’s impending closure.  Leave Gitmo open, leave the detainees there to rot, and everyone please stop whining about their fucking civil rights.  They don’t even know what civil rights are, and wouldn’t respect them even if they did.  Keep it in perspective.