Keep those echolocators movin’…
Leftsiiide!!
Ryan Sager makes excellent points regarding the lack of intelligent debate about both the definition of torture and about what is acceptable treatment of prisoners in an asymmetrical, semi-covert war. Make no mistake, these are two different questions.
An excerpt, (read the entire article):
..In fact, it’s remarkable, since the Amnesty-gulag comparison, the extent to which administration supporters have begun to express great pride that America’s interrogation facilities are so much more humane than those of Saddam — or those of the insurgents just recently found torturing Iraqis in Karabila. And, of course, America is far more humane than any of the savage groups to which it is being compared.
Which is the point. It is just as much the fault of the Amnesty Internationals of the world as it is of the Scott McClellans that, so long as we’re not beheading hostages or fitting them up with electric wires, Bush administration apologists can declare victory.
There’s an important debate to be had in this country about just how far we’re willing to go in our interrogations. But it’s a difficult debate to even get started when one side thinks that we should be extremely concerned with the possibility that someone, somewhere might have desecrated the Korans of the people responsible for the murders of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, three-thousand Americans and now hundreds upon hundreds of Iraqi civilians.
Sager is right that there is an important debate being obstructed by Leftwing hyperbole.
I have used this argument myself: “We’re so much better than our critics that they should shut up.”
That is an argument as accurate as it is easy; and as unsatisfying as it is relativist. But it will have to do until we hear reality-based objections..
We don’t have to be perfect not to have to be subjected to the BS spewing out from the Left. They refuse to take this seriously.
It would be foolish to get into a debate about the upper limit for the volume knob on Christina Aguilera cuts when the moonbats are screaming it’s torture in the first place.
At one time people were publicly drawn and quartered. When that ceased, people were still publicly hanged. We have since adopted more sensibility (if not always necessarily sense; I remember Willie Horton) in our treatment of prisoners – war and otherwise.
But this is a war, and these are not “crimnals” in the “criminal justice” sense. They are illegal combatants.
No uniform, no ID, blending in with civilians. If captured in WWII we’d simply have shot them after a brief military tribunal. And they us, under the same circumstances. The Geneva Conventions presume a certain battlefield honor is required to receive protection.
The detainees have none of it.
The point is that criticism can’t even be heard until we stop getting such hysterical and utterly ridiculous complaints as those to which we are now subjected.
Chris Muir once again captures it.
See also Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg for further debunking.