Unserious Rhetoric on National Security

One of the many signs of the degeneration of our times is how many serious, even life-and-death issues are approached as talking points in a game of verbal fencing. Nothing illustrates this more than the fatuous, and even childish, controversy about “torturing” captured terrorists.

People’s actions often make far more sense than their words. Most of the people who are talking lofty talk about how we mustn’t descend to the level of our enemies would themselves behave very differently if presented with a comparable situation, instead of being presented with an opportunity to be morally one up with rhetoric.

What if it were your mother or your child who was tied up somewhere beside a ticking bomb and you had captured a terrorist who knew where that was? Face it: What you would do to that terrorist to make him talk would make waterboarding look like a picnic.

You wouldn’t care what the New York Times would say or what “world opinion” in the U.N. would say. You would save your loved one’s life and tell those other people what they could do.

But if the United States behaves that way it is called “arrogance” — even by American citizens. Indeed, even by the American president.

There is a big difference between being ponderous and being serious. It is scary when the president of the United States is not being serious about matters of life and death, saying that there are “other ways” of getting information from terrorists.

Maybe this is a step up from the previous talking point that “torture” had not gotten any important information out of terrorists. Only after this had been shown to be a flat-out lie did Barack Obama shift his rhetoric to the lame assertion that unspecified “other ways” could have been used.

From a man whose whole life has been based on style rather than substance, on rhetoric rather than reality, perhaps nothing better could have been expected. But that the media and the public would have become so mesmerized by the Obama cult that they could not see through this to think of their own survival, or that of this nation, is truly a chilling thought.

When we look back at history, it is amazing what foolish and even childish things people said and did on the eve of a catastrophe about to consume them. In 1938, with Hitler preparing to unleash a war in which tens of millions of men, women, and children would be slaughtered, the play that was the biggest hit on the Paris stage was about French and German reconciliation, and a French pacifist that year dedicated his book to Adolf Hitler.

When historians of the future look back on our era, what will they think of our time? Our media too squeamish to call murderous and sadistic terrorists anything worse than “militants” or “insurgents”? Our president going abroad to denigrate the country that elected him, pandering to feckless allies and outright enemies, and literally bowing to a foreign tyrant ruling a country from which most of the 9/11 terrorists came?

It is easy to make talking points about how Churchill did not torture German prisoners, even while London was being bombed. There was a very good reason for that: They were ordinary prisoners of war who were covered by the Geneva Convention and who didn’t know anything that would keep London from being bombed.

Whatever the verbal fencing over the meaning of the word “torture,” there is a fundamental difference between simply inflicting pain on innocent people for the sheer pleasure of it — which is what our terrorist enemies do — and getting life-saving information out of the terrorists by whatever means are necessary.

The Left has long confused physical parallels with moral parallels. But when a criminal shoots at a policeman and the policeman shoots back, physical equivalence is not moral equivalence. And what American intelligence agents have done to captured terrorists is not even physical equivalence.

If we have reached the point where we cannot be bothered to think beyond rhetoric or to make moral distinctions, then we have reached the point where our survival in an increasingly dangerous world of nuclear proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.

WRITTEN by Thomas Sowell as 'Talking Points' at the National Review on May 12th, 2009. As always, the title of this posting is a link to the original article.

TV Watch: '24'

After an extended delay that cost we fans of the Fox television series '24' almost the entire year of 2008, Jack is finally back. Intrepid U.S. counter-terrorist Jack Bauer that is, and he's on a mission to stop yet another crazed terrorist from laying waste to the land of the free and home of the brave.

This time around there are many new challenges facing Bauer and the series producers have also decided to bring some of today's top public issues into the discussion. These early episodes of the shows 7th season have brought the issues of coercive interrogation, torture and communications interception into play, and future episodes will be exploring these issues even more closely.

Taking on modern issues and putting them firmly into play is nothing new for the folks at '24', who this year have cast actress Cherry Jones as President Allison Taylor, the first female President of the United States. She follows on the heels of the early years of the show which featured regular character David Palmer as the first African-American U.S. President.

For those who have not followed closely, the basic plot of '24' surrounds Keifer Sutherland in a career-defining role as a U.S. undercover operative named Jack Bauer. Bauer has spent most of his adult life in highly sensitive, dangerous, and at times violent deep undercover operations for the government.

During most of the series he has publicly re-emerged and become a member of, and at times the head of, the fictional CTU (Counter-Terrorism Unit), and each season he and his CTU buddies are up against some major terrorist group planning some major strike against America. In fact they are often up against multiple groups with disparate agendas with multiple threats against our country developing as the day moves along.

I say as the 'day' moves along because that is the other major plot vehicle in the show. As it's name implies, '24' seasons happen within the span of one 24-hour day. Each episode shows what is happening during a particular hour of that time frame from the perspectives of Jack, his CTU co-workers, the President, the terrorists, and even in some of the characters families and personal lives.

I have a bit of a weird history with '24' in that it was one of those shows that always looked interesting to me, but was difficult to follow because of what I believe is one of it's main problems - it is network television. With a job like mine in police work, this didn't always prove conducive to my schedule, and once I missed the first season I just let it drop for a few years. I really believe that a show such as '24' could be so much better under the greater creative freedom and with the expanded viewing opportunities that a cable network such as HBO or Showtime could provide.

Anyway, I finally purchased the first four seasons after they were finished, and I caught up on DVD. Let me tell you that there is no better way to watch a television series than on DVD or recorded in some other way that allows you to fast-forward through commercials. These days I always 'DVR' the episodes on Comcast and then watch after they air for this very reason.

In any event, I caught up with Jack and his pals quickly through their first four years, and my opinion is that while the show remains well made they have been chasing their tails a bit since the 1st season. That first season of '24' was simply one of the best dramatic television seasons that I have ever seen, full of interesting plot twists, a solid story line, and strong acting. It showed Jack as both an agent and a family man, and his efforts to balance these roles and ultimately combine them when his family became involved in his work responsibilities.

If you have never followed the show it is well worth pursuing it on DVD or some other medium, starting from the beginning. In this current season, which began actually with a 2-hour television movie titled "24: Redemption" that aired back in late November, Jack battles a new enemy.

Instead of the radical Islamists and their sympathizers that have appropriately reared their heads in previous seasons, here it is an African dictator bent on genocide and keeping America out of his efforts to control his country with violence that is providing the danger. He also is up against the challenging fact that he is being questioned by a government panel investigating past allegations of torture and prisoner abuse.

All this on his plate, and his CTU has been disbanded, so he has no official agency to help support him. How can Jack Bauer possibly succeed without all of the CTU agents, gadgets, gizmos, and quirky-teckie support personnel? That is another twist which reveals itself early on, but I won't ruin it for you.

Suffice it to say that I am very glad that Jack is back. In these days of terrorism and other threats in reality to the very existence of our way of life, it is comforting to know that there are actually real people out there like him trying to keep us safe.

NOTE: This is a continuation of the 'TV Watch' series highlighting various programs that I recommend. All the articles in the series can be viewed by clicking in to that below label.

Obama-Dem Mistake #1

There are going to be many of them in the coming days, weeks, months and years (hopefully not too many years.) Major mistakes made by President Barack Obama, the Obama administration, and the Democratic Party power in the congress. Each one of them is going to need to be pointed out and explained. Any number of sources will take on that responsibility, and I am going to ensure that this blog covers the worst of these mistakes. The 'Obama-Dem Mistake #1' began this week with the order to close the prisoner holding facility at Guantanamo Bay, known as 'Gitmo'. For those who are unaware, Guantanamo Bay is located on the southeast edge of Cuba. In 1898, the U.S. established a naval base there, and the 1903 'Cuba-America Treaty' gave the U.S. a perpetual lease on this area. In 2002, three camps were established on the naval base for the detainment and interrogation of prisoners captured on the battlefields in the war on terrorism in the Middle East. There were no appropriate facilities that were acceptable from a security standpoint within the Middle East countries where these combatants were captured for their continued detainment. There was also no way that such individuals were going to be allowed on to U.S. mainland soil, subject to American laws, and allowed to have the American judicial system available to them as if they had the same rights as the average American citizen. These were people who were actively involved in a war against the United States and the entirety of western civilization. They have already been filtered out and it has been determined that there is a high probability that these detainees have particular intelligence or information of a sensitive nature going directly to the security of the United States and/or our troops. Many of them have also been trained to resist normal levels of questioning and usual interrogation methods. Gitmo was selected as a location where these individuals could be kept safe from everyday Americans, and where they could be controlled and interrogated outside the reach of the American legal system. Gitmo has been inappropriately characterized as a 'torture facility' by all of the usual liberal sources such as the ACLU. It is also seen as a linchpin in the overall war on terror, which the liberal community wants shut down. President Obama was elected by these folks, and one of his promises to them was that he would shut down Gitmo and put a halt to any alleged American torture practices. In one of his first acts, he has ordered that Gitmo shutdown to happen within a year, and has ordered that most interrogation be conducted pursuant to the Army field munual. In many cases our intelligence and military officials will now be more restricted when interrogating threats to our national security than are our nations police officers in interrogating common criminals. And as Gitmo is closed down, where will the detainees, all of whom are genuine threats to Americans, be sent? The first recourse will be to attempt returning them to their homelands. But as this has been tried in the past, these nations do not want and will not accept the individuals. Will these individuals simply be released on to the streets of the United States? The ones who do get accepted for return to their homelands, will they return to fighting America? These dangerous individuals are about to become some of the first pawns in the liberal Democrat game. Closing Gitmo and restricting our intel resources is the first mistake of the new Obama-Dem administration. We can only hope that the ultimate price paid is relatively small, and not something even more cataclysmic than the 9/11 attacks.