Moron, a lot of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq paid with their lives for the overly cautious rules of engagement the brass forced them to follow. The one constant in all of this is the guys at the sharp end of the stick, the ones doing the dirty jobs that no one wants to talk about, get hung out to dry when the danger has passed. Cue Jack Nicolson.
Sadly, America is getting closer to this every day. Yeah, we may not have an official "gestapo" just yet, but it's the nature of Leftist governments in general to eventually end up with one. Adherence to our Constitution would prevent such... but we passed on that quite some time back.
[Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi] was respected very much by the US army. If he wanted to visit people in another camp he could, but we couldn’t. And all the while, a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology. Abu Ahmed
What if? That’s the ultimate justification, that’s why we must keep torture on the table, that’s why we must get them to talk, that’s why we must get the information by any means necessary. It always comes down to this trump card, the one nobody wants to argue with: What if? “What if the terrorists had your family? What if they had an atom bomb hidden in a city with your family strapped to it and you caught one of those bastards and there was only an hour left and there was no time to evacuate and millions were going die? Including your family! Huh? What about that? Are you saying you wouldn’t do whatever was necessary to get that information? I bet you would!” You’re right, I would. I, me personally? I would do whatever it took, including torture, if that was the only way to save the city, if that was the only way to save my family, if that was the only way to save you. As a military officer, yes, I would. Absolutely. I wouldn’t order my men to do it, I’d do it myself. I shove a hose up the bastard’s nose and turn on the water. I’d shoot out his knees. I’d cut off his balls. You bet. If that’s what it took. I’d do it without hesitation. And I’d do it knowing I was breaking the law, and I would expect to be tried for the crime and sent to prison. I would. Because even if I saved the day, I’d be wrong. Good intentions do not justify evil. more . . .
Yep, the liberal asshole who wrote this article looks like a real, noble bad ass, im sure hed swoop in the and save the day and then he would call for his own prosecution, cause hes a bad ass liberal with nothing but pure motives, lol
Given that he's retired military and you . . . aren't . . ., I'll stick with his take on the matter. But thank you so much for participating.
If 9/11 was a test of America’s national character, we failed it. As distant as this possibility seems now, Americans of all creeds, colors and political affiliations felt united for a few weeks after the collapse of the Twin Towers. Yes, that soon gave way to jingoism, to strip-mall attacks on presumed Muslims and to the invasion of Afghanistan, which even a cursory, Cliffs Notes history of the Near East will tell you is the place where empires go to die. But bear with me for a moment here. For any New Yorker who lived through that time, those weeks of trauma and communal mourning remain a key event in one’s personal relationship to the city. I can remember the mounds of white dust inside the storefronts near Ground Zero. I can remember when every Urdu-speaking cab driver and Cantonese-speaking shopkeeper sported an American flag. I can remember the NYPD bagpipe choir marching through the mists of Broadway early one morning, in memory of their fallen brothers. Those images and many more, like especially lucid dreams, will be with me until I die. If the attacks themselves seemed like a latter-day Pearl Harbor, a call to unified national purpose, it soon became apparent that there was no purpose around which we could unite. The “war on terror” had no clear enemy, no clear goals and no conceivable end point. There was no Berlin to capture, no Wehrmacht troops who could surrender and go home to lead peaceful lives. Although the war may be endless, a great victory has already been won: the victory over democracy by the “imperial executive” and the forces of the “deep state,” a new form of soft totalitarianism more cleverly disguised than the older and more obvious ones. A democratic government is supposed to operate with the consent of the governed. When the governed are conditioned by fear, bathed in paranoid propaganda and offered only one choice – trust us to keep you safe, or face the wrath of a world that hates you – consent becomes a matter of instinct, or pathological compulsion. more . . .