Category Archives: War

Torturing The 'Torture' Issue

Ever wonder why the Democrats and their media lapdogs never shut-up about the issue of torture, when Bush’s decision to wage an unjust, illegal war ought to be the focus of their Ire? The matter of torture is, after all, subsumed within the broader category of an unjust war. Moreover, one can make the case for torture in desperate, dire situations. (I’m not making the case, I’m saying that one can attempt to justify incidents of torture: you were not thinking clearly, you were desperate to avert another disaster, you wanted to save hostages; you worried you’d be blamed if you didn’t extract crucial information.) But how on earth do you justify lugging an army across the ocean to occupy a third-world country that is no danger to you and has not threatened you? You don’t, you can’t.

Democrats are nearly as culpable as Republicans on the matter of the war on Iraq. So they stick with their limited, safe mandate of torture. MSNBC’s Maddow and Olbermann, and their constitutional scholar, are thus careful to skirt the need to prosecute Bush and his bandits for invading Iraq. Instead, they stick to waterboarding.

CNN confirms that “Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy has called for a commission on torture allegations”:

The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman called Wednesday for the establishment of a nonpartisan “commission of inquiry” to investigate allegations of wrongdoing against former Bush administration officials in their prosecution of the war on terrorism.

Nothing “did more to damage America’s place in the world than the revelation that our great nation stretched the law and the bounds of executive power to authorize torture and cruel treatment,” Sen. Patrick Leahy said at the start of a committee hearing.

American “detention policies and practices from Guantanamo Bay [Cuba] and Abu Ghraib [Iraq] have seriously eroded fundamental American principles of the rule of law,” he added.

Leahy, D-Vermont, called for the “truth commission” to have a “targeted mandate” focusing on issues of national security and executive power. He said it should look specifically at allegations of “questionable interrogation techniques,” “extraordinary rendition” and the “executive override of laws.”

He added that the commission should have the power to issue subpoenas and offer immunity to witnesses “in order to get to the whole truth.”

Leahy refused to rule out of the possibility of prosecutions for perjury committed during the commission’s hearings.

Update II: What Do You Know? We Are Not All Keynesians

Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, Economy, Inflation, Iraq, Israel, Media, Republicans, Socialism, Taxation, War

The Royal “We” is unwarranted; and it’s not only me. The following statement was signed by more than 200 academic economists, and posted by the Cato Institute. The Wall Street Journal buried the statement among a list of economists touting the stimulus package–and the “principle” of printing and borrowing the country out of a depression:

“Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s ‘lost decade’ in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.”

Update I (Jan 30): I always give credit where it’s due. Michelle Malkin is the only conservative writer that I know of who’s consistently protested the bailouts and assorted ‘stimuli’—not only the porky parts. And not because she is familiar with the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT), but because she is a true fiscal conservative. Good enough:

Stimulus Slush Fund for Housing Entitlement Thugs

The UAW’s Money-Squandering Corruptocracy

The Paulson Putsch: Time For A Fiscal-Conservative Counterinsurgency

Update II (Jan 31): Malkin’s moniker for her party: The Bend Over Republicans (BOR).

Malkin has incurred my libertarian wrath, expressed in “Internment Chic.” However, she deserves the credit Ann Coulter undeservedly gets.

The Canadian conservative writer Kevin Grace captured the core of Coulter’s “craft”:

“The secret to becoming a successful right-wing columnist is to echo the mob while complimenting yourself on your daring. That’s all there is to Ann Coulter’s craft, the rest is exploitation of the sexual masochism of the American male—he just can’t get enough of the kitten with claws.”

Or, as I’ve put it, “The secret to success is to keep the masses euphoric, moronic, and pheromonic.”

Coulter is an attractive GOP cheerleader, who has never opposed The Party in any meaningful way. When matters get heated, she further escapes into her formulaic, “Liberals This; Liberals That.” A recipe that works well for her.

The Big Lie About Obama And Race

America, Barack Obama, Race, Racism, War

The excerpt is from my new WND column, “The Big Lie About Obama And Race”:

“Allow me to put forth a simple proposition. The election of Obama is no racial milestone; it’s not that whites have come to their senses. But rather that African-Americans have finally done what’s right (to paraphrase the childish, churlish prose of one Rev. Lowery).

For the first time in a long time, the black community has put forward a candidate of caliber, a candidate the American people were only too willing to consider for the highest office in the land.

Until Barack, the black community had disgorged the likes of Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton. Be they black, brown, yellow or red (Rev. Lowery’s classification) – no sane American would elect those two phonies to serve on their local PTA board, much less in the Oval Office.” …

The complete column is “The Big Lie About Obama And Race”.

‘A’ For Al Jazeera

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Media, Middle East, South-Africa, The West, War

I’ve said it before: The Al Jazeera news network practices better journalism than its American cable counterparts. Al Jazeera is as partisan as the local cable cretins, however, it does know news–the art of reporting.

Writes Eric Calderwood, for the Boston Globe:

[I]n a larger sense, Al-Jazeera’s graphic response to CNN-style “bloodless war journalism” is a stinging rebuke to the way we now see and talk about war in the United States. It suggests that bloodless coverage of war is the privilege of a country far from conflict. Al-Jazeera’s brand of news – you could call it “blood journalism” – takes war for what it is: a brutal loss of human life. The images they show put you in visceral contact with the violence of war in a way statistics never could.

For an American, to watch Al-Jazeera’s coverage of Gaza is to realize that you’ve become alienated not just from war, but even from the representation of war as a real thing. As Americans, we’re used to hearing the sound of heavy artillery, machine guns, and bombs in action films and video games. Yet here on the news, they seem strangely out of place. You could argue that Al-Jazeera uses images of civilian violence to foment public outrage against Israel. This might well be true. At the same time, these images acknowledge human suffering and civilian death and stand strongly against them – and in doing so, foment outrage against war itself.

The complete essay is well-worth reading.

Worth watching is Al Jazeera’s “Saving Soweto”, a superb report detailing the heroic work of Christian and Jewish medical men in ministering to the multitudes. What would South Africa do without such people?! (Scroll down to “DESPERATELY SEEKING BOLLYWOOD’S BRANGELINA”)