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IN BRIEF

Tuesday will be a big posting day here because I will be stuck at home with little else to do as contractors install a new floor so posts should appear throughout the day. I’d post tonight but quite frankly, my brain is too fried to concentrate on much of anything.

I did read an interesting post on H-Diplo by Professor Tom Nichols of the Naval War College where he was commenting on the limitations of consulting academics when dealing with foreign policy problems. He summed it up rather nicely I believe.

LIBERALS AND NGOS WRONG ONCE AGAIN AS GITMO PAROLEES REJOIN AL QAIDA

Apparently you can take the Islamist out of al Qaida but you can’t take al Qaida out of the Islamists.

The cries for civilian courtroom proceedings for war criminals captured by the U.S. military and coalition forces that have rung indignantly from the EU to the ACLU claiming all kinds of mistaken identity as obviously bewildered and harmless Pushtun goat herders were shanghaied to Cuba, just failed a critical reality check. The prisoners at Guantanamo considered least threatening or possibly innocent and paroled under Liberal and international pressure seem to have run off and re-joined al Qaida and the Taliban. Go figure. What were the odds ?

“One of the repatriated prisoners is still at large after taking leadership of a militant faction in Pakistan and aligning himself with al Qaeda, Pakistani officials said. In telephone calls to Pakistani reporters, he has bragged that he tricked his U.S. interrogators into believing he was someone else



Another returned captive is an Afghan teenager who had spent two years at a special compound for young detainees at the military prison in Cuba, where he learned English, played sports and watched videos, informed sources said. U.S. officials believed they had persuaded him to abandon his life with the Taliban, but recently the young man, now 18, was recaptured with other Taliban fighters near Kandahar, Afghanistan, according to the sources, who asked for anonymity because they were discussing sensitive military information…



….The latest case emerged two weeks ago when two Chinese engineers working on a dam project in Pakistan’s lawless Waziristan region were kidnapped. The commander of a tribal militant group, Abdullah Mehsud, 29, told reporters by satellite phone that his followers were responsible for the abductions.

Mehsud said he spent two years at Guantanamo Bay after being captured in 2002 in Afghanistan fighting alongside the Taliban. At the time he was carrying a false Afghan identity card, and while in custody he maintained the fiction that he was an innocent Afghan tribesman, he said. U.S. officials never realized he was a Pakistani with deep ties to militants in both countries, he added.

“I managed to keep my Pakistani identity hidden all these years,” he told Gulf News in a recent interview. Since his return to Pakistan in March, Pakistani newspapers have written lengthy accounts of Mehsud’s hair and looks, and the powerful appeal to militants of his fiery denunciations of the United States. “We would fight America and its allies,” he said in one interview, “until the very end.”….



….One former detainee who has not yet been able to take up arms is Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane, a Dane who also signed a promise to renounce violence. But in recent months he has told Danish media that he considers the written oath “toilet paper,” stated his plans to join the war in Chechnya and said Denmark’s prime minister is a valid target for terrorists. “



Yes liberals and leftists are at fault here but lets face it – many of them would be trying to block effective action regardless of the policy so long as Bush was president. The real blame here lies with the officials of the Bush administration who have not properly applied military law and procedure to captured combatants likely to have broken Geneva Convention rules regarding fighting out of uniform and targeting civilians.

While a desire for intelligence is natural and International Law and the Constitution allows for reasonable wartime captivity prior to trial, captivity in perpetuity was not an argument that was destined to fly in either venue. If we had gone forward with tribunals, which would have resulted in hard labor sentences cracking rocks at Leavenworth and not a few prisoners going to the firing squad, the Europeans and American Left would still have squealed but their argument that the U.S. was violating International Law would not have passed the laugh test.

Not to mention the stern message that military justice swiftly applied would have sent to the enemy. Somehow, video games and English lessons doesn’t have the same impact on a religious fanatic and ecstatic murderer as a prison cell or the gallows. Gee, perhaps if we want to see effective action taken we should hope al Qaida starts selling nickel bags of pot to chemotherapy patients or gets a burqa-clad woman to bare a breast on national television. Those activities seem to concentrate the minds of national policy makers far more than joining a psychotic, transnational, Islamist death-cult at war with the United States.

President Bush and senator Kerry should be asked how the U.S. should deal with the terrorists who violated their parole and what the punishment for that crime is under the laws of war ?

(Hat tip to Richard Jensen of C-Net)

THE POGROM OF THE GOLDEN SQUARE

NYT investigative reporter Edwin Black delves into the infamous massacre of Iraqi Jewry during WWII and the ties between Nazi Germany and the pro-Axis coup by pan-Arab and Islamist activists in Iraq. This article on HNN is excerpted from Mr.Black’s second book related to the Holocaust.

Perhaps someone can forward the article to Anatol Lieven ?

ALL WE NEED IS LOVE…LOVE IS ALL WE NEED

I have been remiss in pointing out that Shannon Love of The Chicago Boyz has been added to the blogroll in her own right. I’ve been following her for a little while on both sites and I have come away impressed with her keen intelligence. Here is one of her more recent efforts at skewering John Kerry on national security. Not hard to do but not easy to do well – and Shannon did an artful job. Here’s an excerpt:

“People make decisions based not on the merits of individual cases but by running the facts of each particular case through their existing model. People with different models arrive at different conclusions even if they start with the same set of facts. Even though the War on Terror is substantially different from the Cold War, Kerry still thinks about fighting Terrorism using the same fundamental concepts that he used to think about the Cold War. Kerry’s model results from a synthesis of New England Puritanism which directs the individual to look their own sins before blaming others and the crypto-marxist conceit that all the problems of the world have their major genesis in the actions of the Western commercial class. Therefore, when confronted with an external threat, Kerry’s first response is to ask, “What did we do to cause this?” His gut reaction to any attack will be to try to alter American behavior to placate the attacker.



Kerry’s Cold War stances clearly reflect this model. In a 1970 Harvard Crimsom interview, he advocated placing most U.S. foreign policy operations under the control of the United Nations. Since at that time Breshnev’s Soviet Union and Mao Tse-tung’s China had vetos on the U.N. security council it says a lot about how much he trusted American decision making. For the then 25 year old Yale graduate running for the U.S. congress, the Communist regimes where better decision makers on the just use of force than American democracy. “



Amen, sister.

THE LIBERAL HAWKS BEGIN TO FIGHT BACK

Recently I posted on ” The Left-Wing War on Liberal Hawks” describing Anatol Lieven’s rhetorical barrage against Paul Berman. Well, Slate has published a devastating counterattack on the insufferable Dr. Lieven. Go read it !

( Hat tip: JihadWatch)