Muslim Rioters Threaten Belgian Gov’t, U.S. Gov’t Fights Back with The Comfy Chair
I’ve been unplugged from news for nearly all of August. Life has been busy. But I did get sucked into this debate, which I think went pretty well. In course of digging up links for that, I came across two stories worth saving:
Brussels court upholds ban on anti-Islamization protest planned for Sept. 11. The headline pretty much says it all. A Brussels group wants to protest the Islamicization of Europe, and the mayor banned the protest, saying that the group is inflammatory and would disturb public order. Translation: The Belgian government already understands that it cannot maintain order if it too strenuously opposes Muslim demands. Europe is lost.
Mark Steyn reviews a book of poetry from prisoners at Guantanamo Bay:
The jacket of Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak shows a photograph by Paul J. Richards of Agence France-Presse: a close-up of the shackles that chain a man’s ankles to the floor while he’s being interrogated. But what rang a bell with me was the strip of carpet you can glimpse just above it. I visited Gitmo last fall — for Ramadan, as it happens — and, among other highlights, got to visit the interrogation room. The detainees are questioned while seated on a La-Z-Boy recliner or a sofa — blue plush with gold piping.
. . .
I mention the La-Z-Boy recliner not to make a political argument so much as an artistic one. Presumably when Paul J. Richards snapped his pic for Agence France-Presse, either the La-Z-Boy or the sofa was in the frame. But the Iowa University Press chose to crop the furniture out of the cover shot. Why? You can figure they’d have left it in if there’d been a rickety wooden chair under a bare lightbulb swinging on a frayed cord. But a book with a La-Z-Boy on the front doesn’t exactly shriek “Death camp!”
Steyn must not be a Monty Python fan, or he would surely have worked in a reference to the Spanish Inquisition’s Comfy Chair Torture. (Script here. Video here. And even if you’ve seen it before, watch the video. It’s funnier than I remembered.
Are you suggesting that being held without charge and for indefinite time is ok if the furniture is sufficiently comfortable?
Comment by jez — September 5, 2007 @ 9:42 am
No, Jez. I’m saying that the media-created image of the US gov’t and military as sadistic thugs is pure leftist propaganda. They publish that propaganda for short-term political advantage, but the long-term costs to the country—and especially our allies—is horrifying.
We have always had a military justice system separate from the criminal justice system, and we always will, because we must. It would be suicidal to treat prisoners of war like common criminals.
Comment by BenBateman — September 6, 2007 @ 12:47 pm
But they are’nt treated like prisoners of war! How come Geneva does not apply?
Comment by jez — September 6, 2007 @ 6:48 pm
As I understand it:
1) Geneva doesn’t apply because the people we’re fighting didn’t sign it and don’t follow it.
2) Even if Geneva did apply, then the people we captured would not be prisoners of war because they don’t carry their arms openly and they don’t wear uniforms.
The Conventions themselves are pretty complicated, but here’s the White House press secretary giving Bush’s view.
Comment by BenBateman — September 7, 2007 @ 1:10 pm
Are you saying that although they’re not technically prisoners of war, the USA has undertaken to treat them exactly like prisoners of war?
Comment by jez — September 10, 2007 @ 11:19 am
The USA has undertaken to treat them humanely. And we have. The Left’s propaganda about how these men have been brutally tortured and so forth is beyond preposterous. These men are more comfortable than they’ve ever been in their lives. If those same men had captured you or me, this is the sort of treatment we would receive.
Comment by BenBateman — September 11, 2007 @ 9:01 am
I guess your point is valid, as far as it goes. Prisoners probably aren’t treated inhumanely.
But for me, not being held without trial or evidence is one of those non-negotiable things that a country must successfully and unfailingly apply in order to qualify as civilised.
This isn’t a war, detainees aren’t soldiers, they are not prisoners of war. Therefore they should be prisoners. Charge them. Holding a person purely for questioning for years at a time is unacceptable. You understand the importance of traditional values, what about the traditional legal values that have existed since the magna carta?
Comment by jez — September 12, 2007 @ 5:49 am
I think this is a war, Jez, and that these men were captured on battlefields while trying to kill U.S. soldiers.
It’s strange for you to appeal to traditional values, because what you want isn’t traditional at all. Battlefield justice has always been harsh in the English tradition, though not nearly as harsh as in most traditions. The rights you want these people to have traditionally only applied to civilian citizens, not to every person on the planet, and not even to our own soldiers.
What you want is completely new—and completely unworkable. It’s a typical liberal thing: You want to issue this grand edict to feel good about yourself, but you don’t have any idea what the real consequences are. You expect somebody else to work out the details.
This sort of liberal edict was one of the big government mistakes that led to the 9/11 attack. In 1995 Jamie Gorelick, then deputy US attorney general, decreed that the FBI and CIA could not share information with each other. Gorelick admitted that the policy went beyond what the law required, and investigators complained about it. But none of that mattered, because the liberals were able to feel good about themselves for making life harder on those meanies in law enforcement. As usual, somebody else had to pay the price for their warm fuzzies.
The Guantanamo complaints are the same story: You think that it would feel good to punish the military meanies, and here you think you have an opportunity to do it. But there’s a price to be paid for denying the military access to the information it needs. And I for one will not sit quietly as liberals try to get their warm fuzzies while putting our soldiers at unnecessary risk.
Comment by BenBateman — September 13, 2007 @ 12:44 pm
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Comment by Stasigr — October 29, 2007 @ 2:40 am
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Comment by Stasigrii — November 4, 2007 @ 7:51 am