Posted on 02/21/2006 4:39:17 PM PST by mdittmar
An Open Letter to Kevin Drum,Jane Mayer,et.al
Have you ever seen a man turned to mush? A man with a wife and kids. An educated man who spoke several languages. A man who long knew the leader of his country was vicious and who joined the enemies of the leader. A man in his 40s who voted in his first election only a few months before?
It is easy to opine about abuse and torture and rules of engagement on paper, thousands of miles away from the crack of an AK or the bone jarring concussion from a shaped charge or when you have never looked into the eyes of a terrorist who has sawed the head off another human.
Have you ever stood on a narrow ribbon of asphalt on a 110 degree day in Al Anbar?
Have you ever seen your roomate bleeding out on that narrow ribbon of asphalt? Then minutes later, finding the man who detonated the bomb hiding in a building filled with South African tank rounds and pagers?
What would you do if you had?
I had the honor of spending 5 months in Iraq with a platoon of infantry Marines and going with them outside the wire on dozens of missions.
They faced these situations. It was not an intellectual or bureaucratic exercise. The bullets, shrapnel and blood were real. The timeline from observation to action not days, or months or even minutes, but mere fractions of a second.
Have you faced these situations?
I have and know more who have seen worse.
When I watched 'Ali', an Iraqi national working with the Marines, being pulled out of a smoking humvee, his body charred and limbs hanging by threads the world changed for me. For if the bomb had gone off a minute earlier, it would have been me they pulled out of that smoldering humvee. My limbs would have been dangling. And the Marines would have seen me turned into mush.
You see, it is easy condemn extremely tough interrogation techniques, rough handling of detainees and use of force exceeding the rules of engagement from 8,000 miles away where your decisions hold no weight and the responsibility for your decisions affect no lives.
Imagine for a moment, you were charged with protecting the lives of 300,000,000 people. Could you even handle that responsiblity?
Could you even handle the responsiblity of watching your buddy's back as he cleared a house?
If you had that responsiblity, what decisions would you make? If the decisions are wrong, your buddy or thousands of people will die.
If it was your back that needed to be watched as you cleared the house, what decisions would you want your buddy to make?
And it is your back Rumsfeld and others are watching.
If another 9/11 happens and if it turns out that someone in Gitmo or an undisclosed facility had the info, but because the only questioning allowed by law was more gentle than an interrogation on Law & Order the information was never obtained, what will you opine then?
If you are the one determining the level of pressure during the interrogation, what would you authorize? If it would save 3,000 lives, would you authorize sleep deprivation, water boarding, staged kidnapping?
But you will never have that responsiblity. You are not accountable for your opinions. You will never have to cover your buddy's back in a place where the shrapnel, bullets and blood are real.
There will never be a blue ribbon panel to investigate and affix the blame for the deaths one of your decisions or opinions may have caused.
You will not stand on a ribbon of asphalt in Al Anbar and watch your roommate bleed out then catch the terrorist who did it.
For you it is all memos and moral standing from 8,000 miles away and opinions on paper for which you will not be held to account for one drop of blood.
Kevin you wrote, "The problem is that they don't understand how to fight it, and because of that we're losing the broader and more important ideological war against terrorism — and we're going to keep on losing it until they figure that out, something they show no signs of doing. That's the problem."
If the greater dar al islam will do this over a few cartoons, how can you seriously contend that treating captured terrorists like house guests will end jihad against the west.
[And also, in case you forgot, the so called 'abuses' at Gitmo happened after Sept. 11, 2001, not before it and Bin Laden's first fatwas appeared back when you were an independent blogger in the 1990s, when supposedly more enlightened people ran the executive branch.]
But just for a moment look at these pictures and ask yourself, what would you do to prevent it from ever happening again.
Any answer short of WHATEVER IT TAKES is unacceptable.
Amazing piece, thank you for the post.
Good post. It can't be put much clearer than that.
This is GOOD! VERY GOOD! A Solid Indictment of the MSM easy chair pundits.
Thanks for providing inspiration to those who care.
I hope that you woke at least one of these MSM typing-heads up.
In the Army,the MSM people were referred to as REMFS
thank you for this post
BTTT
Wow, thanks for posting this.
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