Posted on 04/06/2006 8:09:44 AM PDT by Thanatos
Britain’s defense secretary says international terror has the potential to become civilization’s most dangerous enemy because al-Qaida fighters have access to destructive modern technology.
Because of that, Secretary John Reid suggested Wednesday night, international law, including the Geneva Conventions that set the laws of war, should be strengthened and expanded, not abandoned.
As important as ideological and cultural aspects are to the conflict, Reid said, “the nature of the enemy and its tactics and philosophy” lead to “the utter lack of constraint. Legal, moral, conventional self-discipline.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, Reid said terrorists of the 20th century, such as the Nazis, similarly ignored society’s norms.
“But what is new is the combination of wholesale license in the intention side and the use of indiscriminate violence allied to modern technological capacity and capability, at least potentially,” he said.
Reid called al-Qaida and other terrorist groups “absolutely a threat which is potentially, I think, greater than any we have ever faced.”
“While the evil intent was there in previous generations, constrained by relative inefficiency in technology,” Reid said, al-Qaida and other terrorist groups have “potential access to modern destructive capacity (of) unimaginable scale in the form of chemical, biological and radiological weapons.”
Reid said a major tactic of the al-Qaida network is to use the West’s system as a weapon of war by counting on the press’ freedom to wear down the civilian support for the fight.
“There would be no freedom of speech in a society ruled by al-Qaida,” Reid said. “In this life-and-death struggle, they want both their hands free and ours tied behind our back.”
On Iraq, Reid said other countries in the region - Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey - need to become involved in the country’s recovery.
“The ultimate solution in that area would be to ensure that these countries of the region itself play an important role,” Reid said.
I think the Democrat Party and every Liberal out there needs to be classified as "Terrorist Weapons of Mass Destruction", and I do not mean this in parody, I mean it as fact.
The Liberals and the Democrat Party has done more to aid the enemies of the United States more then the Japanese and Italy did to aid the Nazies in their quest to rule the world.
What is this guy smoking? The enemy isn't al Qaida...the enemy is allah.
Thanks for the post.
ping
As important as ideological and cultural aspects are to the conflict, Reid said, “the nature of the enemy and its tactics and philosophy” lead to “the utter lack of constraint. Legal, moral, conventional self-discipline.”
. . . international law, including the Geneva Conventions that set the laws of war, should be strengthened and expanded, not abandoned.
Absolutely, the Geneva Conventions need to be enforced and not abandoned.But the Conventions are designed to motivate hostile powers to enforce them on themselves, for want of any secular authority over the warring states. The US is an exemplar of a state which will not normally order its soldiers to violate the Geneva Conventions; indeed we will not normally wage war on another state which will not routinely violate the Geneva Conventions.
The trouble, as Secretary John Reid mentions, is that the powers which the U.S. is likely to become hostile to are contemptuous of the Geneva Conventions. It is difficult to think of any stricture of the Geneva Conventions which Al Qaeda and its operatives do not systematically violate.
And what is the result? The people who are in a position to attempt to enforce the Conventions by publicizing violations of them have moral authority at all over Al Qaeda - and both know it. Lacking any moral authority that would shame Al Qaeda, the reporters and other fine holier-than-thou liberals focus on the behavior of only party which is responsive to such shaming - the United States.
Does the United States detect and prosecute a small clique of prison guards for "abusing the rights of" captured members of al Qaeda? The reporters and other holier-than-thou liberals have a field day condemning the president and the entire chain of command - the very people who uncovered and prosecuted the malfeasance in the first place.
And what "rights" did the members of al Qaeda have which were violated by the malfeasant American jailkeepers? The Geneva Conventions do not assign rights to people who do not make a good-faith effort to operate under its strictures. The Geneva Conventions do not confer status on criminals.
To extend Geneva Convention protections to criminals would not strengthen the conventions but would be to delegitimate them.
Good-point bump.
The media and the ACLU have been similarly wilfully obtuse in insisting that international terrorists held in Guantanamo must have the rights of both Geneva signatories (they are not, since they are not agents of any statal power, but an armed NGO) and of U.S. citizens, or at least of legal aliens. As if, once captured by the Special Forces or General Dostum's partisans in Afghanistan, they somehow magically had conferred on them green-card status and the right to consult an attorney and a consul, and to be "tried" under U.S. criminal law with all its protections, which were, by the way, drawn and defined for U.S. citizens who are members of our compacted society.
The people about whom these liberals are so solicitous are neither compacted with us, nor at peace with us, but are instead hard-core, bitter-end, ruthless enemies who will stop at nothing.
Liberals are preoccupied, I think, with showing forth their liberalness, their ruthfulness, their compassion. They have this Barney-the-Dinosaur "I like you and you like me" attitude that is pathetic when it collides with real hatred such as that which burns inside people like Abu Ayman and Osama Bin Laden.
They are more occupied in their thoughts with their own moral solipsism, mental gymnastics, and moral narcissism than they are with the practical considerations of keeping their fellow-citizens from being burned alive in their beds by terrorists.
Thanks for the ping. More people are slowly beginning to realize that the leftists in this country want to see this country defeated and destroyed.
"The Liberals and the Democrat Party has done more to aid the enemies of the United States more then the Japanese and Italy did to aid the Nazies in their quest to rule the world."
Oh certainly, dissent is just like lending massive military assistance in a war, no difference at all here. Also, its terrible that the Democrates keep bombing our airbases in the mideast, We really need to put down their navy before they do any more harm.
Remember, it was not the genocide of the Nazis that was so horrible, it was the industrialization of it!
Other nations have committed crimes like this but were limited in their scope by the very nature of the acts,
most humans can only make so many personal kills without
becoming affected in one way or another, (as the Germans
themselves found out) hence the introduction of industrial
techniques.
Were the Islamic fanatics to over run Israel, we would see
no mercy and due to the shear numbers they would have to
resort to industrial methods just to handle everyone.
Israel will not go quietly into that Islamic night...
.....and neither will we!
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