Middle Earth Journal: It depends on the threat

Friday, September 15, 2006

It depends on the threat

The Democrat's very own neocon nut case, Marshall Wittmann, likes to say that "the lefties" think George W. Bush is a greater threat than al-Qeada. Well it all depends on what threat you are talking about and which one you think is greater. The United States is facing two major threats. One is al-Qaeda and Islamic terrorism, a largely criminal threat involving periodic physical harm. The greater threat as I see it is an internal one that threatens the very values that have made the United States great. The first threat will not result in the end of the United States as we know it, the second will. The same man, George W. Bush, who made the blatantly absurd statement that the terrorists "hate us because of our freedoms" has done everything he could to undermine those freedoms and the values of the United States. A recent example is given in a Washington Post editorial today, A Defining Moment for America - The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture.

PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.

Of course, Mr. Bush didn't come out and say he's lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to "an alternative set of procedures" for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won't have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and "waterboarding," or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

It would appear that there are enough Republicans in the Senate who are not Bush cultists to stop this attack on American values. They are backed up by a couple of former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Gen. John W. Vessey Jr: "No matter how true that may be, inhumanity and cruelty are not new to warfare nor to enemies we have faced in the past. . . . Through those years, we held to our own values. We should continue to do so."