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Can anyone imagine sending your children around the world to fight, putting their lives on the line, and then your leader lets the enemy go to fight them again? It's more than treasonous. I don't know how our military does it anymore, but then again I've heard some pretty wimpy Admirals on the news lately. Politics seems to be the number one priority for our top military leaders now.
We are lucky that some Americans are still willing to try to defend this country despite the domestic and foreign policy corruption and the unnecessary danger they are put in through government pandering to a subhuman enemy.
By "would have gone to Canada" do you mean instead of conscription for sacrifice in Vietnam? I feel badly for those who went there, whether or not they chose to, thinking it was for this country rather than the mindless Kennedy-Johnson adventure that it was. The draft made it much worse and many innocent intended victims honorably resisted it, some resorting to Canada but there were many other ways.
The Vietnam war was not a good or appropriate means of fighting communism. Read or re-read Ayn Rand's very important essay "The Wreckage Of The Consensus
". Anyone has a right to fight communism, but Vietnam was not in our interest, which is required for a rational foreign policy.
You say you mentioned going to Canada only facetiously, but for many it was very serious in the face of conscription. Opposition to the Vietnam war and the draft does not mean siding with the left, which wanted the Viet Cong to win and did not oppose forced national servitude.
Personally, I wish they had been shot on sight, but, that’s not where we are at.
This does not compute.
Jan
It's disgraceful. Charge them with a crime or release them. If the criminal justice system can be circumvented just by a gov't official condemning suspects with an epithet, we really don't have rule of law. We should release all suspects and apologize we didn't follow our system of law, which is actually good and should be a model for dealing with people accused of heinous crimes in all countries.
There are many that would beg to differ with you what actually goes on at Gitmo. These prisoners are in fact people first and foremost and they have inalienable rights that we as objectivists acknowledge by the nature of the facts of reality concerning what type of beings they are.
You first said they are "put under torture", and now changed it to "why wouldn't they be". The fact is that they are not.
The "type of being they are" is responsible for its actions. "People first" do not remain innocent after they have committed acts of terrorism, which is why they have surrendered their right to be treated as normal human beings. You are an apologist for terrorist thugs, which contradicts the very possibility of defending a moral, free society.
Yes. We have no idea who is guilty without a legal system. Without it we're just making stuff up. Not only does it keep us from finding out whose guilty, it sets a precedent for other cases of taking people's freedom or assets without due process.
Again, show me the international statute or convention affording people such as these (specifically TERRORISTS) any legal protection at all. If you can't this is all emotion driven bluster.
Soldier: a person who serves in an army; a person engaged in military service.
Terrorism definition. Acts of violence committed by groups that view themselves as victimized by some notable historical wrong. Although these groups have no formal connection with governments, they usually have the financial and moral backing of sympathetic governments.
It looks like the only difference between the two is how they fight and how much government support they have.
A soldier, at least in this country, is someone who volunteers to give-up his liberty and his constitutional rights to receive training and pick-up arms to defend the Nation and its interests. Further, soldiers agree to a code of conduct which prohibits acts common to terrorists. A solider is an individual deserving of honor and respect because they ALLOW others in this nation to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness because of their sacrifice.
Terrorist - a collection of people bound by an ideal who use any means necessary to make a political statement. Terrorists have no code of conduct prohibiting their behavior and use civilians as fodder, shields, and weapons to achieve their objectives.
I could go into the whole uniform, national flag, defined landmass discussion but I know my piecemeal approach to articulating it would leave far too much out.
There is a huge difference between killing someone in battle and murdering innocent civilian to make a statement. It is for this reason that the relativism far too many people in this country practice toward our soldiers makes me sickened and is a disservice to their sacrifice.
I do not believe the word 'terrorist' has any meaning, so I'm not creating any equivalence to it. Can soldiers commit acts of terrorism? I don't have an answer b/c terrorism is not real. It's like a swear word. People who commit violent crimes to make a political statement deserve to be called a swear word, though, so that part makes sense. But more important than swearing at them, which I support, is having a system to prove who committed and aided the crimes and put them in jail.
I can't believe anyone can say this with a straight face. "If it saves one life..." is the road to tyranny.
It's disgraceful they even set up special prisons outside of the legal system. I am disappointed President Obama didn't shut down the prison at Gitmo and other foreign locations altogether. American needs to show the world how we try and incarcerate the criminals of the world, the people almost everyone wants to see behind bars. Instead we push the boundaries of the law and forgo the moral high ground.
harsh? Try getting you head chopped off on camera with a knife.
Even paradise island can become a hell hole...
Are the lowliest criminals on Earth even part of a model for civilized behavior?
the elimination of pests when they attack --
I kill ants when they get into my food,
don't you? -- j
There's no war, legitimate or otherwise. It's only similar to war in that it's an opportunity for people in power to say, 'this is _so_ bad that we need rule of people instead of rule of law'.
A 'crime' is a violation of rights against the law in the context of an otherwise civilized society. An organized attack on a country is war. They are different concepts.
"Not recognizing those who have done and seek to do you harm does in no way mean that these people are misunderstood or do not exist. In fact, this stance can only ensure your demise should those throwbacks decide one day to come for you and yours.
Not sure how I diced that up.
that they have dehumanized themselves. -- j
monsters really do exist
When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.
I run out of cheeks. -- j
Could you finish the quote and briefly say how it relates.
a model for your behavior, but apparently not. . I view
the world as a wild place needing to be tamed, much
as Rand did, I believe. . sometimes, when people
turn into base animals, the taming gets rough. -- j
I agree with that. The wild part of the world is the system the first system that evolved to deal with crime. A person is discouraged from committing a heinous crime because he knows that rage may drive him or his family to come after the criminal even if it's a great cost, even if it's not in their own self-interest. In the civilized world, the law takes the place of that rage.
This reminds me of the "Riots Are Good" article. Before the law, that's all we had. One group of enraged people afraid of another group of enraged people. That genetic makeshift criminal justice system got the human race by until we developed legal systems: rules written down before the fact and institutions that attempt to enforce them without regard to opinions of powerful people.
We need the law esp in cases where we feel something is so bad it should just go to a mob vote or some other extrajudicial means.
see what they are. . if my defensive armor
reflects their evil back onto them, I consider
that it is their evil and not mine. . please remember
that the initiation of force is bad. Nazis did a
lot of that, also, just like the beheaders. . -- j
guantanamo. they probably should have met
their maker on the battlefield. -- j
"Turning the other cheek" does not save lives from Islamo-fascists.
in both senses. -- j
Jan
'caught in action' and 'accused' are the same thing, except the first one presumes guilt.
Err that is called a terrorist. And they aren't so few (may cells/groups), they aren't so limited regionally, nor are they poorly armed or funded. ISIS.
Okay. So terrorist equals someone who commits a violent crime for political reasons? Can a terrorist group be part of a state, like a secret police force in a totalitarian country? Can a mostly free country ever have leadership that carries out a few limited terrorist attacks for political reasons, i.e. attacking a civilian target to put pressure on enemy leadership? If someone does something illegal in his country for political reasons and someone dies as a direct result, is that person now a "terrorist"?
I guess if the answer is yes, then "terrorism" is a reasonable word that conveys "politically motivated violent crime" in one word. But more often it just conveys "time to turn off our brains." I've heard people use it to describe the most mundane decisions likes a change in a tariff.
Turning off your brain to someone, some group, who openly threatens mortal harm AND have proven their willingness to carry it out is fatally foolish.
Doing it piecemeal almost 6 years later, is both stupid and reprehensible. The criminals he releases will serve as rallying-totems for the moslem fanatics, and waste precious resources by inducing the GOP to form committees that watch his left hand while his 'lefter' hand does something worse!
To put the Nation on a wartime footing without a declaration of war leads to the Viet Nam style, political war, fight to a push, walk away from to spoils engagements we have long suffered.
To paraphrase Don Imus, "if we are going to send our youth and treasure over there, we need to let them kill every SOB in sight." Our political war, designed to spur the economies without total destruction, always have "rules of engagement".
What better place is there for the highest enemies of modern civilization than GITMO? On the one side are the sharks in the sea, on the other the loving arms of the Castro family. viva la gitmo!
Bush had the right, via congress, to use military force in the Bush Doctrine of fighting them preemptively over there rather than defensively over here. Progressives and liberals can argue about enemy combatants, because there is no war and therefore no enemy combatants.
Their argument almost holds water until considering the magnitude of their acts. These are not assault or battery or robbery/murder. These are mass killings, battlefield killings, genocide, and they have declared war against the US. So, with tongue in cheek, I can say it makes perfect sense to try them in open court in the juris diction of their offense, with the rest of the freaks in lock up. Perfect sense.
My reference to insurance was simply to point out that words matter, actions matter, and while the feeling may be the same, the parsed words of lawyers and politicians can be wildly different in meaning.
I'm all for the Bush doctrine. Shoot 'em over there before they bring the terror over here. After 9/11 GW Bush should have asked for a "Declaration of War" rather than congressional approval of the war powers act. It not only would make a difference in POW treatment, but it probably would make a difference in how we prosecuted the war. Playing to a tie is not the same as winning. Just my opinions. I have noticed they are not calling me for advice these days. I guess they are doing fine without my help.