Torture and the Party-line ethic...

president hussein's recent and blatantly partisan move to release a hand-ful of memos from the Bush Administration regarding torture techniques has caused a tremendous amount of debate. Even within the hussein camp there is some disagreement on the relevance of the use of these techniques as noted in this CNN.com news article.

hussein has chosen this to be his "high horse" and he believes he is so high in the saddle now that no one could possibly see anything wrong. America, after all, stands for taking the high road and having better values than the rest of the world.... even though that position is at odds with where he is taking us, and indeed, how he has described us to the rest of the world.

To be sure we like to believe we are above the use of questionable tactics when engaging our enemies. It's a bit of a spit-and-polish job to imagine ourselves wearing the white hat, being the good cowboy in war. But the reality is that this WAS a wartime decision. A wartime decision from a war that Bush wisely noted we can not win in this generation.

And therein lies the split. The party-line ethic, if you will.

Our intelligence community has known for a great many years that there were organizations and countries who want nothing more than to destroy the United States. These are enemies who plot and conspire against us because our methods work. We live in peace and with freedom. You can't have that, it upsets their efforts to control, ruthlessly, their own people. After all, if Americans can live happily and in peace why can't others?

And yes, I AM considering the piece form a few days ago about Jackie Chan.

President George W. Bush understood that this was not an enemy who fought based on a physical issue, say, territorial dispute or some other traditional reason for war. This was an enemy for whom there could not be negotiations. When you hate someone because they are offensive to you on a religious ground then your God will not change his mind when the enemy apologizes to you. You'll still hate them, and you'll still want to kill them.

Therefore President Bush was forced to research the law to see what limits there were interrogation techniques. In fact, the initial uproar came with hussein releasing notes showing that Bush had, in fact, asked his lawyers to do just that.

If we were going to go up against an enemy not constrained by the rules of the Geneva Convention we needed to know how far was too far.

And honestly, in a brilliant move, Bush hit upon the right version. Knowing that we were not fighting an enemy with borders, an enemy fighting to protect their homeland, and therefore not only bound by the Geneva Convention, but legitimately deserving of all those protections (for instance, the Iraqi soldiers....) he chose to classify the Al Qaeda as a non-enemy combatant.

In other words, if you won't play by internationally recognized rules of warfare, you will not be granted the rights associated with them, and your fate is in your hands if you choose to go up against the US. So normal boundaries of interrogation were shifted.

They were NOT abolished.

The techniques employed still met a definition of humanitarian conditions. Much was made of the use of non-lethal insects to obtain information from the highest level Al Qaeda operative in US custody. How horrible for us that even though this guy wanted nothing more than to kill as many Americans as possible he was still given protections he would NOT afford an American under the same conditions.

Or don't you recall the taped and broadcast beheadings of captured Americans.

president hussein is adopting a dangerously naive attitude that our enemies have a right, a mandate from the masses, if you will, to hate us. And therefore the answer lies in appeasing them. Clearly they wouldn't have held Americans hostage and paraded them in front of cameras, showing their brutality and then publicly beheading them if we had only said "I'm sorry" earlier.

And most importantly, hussein is tying his handling of this issue of "torture" to a mandate to not have a fundamental split down party lines that could hamper the effectiveness of his government. Huh?

He controls with broad margins the House, The Senate, and the Media. He could decide to nuke Nebraska and he'd get a pass for it, and maybe a mild tongue-lashing from CNN. What does he care about party line ethos?

I'm guessing more than he wants us to know.

hussein was elected as a different leader who crossed party lines and brought everyone together. So far he's brought our enemies together and is making moves to alienate the Conservative Right. And now the Conservative Right is starting to unite together, and to his amazement, not on his side.

I'm Dr. Calamity and I approve this message.