The path to, yet another, 9/11
By now, those who weren’t watching Sunday Night and/or Monday Night Football, may have seen ABC-TV’s docu-drama, “The Path to 9/11.” The mini-series documents what happens when government ignores its first responsibility, which is “to keep us safe and secure in our persons,” and thinks appeasement of evil is going to work. Partisan Democrats, who might be put off because the series ties the 9/11 tail to Bill Clinton’s donkey, would be well-advised to look to the lessons learned.
But here it is five years later and it looks like the ACLU and its cohorts in the Sinistra Media are determined to make sure we are blind to what those who would kill us are doing. Apparently, they have forgotten, or choose to ignore, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chat of September 11, 1941 (notice the date?) when he said: “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck you before you crush him…The time for active defense is now. Do not let us split hairs. Let us not say: We will only defend ourselves if the torpedo succeeds in getting home, or if the crew and the passengers are drowned. This is the time for prevention of attack…”
President Roosevelt saw Hitler as a rattlesnake even before Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and even before December 7, 1941. Most Americans did not want a war; however, no one, not even his political opponents, were calling President Roosevelt a “cowboy.” Back then, we had this old-fashioned conception that “politics end at the water’s edge.” Obviously, those days are gone and what our troops and intelligence services are doing to prevent another 9/11 have become a political football.
“Hard” interrogations (and I’m not even talking about real torture) have been replaced by “soft” interrogations. In that spirit, this former intelligence officer, who used to work at the U.S. Army, Europe Interrogation Center at Camp King (the former Nazi Dulag Luft) north of Frankfurt, West Germany, proposes the following “soft” tortures for the Islamic fascists currently held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility:
No more Sharia-approved cookies at tea time. The color-coordinated, tax-payer-funded prayer rugs must be replaced with rugs that do not match the walls. The precise GPS-derived direction to Mecca must be changed so that it is five degrees off. Posters of some of the great Jewish inventors, scientists, physicians and writers will be placed on the cell walls. (Of course, that will leave space for little else.) The American Pork Council will be asked to provide full-color, posters of some of their best products browning in a skillet. The heating/air-conditioning units in the cells will be set at 80 degrees F., instead of the current 72-degrees F.
If these measures do not force them to tell us where those nuclear devices planted under the Capitol or the Sears Tower or in Long Beach Harbor are located and when they are set to detonate, then we should just let them return to doing what they were doing before they were captured on the battlefields – as long as they promise to enroll in a “tell-it-to-a-mullah” anger-management program and (on the honor system) do ten hours of community service back home.
If these forms of “torture” do not work, let us hope we still have enough trusting allies who will allow captured terrorists to be “rendered” to them for some really stern rebukes. Meanwhile, we must confess that these detainees must be fed, watered and housed overnight in hotels or safe houses (AKA secret CIA prisons) while they are en route to allied “rendition” facilities.
But, let’s face it, if we can’t find allies to conduct those stern rebukes, then we’ll just have to ship those detainees over to Guantanamo Bay and wait, as long as it takes, for them to break down and tell us what we need to know before the next 9/11.
William Hamilton, a syndicated columnist, a featured commentator for USA Today and self-described “recovering lawyer and philosopher,” is the co-author of The Grand Conspiracy and The Panama Conspiracy – two thrillers about terrorism directed against the United States.
©2006. William Hamilton.
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