Days of Change

Day 172

“Terrorists have dirty beards and blow up airports.”

That is from the 1994 movie “The Chase” starring Charlie Sheen. In fact, that was a line his character Jack said after being called a terrorist. The irony is that Sheen is now fully on board the 9/11 inside job conspiracy wagon. And all those truther liars think that we are the terrorists.

Terrorists blow up airports and any other building with people inside. They hijack planes and crash them into buildings. They cut the heads off civilians. Terrorists also support regimes that treat women like animals. The Unitied States does not do this.

One of the bigger PUMA sites is siding with the jerk in the White House over this memo decision. His claim is that waterboarding, bugs and sleepless nights are worse than SERE training for American soldiers because the Americans volunteered for it. They can leave at any time. Let’s put aside the fact that when you commit terrorism, you have signed on to being the government’s guest for the near future. This argument is stupid on its face because ANY captivity could be considered torture.

The gold standard of taking prisoners is the Geneva Convention. Technically, since the Taliban have neither rank nor serial number, they are not protected under these guidelines. Leaving that aside, there are a lot of things we could do under the Geneva convention. We can kill every single Taliban member who does not surrender on the battlefield. We can bomb a country nonstop if we avoid population centers. We could put prisoners in a jail cell for 23 hours a day with no Koran, no religious services and a steady diet of soy paste with nutrients and all the water they can drink.

The pirate standoff lasted 4 days. It seems likely that had the military had authorization the first time Captain Phillips tried to escape, this would have ended sooner. The president fretted about the lives of FOUR lowlife pirates. What happens in Afghanistan or Pakistan when airstrikes are called for? How do we deal with prisoners with no jail for them? What is the end game for the administration in the Middle East that doesn’t end in millions of human beings living under miserable fundamentalist tyranny?

And why the hell are Democrats against Obama taking HIS side? I guess that Cheney hatred runs deep, even though he’s been out of office for 6 months.