Paid in full

Today Al-quaeda released a video of Osama bin-Laden spouting off his usual drivel, followed by video images of the mutilation of the bodies of 2 US Soldiers. They claimed it was in response to the alleged rape/murder committed by the Pendleton 8.

Thankfully, the majority of the MSM has had the class not to show the video. How did we respond? The DOD today released a memo moving the detainee status of the terrorists at camp Gitmo from “unlawful combatant” to “Prisoner of War.” This gives these untermensch status and rights under the provisions of the Geneva Convention. They hack our soldiers to bits, we give their soldiers rights.

However, there is a good reason to give them status as POWs: if they were not wearing a uniform, we can try them as spies and execute them outright. In the Second World War, the United States captured eight German saboteurs who were out of uniform and executed six of them. Also, Article 5 states that: “Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention.

Of course, none of that’s going to happen. We’ll treat them like little pampered princes so as not to offend the IRC, Human Rights Watch, or any of the rest of the hand-wringing crowd. I suppose the next thing will be to offer them all citizenship, full pardons, condos in Waikiki, and free corvettes. Perhaps we could even agree to let them kill a few women and children every year to fulfill their personal jihad, so we don’t violate their religious beliefs any further.

We could make two statements in one here, we could load them up in B-52s and drop them on North Korea’s missile launch pads and nuke reactors from 80,000 feet, sans parachutes, or even perhaps return them to Palestine, via the Israeli Army, who assuredly would be a bit less moved by the humanity of it all.

Alas, al-queso has decided to do this as “punishment” for the alleged crimes of others. Since that debt has now been paid in full, I say try the Pendleton 8, and if found guilty, they walk, since their debt is paid. If they’re found innocent, then we exact vengeance, in spades, against all of our POWs. (On a side note, are the folks who routinely stone women for getting raped really that upset over this?)

The Hague/Geneva conventions are a great, and unrealistic idea. (Much like the UN.) We’ve yet to see what warfare would be like if both sides played by the rules. Hell, it’d probably last forever, given the POW swaps, and knowing that if you surrender, you be given food, clothing, care, and treated better than you were in boot camp. We wouldn’t have war, just armies surrendering to each other all the time. Wouldn’t that confound the press and politicians? But the fact remains: if you are about to be captured by our religion of peace brethren, you can guarantee that if they don’t just behead you, you’ll be tortured. By the way, it’s the really gross marquis-de-sade-when-he’s-off-his-Zoloft kind of torture, not a girl walking you around by a leash, standing on a box with a bag over your head, naked brady-bunch pyramid, stress position kind of “torture” that (if you survived) would leave you permanently disfigured, mentally and crippled, and horribly psychologically scarred. So, like the poem says, “when the hostiles come to take your scalp, just empty your canteen, put your pistol to your head, and go to Fiddler’s Green.”

That’s it. Our fighting forces have these options: Fight and maybe die, or surrender and definitely get tortured and die and have your body displayed on TV for the world and your parents to see.

Can anyone tell me why (not the policy reason, the real, logical reason) we even hold these folks after we drain them of intel value? I say give ‘em $.09 worth of copper and lead, applied behind the ear, and toss ‘em into Guantanimo Bay for the manatees to eat. The folks we’re fighting now fight to the death, or surrender only when they are wounded, can’t fight, and can’t run, because they know we’ll never hurt them once they give up. It doesn’t matter if they kill one or two, or even fifty others before they surrender, we’ve bound ourselves to an outdated utopian idea of warfare that ties our hands while freeing theirs. Line the road from Baghdad to Kabul (yes, I know that’s right through Iran) with crosses bearing the dying and dead bodies of our enemies. We know how our enemy treats us when captured, we claim to take the moral high ground and hold ourselves as better than that. That’s all well and good when someone isn’t carving your body up to send a message. Morality in war. What a ridiculous concept: to make war, the most horrible thing one man can inflict on another, more palatable to those who aren’t fighting it. Why not make one out of every three bullets a dud, to give the enemy a better chance to surrender and end this more humanely?

Wow. All that without cursing.

--Chuck