Terrorism

I was alive during the 1972 Olympic Massacre, though I was rather young to have recognized the events as marking a fundamental shift in how the world functions.

Still, my own level of self-awareness notwithstanding, it was a turning point in that it made the nations of the world sit up and realize that Palestinian terrorist organizations had a very long reach, and that they weren’t going to go away on their own. One indirect result from this terrible act of mass murder was that the UN decided to grant legitimacy to the PLO a mere two years later, an attempt at appeasement that we’re still trying to deal with more than 3 decades later.

Steven Spielberg recently came out with a movie entitled Munich. In the film, a team of Israeli professionals are tasked to track down and assassinate the terrorists responsible for the Olympic murders. Although an undeniably well crafted film, Spielberg bends over backwards in an attempt to portray both sides of the conflict as being morally equal. This, in my opinion, is one flaw that simply cannot be overcome.

Read more

With all the coverage about the McCain Amendment, has anyone bothered to read the text? The news media only describe it as outlawing torture. The actual bill outlaws “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment,” which is a good deal broader. In fact, here is how the bill defines it:

(d) CRUEL, INHUMAN, OR DEGRADING TREATMENT OR PUNISHMENT DEFINED.–In this section, the term ”cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” means the cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984.

Leaving aside the UN convention for the moment, the Eighth Amendment is enough to seriously hamper the treatment of terrorist prisoners. Domestic interpretations of the Eighth Amendment have led to the release of convicted prisoners and those held for bail because of overcrowded conditions. For example, the old Charles Street Jail in Boston was condemned and converted to private housing because of successful legal action citing the Eighth Amendment. Inadequate toilet facilities, insufficient access to mental and physical health treatment, and solitary confinement have been found to be violations of Eighth Amendment rights. Boston Review has a very good overview of Eighth Amendment issues by Joan Dayan. The McCain Amendment bestows the same rights on terror suspects held anywhere by the US. Also, by granting these rights with reference to the US Constitution, it will be impossible to exclude lawsuits by detainees from the US court system. Brace yourselves for a Ramsey Clark extravaganza.

Preventing terrorists from gaining access to weapons of mass destruction must be elevated above all other problems of national security because it represents the greatest threat to the American people.

-Excerpt from one of the 9/11 Commission reports, as cited by Daniel Henninger (link requires WSJ subscription).

TIME dutifully reports that:

… as one Kabul cleric Mohammed Omar told newsmen, “The burning of these bodies is an offense against Muslims everywhere. Bodies are burned only in Hell.”

I know just what he has in mind.

At Mass yesterday the Gospel reading was Jesus’ admonition to forgive, Mt:18:21-35. The priest gave a solid enough homily on this point, with some reference to the attacks of four years ago. And he is right to say we should forgive the people who hate us and who attacked us. That does not mean, and he did not suggest, that we should not defend ourselves, or carry the war to them. We sang America as our recessional, yet another indication that the date is now solemnized as an annual patriotic memorial.

Forgiveness does not mean being naïve. It does not mean failing to recognize evil when you see it. It does mean not repaying evil with evil, but responding to evil with justice, not vengeance or hatred. President Bush is right to emphasize that we will bring our enemies to justice, or justice to them. We must prosecute our wars without rancor, without the madness that grips our enemies. Don’t take this from me, an armchair warrior, but from the real thing.

In his book On Combat Lt. Col. Dave Grossman quotes one of the Delta Force men who was engaged in the “Black Hawk Down” debacle in Somalia:

Don’t dehumanize those who disagree with us, or even hate us. Filling ourselves with hate is neither necessary to combat those who hate, nor is it productive. The professional soldier is one who is cold, dispassionate and regretful in his duty when forced to kill. … The steady trigger finger kills a lot more enemy than one that trembles with hatred. Take pride in the fact that we live in a country where we should treat Americans from all clans as Americans first and foremost; don’t stoop to the level of hating those who hate us. …

The practical tasks of destroying the people who want to destroy America is not advanced by hating them. Cool heads bring victory; steady aim puts the bullet on the mark. The moral task of transcending the people who would destroy America is not advanced by hating them, either. Our active enemies have made hating us the core of what they do and what they are. We need not and should not mirror-image this stupidity. We have much more to offer, much more to do, and fighting them does not define us. It is one distasteful task amidst many positive activities. They are simply in the way.

Removing the threat to America is a hard and dangerous and bloody task. We have gratitude and respect for those who bear the heaviest burden of doing that job — the kind of people Michael Yon writes about, for one example. As John Keegan wrote:

War is repugnant to the people of the United States; yet it is war that has made their nation and it is through their power to wage war that they dominate the world. Americans are proficient at war in the same way that they are proficient at work. It is a task, sometimes a duty. … Left to themselves, Americans build, cultivate, bridge, dam, canalize, invent, teach, manufacture, think, write, lock themselves in struggle with the eternal challenges that man has chosen to confront, and with an intensity not known elsewhere on the globe. Bidden to make war their work, American shoulder the burden with intimidating purpose. There is, as I have said, an American mystery, the nature of which I only begin to perceive. If I were obliged to define it, I would say it is the ethos – masculine, pervasive, unrelenting – of work as an end in itself. War is a form of work, and America makes war, however reluctantly, however unwillingly, in a particularly workmanlike way. I do not love war: but I love America.

I had this last year on 9/12, emphasizing that we should forget nothing, but that we should get on with it. I still think that.

God bless America.