Torture Report

I’ve seen this a few times on friends’ social media pages. I would like to respond to it.

First, the premise is flawed. It IS possible to be outraged by both. However we can only control what we control.

Yes, the Islamists are evil. Their agenda is to build a global Caliphate by force. It’s been their agenda since long before the events of September 11th, 2001. For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into the long history of assaults on Americans and other Westerners before and since 9/11. It suffices to say, September 11th CHANGED NOTHING. We were targets before and we’re still targets now. We can’t control what Islamists do. We can only control what WE do. In a free society people of conscious are free to voice their outrage over the things we’ve done since 9/11 that we find morally objectionable. It doesn’t lessen their outrage over what the Islamists are doing, nor does it make them less patriotic. As Fredrick Douglass once said: A true patriot is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.

I will freely admit that I’m not outraged over water boarding or any of the other atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Abu Zubaydah and his Ilk deserved EVERY ounce of pain and degradation they received. I don’t feel the least bit of sympathy of that garbage. I save my sympathy, empathy and outrage for those who didn’t deserve such treatment. You can shout, deride and degrade Westerners for opposing torture. But you can’t change the fact that people who turned out to be innocent were in fact tortured.

None of that however, in any way reduces my outrage over the beheading of Westerns, crucifixions of minority Muslims or the sexual enslavement of women. My feelings on these events are mutually exclusive. Perspective matters.

Second, I AM disappointed that in the wake of 9/11, the CIA threw away decades of common wisdom regarding those actions and their proven ineffectiveness.

Prior to the start of his torture Abu Zubaydah was giving up actionable intelligence to an FBI interrogator. AFTER the CIA stepped in and started torturing him, he gave up ZERO actionable intelligence. His FBI interrogator (a dude named Ali Soufan) wrote a book about what actually happened called, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda. <-Read that and How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq by Matthew Alexander. Abu Musab al Zarqawi was hunted down and killed successfully without using any of the methods applied at Guantanamo Bay. Why? The CIA’s own records (dating back to the Kennedy Assassination) prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they KNEW torture was a useless interrogation technique. So, what they did at Guantanamo Bay not only DIDN’T save lives. It and Abu Ghraib were used as a rallying cry to recruit MORE terrorists.

The only thing I’m sorry about, THE ONLY THING is that human rights violations were committed in my name as an American and it cost us more than just the moral high ground. It cost lives.

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. – Mary Wollstonecraft

Guantanamo Bay & the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act

You want Obama to keep his promise on Gitmo? Tell him to veto the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act. The world wouldn’t come to an end when he does. Congress has passed emergency budgets in the past. They will again. Everyone will get paid. However, he needs to veto the bill because of section 1034. Title X-General Provisions, Subtitle D-Counterterrorism, section 1034 “Prohibition on use of funds for the transfer or release of individuals detained at United States Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” It’s on page 391 of the bill.

Congress has inserted this amendment in EVERY NDAA since Obama took office. Congress has been cock-blocking the president on Gitmo from the start. It’s time for Obama to grow a pair and VETO the Bill.

If you agree go to

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/veto-fy2014-national-defense-authorization-act-close-detention-facility-guantanamo-bay-cuba/fnPPfQ6l

and sign my petition.

==================== UPDATES====================

As of 2013/06/21:

I only need 145 more signatures to make my petition publicly searchable on the White House Petition web site and 99,995 more signatures to receive a response from the White House.

As of 2013/06/18:

I only need 149 more signatures to make my petition publicly searchable on the White House Petition web site and 99,999 more signatures to receive a response from the White House.

Brigitte Gabriel: This Time She’s Gone Too Far

Brigitte Gabriel is an activist, author, fear–monger and racist. I’ve cut her a lot of slack over the years because I read her book about surviving the Lebanese Civil War of 1975 and couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. I find it hard to believe anyone could live through something like that and not bear emotional scars from it. I wrote an open letter to Gabriel in November of 2010 on this blog in response to a letter she had composed to the 112^th Congress that she wanted me to sign. In that letter (among other things) she expressed opposition to closing the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility and wanted the Military Tribunals to continue there. I said it then and maintain today that Civilian Criminal Courts are the preferred route for trial and sentencing of terrorists. It’s important to remember that men accused of terrorism are criminals, not soldiers. Elevating them to the level of “enemy combatants” and using military tribunals only lends false credibility to their crime by disguising it as “combat” or actual “warfare.” As opposed to the selfish, shameful, cowardly and criminal acts that they really are. Their activity is funded through illegal drug sales. They have mouth-pieces in the United States trying to subvert our laws to impose their own agendas. They are more like the scum-bags who populate Organized Crime Syndicates than the noble heroes of the Military. Anyway, I expressed my humble opinion and left it at that. As it turns out, she’s like a dog with a bone on the Military Tribunal issue. This time however, she has gone too far. I have received no less three letters from her in the last month asking me to sign a petition regarding Purple Hearts for the victims of the Fort Hood Massacre and the Little Rock Recruitment Center shooting. It appears this time she has teamed up with the sexist, Islamaphobic and racist Congressman Allen West of Florida who introduced legislation (H.R. 1142) called the Global Combat Zone Recognition Act. The purpose of this legislation (on the surface) seems to be to provide Purple Hearts to service members injured or killed by MAJ Nadal Hassan and Carlos Leon Bledsoe (a.k.a. Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammed). But if you read H.R.1142 more closely, you see that in order to qualify for the Purple Heart outside the combat zone, people like MAJ Hassan and Mr. Bledsoe would be inadvertently re-defined as “Enemy Combatants” thus removing them from the Criminal Court system (where these despicable embarrassments to the human race belong) and returning them to the realm of Military Tribunals. So essentially what Gabriel and West are doing is: Dangling Purple Hearts in front of mourning families and wounded soldiers in an effort to advance their Military Tribunal agenda. I urge EVERYONE to ignore these two ignorant hate-mongers. DO NOT let them play you.