Posted on 07/10/2006 6:15:10 AM PDT by yoe
July 10, 2006 -- THE British military defines experience as the ability to recognize a mistake the second time you make it. By that standard, we should be very experienced in dealing with captured terrorists, since we've made the same mistake again and again. Violent Islamist extremists must be killed on the battlefield. Only in the rarest cases should they be taken prisoner. Few have serious intelligence value. And, once captured, there's no way to dispose of them. Killing terrorists during a conflict isn't barbaric or immoral - or even illegal. We've imposed rules upon ourselves that have no historical or judicial precedent. We haven't been stymied by others, but by ourselves.
The oft-cited, seldom-read Geneva and Hague Conventions define legal combatants as those who visibly identify themselves by wearing uniforms or distinguishing insignia (the latter provision covers honorable partisans - but no badges or armbands, no protection). Those who wear civilian clothes to ambush soldiers or collect intelligence are assassins and spies - beyond the pale of law.
Traditionally, those who masquerade as civilians in order to kill legal combatants have been executed promptly, without trial. Severity, not sloppy leftist pandering, kept warfare within some decent bounds at least part of the time. But we have reached a point at which the rules apply only to us, while our enemies are permitted unrestricted freedom.
The present situation encourages our enemies to behave wantonly, while crippling our attempts to deal with terror.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Great minds think alike! We even put the same snippet in our comments!
Makes sense to me.
I've been saying this now for years. There is only a very limited amount of intelligence we can gain from these guys and most of what we gain is from the papers we sieze or their computers. If we had been killing them right from the start, fewer of them would have decided to leave home and join the jihad, but since they are treated better after they are captured than they have ever been treated in their lives, there is little to deter them.
ALL OF THIS made possible by three institutions: the Democrat Party (liberals in government), the MainStream Media (liberals in the press), and the United Nations (liberals on the global stage).
In a time of war, when American soldiers are being killed, or captured and tortured, the Democrats support the enemy. The enemy has blood on their hands, and it drips from the teeth of their allies, the Democrat jackals.
The fewer prisoners we take the better.
Works for me.
We will need to quit embedding reporters with our troops if we change to this tactic.
Kill all terrorists except the ones who have some information and would be executed after a speedy military trial.
While this makes battlefield sense and has from the beginning, I simply do not know of any modern conflict that has ended in stable perpetuity because one side was able to kill all the other side.
By perverting the "Geneva Convention" into a US civil rights document, liberal lawyers have essentially neutered it as a military treaty.
Don't forget the liberal activists on the SCOTUS...they contributed to this farce more than most.
The concept is pretty simple: hide among civilians and wage or support murder?
Die.
As evidenced by the NY Times obsession with abu Garib ... 140 stories in the first two months (most on the front page) after the so called atrocities came to light. More recently two U.S. soldiers were captured by terrorists, tortured and horribly mutilated, to the extent when their bodies were found it took DNA testing to identify the remains. The NY Times gave the story one day of front page coverage ... after that, no further reference to the incident.
...and this, teach children at an early age not to throw rocks at people who have guns.
They need to know it's not worth a Kent State photo op.
This is the only statement in the article with which I disagree.
That about sums it up.
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