It seems every bleeding-heart is up in arms today over reports CIA interrogators were mean to terrorists. If, that is, bleeding-hearts aren’t opposed to being up in arms, so to speak. Anyway, this article from MSNBC details some of the shocking claims against these evil, bad men.
The CIA that is, not, of course, the terrorists who we all know are freedom-loving patriots.
Now I’m not saying I’d want to share a meal with someone who threatened to kill my children or have my mother raped in front of me, but it would certainly get me thinking. Thinking about what information I could give up to avoid such things.
I hesitate to use the word “war,” as in “Global War on Terror” because it tends to diminish the term. Kinda like the “war on drugs” or the “war on poverty.” Yeah, both of those have been going swimmingly.
The truth is though, we are engaged in an armed conflict. An armed conflict with groups who think kidnapping people, cutting their heads off with knives and videotaping the proceedings is a legitimate act. An armed conflict with people who would be quite happy to kill you, your family, friends and everyone else you know and don’t know without blinking an eye.
Did you ever see The Untouchables? Remember the scene where Sean Connery got fed up with the mob guy not talking, so he went outside and grabbed the dead body of another mob guy? “What’s amatter? Can’t ya talk with a gun in your mouth?” he asks the corpse before shooting him to scare the live one into talking.
“They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That's* the *Chicago* way!”
I have no problem using the *Chicago* way. Although I’m sure people I like and respect will disagree with me. But that’s the beauty of this, as civilized people, we can agree to disagree and then go out for a Jameson’s and talk about it some more.
There is one funny thing about this suit from the American Civil Liberties Union. In its efforts to protect terrorists already in custody the ACLU is endangering the lives of terrorists’ pals who have yet to be captured.
How the hell can that be you ask?
Well, it’s very simple and it goes like this: Since dealing with captured terrorists is getting to be such a gigantic pain in the ass with you standing a really good chance of ending up in federal prison, there just won’t be prisoners. In the future the good guys – that’s us for those of you not following, our Marines, soldiers, SEALs, CIA guys and whatnot – will just shoot the bad guys in the head, launch a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone or put a laser dot on the target to make sure the GBU-12 hits the spot. You see, it’s a whole lot easier and safer for our troops to kill the bad guys than to try to take them alive. All things being equal, which choice do you think they’ll make?
Call it an effect of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
So I’d like to take this opportunity to say thanks to ACLU (who’s work, I should add, I generally support) for doing its part to keep our troops safe. Although the loss of actionable intelligence from live prisoners might tend to make the rest of us less safe.
Oh well, everything in life is a trade off.
I guess crime really doesn’t pay.
Instead of paying the Somali pirates who’d taken a U.S. sea captain hostage the $2 million they asked for – like many governments have done lately to recover their own sailors – the U.S. Navy chose a much cheaper solution: three bullets.
Even counting the cost of the fuel oil burned by the flotilla of ships surrounding the lifeboat carrying Capt. Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama and the three now, very, very much dead pirates, I’d say they chose the better alternative.
All in all, a very pleasing outcome to the situation. For more, read the NYT’s article.
The article does bring up a couple of interesting points in my mind, chief among them is this: Why the hell did the Navy have to get permission from the president to shoot these fuckers? Does it really take executive authority of that nature to kill foreign pirates actually in the act of piracy?
Or, the less desirable option in my mind, someone in the administration told them they couldn’t shoot without executive permission.
Actually, both of these choices are pretty distasteful. One the right hand you have military leaders unwilling to take a clearly military action without political coverage from above, making them unworthy of their commands. Seriously, how hard is it to order SEALs to shoot three guys? Or, on the left hand, you have political officials who’ve told the military they’re cops now (no offense to the cops out there, but your job is different from the military) and they can’t just kill the bad guys.[Note: Upon further reading about this situation in other news sources, it seems the actual shoot order came from the ship's captain under the White House's guidance of "all necessary measures" to recover Phillips safely. While the NYT's description was not inaccurate, it could have been a little clearer. My bad. The situations I described above, however, are not unknown in military/political decision-making process, unfortunately.]This is a situation, the whole “Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden” thing, requires only one order from the president: Shoot to kill on sight. Use missiles if you like and send us the strike footage, we’ll make popcorn and host a screening on the Mall.
See, one of the things the NYT got right in its article was this line: “The pirates threatened to kill Captain Phillips if attacked, and the result was tragicomic: the world’s most powerful navy vs. a lifeboat.”
I can understand our diplomatic restraint when dealing with Iran, Germany, Syria, France Venezuela, Canada, hell, even North Korea. They’re nation-states and a different set of rules apply. (I’m kidding about Canada and Germany. OK, France too, though they do so try my patience sometimes.)
A little more from the NYT:
In Somalia itself, other pirates reacted angrily to the news that Captain Phillips had been rescued, and some said they would avenge the deaths of their colleagues by killing Americans in sea hijackings to come.
' "Every country will be treated the way it treats us," Abdullahi Lami, one of the pirates holding a Greek ship anchored in the pirate den of Gaan, a central Somali town, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying in a telephone interview. "In the future, America will be the one mourning and crying." '
Two words jackass: Get bent. Somewhere out there, there’s a SEAL, Ranger, Marine or Delta sniper with your name on a bullet.
Here’s a nice little mission for the world’s most powerful navy: blockade the “pirate den” of Gaan with a couple of destroyers (or half the U.S. Fifth Fleet for that matter) and then hunt down the pirates and kill them. They try to leave port: shoot ‘em. They threaten to kill any of the 200 or so hostages they’ve taken off of the 12 ships they’re holding, shoot them some more. They actually shoot any of the hostages, shoot them even more. In a situation like this, power comes straight from the barrel of a gun or, in our case, lots and lots of guns. Lots and lots of really big fucking guns.
Does anyone really think these guys are ever going to go back to fishing? No? Didn’t think so, so we’re going to have to kill them anyway at some point so why not now?
Sean Connery said it best as Officer Jim Malone in The Untouchables: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way!”
What the hell fun is it being a great power if you can’t kill a bunch of pirates? Seriously, it’s not like anyone (worth mentioning) is going to complain. This would also have the beneficial side-effect of making some of the other nations that annoy us just a bit scared of what we might do to them if they fuck with us.
A little known historical fact: The United States’ very, very first expression of power overseas was dealing with the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean. Instead of paying tribute to the pirates (which is exactly what is happening now), the U.S. decided to build a navy and take the fight to the pirates. (If you want, you can still see one of these ships, USS Constitution – “Old Ironsides” – in Boston Harbor.)
It took a little while, but in the end the United States was the first major power to stop paying tribute to the Barbary pirates. The exploits of some even ended up in a song: “From the Halls of Montezuma, To the shores of Tripoli. We have fought our country’s battles in the air, on land and sea.”
