First off, I want to start out with a very pragmatic statement…..The first duty of the government is to insure its own survival. 

That must be the first duty of any organization, big or small.  Be it filing paperwork on a limited liability corporation, retaining a lawyer, or building an army, an organization or entity must work to establish itself in a secure and defensible manner.  Governments do this in many ways…..building an army is the most overt.  Comparable to that is levying taxes.  Then, infrastructure construction, securing of resources, building of relations with other governments…..these things are all done to secure the continued existence of the government in question.  The construction of the government does not matter where first-tier actions to maintain existence are concerned…..The kings of Assyria and Elam built armies, levied taxes, and constructed economic infrastructures.  The Continental Congress did the same thing.  Once survival is assured for the time being, second-tier actions are undertaken, such as addressing citizens’ rights, economic diversification and expansion, education systems, redefining governmental structures and the like.  To the Assyrians, laying siege to Jerusalem in 701 BC was akin to the United States creating the Internal Revenue Service…..both were internal, secondary-tier governmental actions meant to generate money for the central government. 

You get the gist of what I am saying.  Rome building roads and the USA building Interstate 70 is the same exact thing….it is a duty of government to protect itself. 

As I indicated before, the political construct that makes up the government isn’t a first-tier aspect of that government’s survival.  The Byzantine Empire lasted from 460 AD until 1453….and it was a patriarchal, religious, despotic plutocracy.  France has existed from 800 AD until now, and has been a hereditary monarchy, a dictatorship, a revolutionary tyranny, and a constitutional republic.  One might argue that France has lost several governments…..and it has.  However, the cycle shows itself to be true….each time, there was a rise to power, a period of top-tier actions to insure the survival of the new government (beheadings, purges, wars, seeking the allegiance of the military or Church), then a longer period of ‘shaking out’ the next-tier duties.  Ask the Second and Third Estates about that. 

A government has to have the ability to insure its own survival.  It has to be able to levy taxes, build a military, defend its borders, build an economic foundation, and attain sovereignty.  Our government, since it is a democracy, is not just the buildings in Washington….it is US.  Unlike the peasants of central Mesopotamia in 750 BC, we have a direct say in our governance.  If the government falls, we don’t just go back to the fields and tend the flocks….we lose the bulwark against the predations of natural law.  Liberty is freedom under the laws agreed upon by the governed.  Freedom, as we know it, isn’t the absence of law….that would be anarchy.  We have given our government very limited powers…but one of those powers is explicit:

“Provide for the common defense….”

Terrorists have attacked us.  They have hit us in New York, in Pennsylvania, in Arlington, in Afghanistan, Africa, Iraq, and in Indonesia.  They are trained how to resist current methods of interrogation.  In fact, many have gotten out of Guantanamo weighing more than they did when they arrived.  They do not mind being captured….in fact, it hels their cause, as we will address later.  Therefore, fighting and surrendering to US Forces is no big deal.  They are released, and we fight them again….and that has been documented as occurring more than once. 

The United States government, when we, who are the government, are threatened, must have the understood right to act in order to perpetuate itself.  Constraining the government in this manner does nothing…..nothing….but weaken the ability of the government to protect itself…and, therefore, us.  There is nothing moral about this part of the discussion…..the government must have the right to insure it’s own survival.  It must be able to, in extreme circumstances, act outside the laws it sets for the citizens.  If it couldn’t, we couldn’t field an army, because soldiers kill other soldiers.  We couldn’t utilize eminent domain.  We wouldn’t survive. 

Since a government MUST have the prerogative to act, even if it has no intention of acting this manner, having a bunch of blustering, posturing politicians hamstring the government is foolish in the extreme. 

It’s as if a criminal, who is afraid of a certain man because he has a gun, is suddenly told by this certain man’s wife that he has gotten rid of the gun, and is not allowed to use it anymore.  The criminal now has no reason to fear. 

Remember, the terrorists have been trained to resist our ‘interrogation’ techniques.  They come to Gitmo with a game plan to cry about their religious and physical persecution.  They leave the prisons, then work their way back into the battle against us.  It is tactically idiotic to allow this to happen, and strategically foolish as well.  Ex-prisoners tell many about their experiences in the prison, and instead of one person knowing that they can survive to fight again, a hundred learn how. 

So we have a politically and emotionally-charged piece of legislation moving through the Congress.  Bush has rightly decided to fight it….even though it is unpopular to most people….because he needs to have that right reserved, should it need to be done in order to save lives. 

All along in this War on Terror, we have seen how the terrorists react to things.  Appeasement and bribery by France has won them no concessions from the Islamic punks tearing their nights to shreds.  Spain is still under threat, even though their government was thrown out in order to appease the bombers of 3-11.  Iran is building a nuclear bomb, even as the EU stomps their feet and demands agreements. 

However, Libya closed down their WMD program, with Ghadaffi admitting that it was the American use of force that made him decide.  Syria, now surrounded by democracies, is facing the death of its Islamosocialist government.  India and Pakistan are talking, and the monsters running both Iraq and Afghanistan are gone.  We have seen it over and over….proactive policies are the most effective in the WoT.  Bush sees this, hence Iraq and Afghanistan. 

So, the current Administration sees that going after the terrorists and killing them or capturing them is the best way to win the WoT.  We have done that, both overtly and covertly.  Overtly, we have captured and killed them in Iraq and elsewhere, but covertly, they have been seized, run to isolated prisons, and interrogated.  Since these terrorists have been trained in resisting our methods, it would be foolish to rely solely on those methods.  It would be worse to force soldiers and intel agents to give up any other alternatives. 

That leads to dead Americans. 

Also, there are moves by Senatorial politicians to limit the length of time we can hold these terror suspects.  So, since we cannot successfully interrogate them, and we have to release them, why fight the war to begin with?  The only other effective option would be to line them up and shoot them.  That is the Nazi way….and we abhor that, even more than ‘washboarding’. 

If the Government is forced into ineffective interrogation techniques, there should be no reason that these people are released.  If we cannot release them, why hold them?  This is the same mentality that has screwed up our border with Mexico.

And it leads to the real reasons people are so upset about this subject.....and why it is going through the Senate.

We, as Christians and as members of Western Society, care for all individuals.  We are generous, gregarious, and value individual freedoms and worth.  Therefore, we abhor hurting or killing others.  It is not just a sin…it is a de-personification of the other person.  We see this debate where abortion is concerned…if an unborn human being is ever declared a full-fledged human being, abortion would come to a very fast stop.  We rail against killing in video games.  We view murder as the top of the crime chain. 

However, what do we also view as especially heinous? 

Rape. 

We look at rape as a dreadful act…..and more so if the victim is harmed or somehow unable to protect themselves.  For example, children being raped is enough to turn one’s stomach.  We abhor, as a society, the violation of someone who is defenseless. 

Don’t we? 

So, let’s tie it in with torture.  Actually, we need to tie it in with war, and recent history. 

There is no question that we understand that the enemies we have faces in the wars we have fought were also people…..people with lives, wives, kids...we understood that.  But, they were the enemy. Their cause was not just.  They were going to try and kill us, so we had to kill them first, or keep them from killing again.  So, we fought them, and captured them, and held them behind barbed wire, and beat them for information…..this occurred in every war we were in, from 1775 until now.  It was us against them, and we knew that in order to win, we had to remove the ability of the enemy to wage war against us.  It was survival, and a win-loss scenario writ large. 

Remember the whole ‘survival of the government’ thing?  Well, let’s move on…..

However, in Vietnam, we had the media.  The media was full of people that had grown distrustful of the government….and though they did not start off using the Vietnam War as a tool to push their view of the world, it eventually became that tool….the media in Vietnam was the direct ancestor of the media that shot the flare known as Watergate. 

The media sent back pictures of the enemy…..a different enemy than we had faced before.  It was an enemy that was no longer faceless.  It was a young girl, most of her skin burned off.  It was a young boy innocently handing a Marine a hand grenade.  It was a village that was ‘allegedly’ a home for Viet Cong, but was full of widows and orphans, and we were burning it down.  The enemy was no longer the enemy…..they were victims of violence. 

American-made violence. 

The reasons behind the conflict were soon forgotten.  The 25-year old Cold War was not an issue anymore, even though 5,000 nuclear bombs were pointed at us.  It didn’t matter, because a single child was harmed in a napalm attack.  More so than the 250 enemy that were killed, that single child signified the entire message that we got from the Vietnam War. 

It didn’t matter what message our government put out there.  Nixon wasn’t an idiot, but he couldn’t compete with body counts and men missing limbs.  It didn’t matter that 53,000 total casualties over 10 years was comparable to 295,000 in just the four years of WWII.  Or the 27,704 deaths in the three years of heavy combat in Korea.  What mattered were the VICTIMS, and the VICTIMS were the enemy. 

The media didn’t care much for the American victims…..that much was readily seen.  However, their dislike of our government translated into an almost pathological sympathy for the enemy, who is estimated to have killed 1,670,000 of their own people between 1945 and 1987.  We were rich, and had big guns.  They were poor, and defenseless, and we were victimizing them. 

Now…..fast-forward to 2001. 

The left-leaning people said what after the 9-11 attacks? 

“Our foreign policy was to blame.”

See?  The enemy is still a VICTIM!!! The media portrays the enemy…..an enemy that wished Israel to be utterly destroyed, had preached for our destruction….as a victim of our actions.  The left does the same. 

How can we manage to motivate ourselves for a long-term conflict when the main outlet for our cultural elites is telling us that we are killing poor victims of our own selfish desires?  How can we imprison the raped, and ignore the rapist?  How can we continually insult the insulted?  How is that right?  How is that moral? 

The left and the media completely removes any stigma that the enemy might have.  When we say that they attacked us first, the Left compares that to blaming the raped woman for what she was wearing when she was raped.  When we say that they hate us, and our way of life, they tell us that our way of life is wrong, or that we are just as fundamentally religious as they are.  Of course, doing this shows that they view the enemy as miscreants as well, but that’s not as important as the fact that we are lowering ourselves to their level. 

Well, I have news. 

The enemy is still the enemy.  We are still at war.  The enemy still requires defeating.  He requires being engaged, captured, or killed.  His actions….bombing civilians, attaching bombs to adolescent girls and pregnant women, and the indiscriminate murdering of Muslims for media coverage require his defeat.  He is no more human or humane than the Nazis who gassed the Jews, or the Japanese soldiers that slaughtered 300,000 at Nanking.  He is no more moral than the Communists in the Soviet Empire or China that managed to make 100,000,000 men, women, and children simply vanish into Death’s nothingness. 

He needs imprisoned until the war is over.  He needs fed just enough to keep him alive.  He needs no Koran, no help other than basic medical care, no comfort other than protection from extreme heat and cold.  And, if he holds information that will stop his ilk from killing more innocents, or more of our soldiers, we need to have the ability to get that information. 

The enemy has abrogated his rights to comfort, ease, and our understanding.  He is not a victim…he is the enemy.  And, being such, must not be treated as anything else. 

However, to the Left and the Media, the homicide bomber is a psychologically-challenged, misunderstood partisan, not the enemy.  Osama bin Laden is a hero to the Islamic world, not a narcissistic prophet-wanna-be with delusions of genocide.  Arafat was a freedom-fighter, not someone who would slit the throats of every Jew on the planet.  It is easy for the Left to assign these values, because all victims have redeeming qualities.  We all understand that.  We have never abandoned the sociological knowledge that victims need protected.  Victims are people….like us. 

However, the Islamofascist terrorists that we face now are not victims.  They are people that have chosen to try and kill us.  And it is madness not to engage them, break them, and destroy them. 

The enemy in Gitmo are not being tortured by fake menstrual blood.  They are not being victimized by soldiers destroying the Koran.  However, their stories (true or not) are designed to play to the media’s interpretation of the War….that being that we (the Americans) are the bullies, and the enemy (the Islamofascists) are the victims of our aggression.  They were trained to cry wolf in this manner.  They are doing this now. 

Can you see a reporter in WWII seeing the pictures of Abu Ghraib and doing anything other than laughing at the naked Nazis?  No. 

Also, since the torture of people goes against our sociological norms, I am apt to believe that the incidents were not part of a larger scheme (unless it was meant to deter the enemy from desiring capture and detention).  It is more reflective of immature and sociopathic behavior. 

Or….you can blame the media, and violence on TV.  Heh. 

In conclusion, the threat, if not the use, of what we call torture is needed.  We need it for the protection of our people and government, we need it as a deterrent, and we need to understand that the enemy is using our sympathy for victims to play our media against our cause.  Is torture wrong?  Of course it is.  I do not wish for anyone to be tortured.  However, my morality isn’t the question….the question is what our government must be able to do….or be believed to be able to do….in order to win this war. 

Comment freely.