However as noted later in the article, Churchill did in fact support torture of enemy prisoners (1) but was smart enough to publicly deny its use while privately supporting it. Obama, it seems, is stupid enough to publicly admit we used to torture and actually in private deny its use. Our enemies will not drop their weapons saying, "Oh Well, the US doesn't torture anymore, we can stop our jihad", but rather they will use the admission of past tortures as a recruitment tool: "Don't take our word for it, see, even their President admits they tortured Muslims."

But let's for a moment concede the notion that "what goes around comes around" so that if we treat enemy prisoners well the enemy will treat American prisoners likewise. This may have worked well, if it ever did, with semi-civilized peoples like the Soviets, Nazis, and Japanese. But how stupid do you have to be to believe this would work with savage, primitive, uncivilized Muslims?

The truth of the matter is that there is no going back, there is no apologizing to Muslims; whatever was done, whatever was imagined to have been done, whatever was falsely alleged to have been done, will be used forever by Muslims to torture, maim and dismember American prisoners.

Islamic Thinkers Society [an obvious oxymoron], EXCLUSIVE VIDEO:American Soldiers Burn Taliban

Muslims everywhere will laugh when your boys eyes are gauged out, their tongues are chopped, and their arms and legs are amputated and fed to the dogs! Beware Oh Americans, you are playing a game in which Allaah (swt), the Lord of the heavens and the earth and all that is in between, has already decreed that Islam and Muslims will be victorious. You are fighting a losing battle, even if you don’t know it yet. The winds of change are blowing across the Muslim world, the Islamic revival is strengthening day by day, new leaders have emerged who have the respect of the Ummah (muslim nation). These atrocities committed by your boys, be they Americans, British or Australians are a sure sign of the decline of your Western world as it becomes increasingly desperate and brutal (discarding all its laws, values, and ways of life) in the face of the mounting Islamic resistance against your hegemony over the Muslim world and its vital strategic resources.

If anything, announcing that we do not torture, that we are weak pussies, will only strengthen the resolve of our enemies, just as our tail-between-our-legs retreat from Mogudishu only showed Osama bin Laden that America was a paper tiger and encouraged him to attack the World Trade Center because we would do nothing in retaliation. (2) That's right: the cowardice of Bill Clinton was a direct cause of the death of almost 3,000 civilians on 9/11.

Who knows what consequences of the cowardice of Barack "yellowback" Obama will be.

Torture is Wrong but

Disclaimer: I believe torture is wrong. I wish a way could be found in all circumstances to gather critical information without torture. I also believe war is wrong. I wish a way could be found in all circumstances to talk our way to peace without war. Unfortunately, we live in a world filled with evil people who will not do the right thing. Our enemies will attack us, they will torture our soldiers, no matter how nice we are, so the argument that we should not torture lest they torture does not hold water (no pun to waterboarding intended). There are times when doing the vile, wrong, immoral thing is the kind, right, moral action. For example, the Allies could have bombed Auschwitz. Sure, tens of thousands of innocent Jewish lives would have been lost; on the other hand it would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Bombing Hiroshima was vile, wrong, and immoral; but I'm glad it was bombed, so are millions of others who would have perished in an unending urban warfare. But imagine now if Obama were President in 1945 and declared, "We do not nuke our enemy. We are above that". Imagine the untold suffering and the millions of American and Japanese who would have perished simply because our President wanted to maintain the pretense of being moral and righteous. Imagine how the Soviets would have acted without Mutually Assured Destruction.

Sadly, Liberals view all torture as criminal even if the torture only involves shaming the victim or rubbing his face with a wet panty. But let's be clear, American torture and Muslim torture are not equivalent. To a Muslim, pissing on the Qur'an is an unspeakable piece of violence; indeed as I wrote last year:

Planck's Constant, The Difference Between American and Muslim Cultures

Mention that Muslims drill the eye-sockets of their prisoners and the liberal cries about the indignity our Muslim prisoners suffer by having a female rub her body against his. That Muslim torture is 99% unbearable, excruciating pain and American torture is barely 1% unpleasant is morally equivalent. If you had to be a prisoner where would you want to be, in the most luxurious Saudi prison or the dankest of an American jail? Be honest..

I believe torture is wrong. I even believe all violence is wrong. I am not naive enough to believe my enemies will honor my beliefs. Therefore, I do not let my beliefs endanger my own life or the lives of my countrymen. I wish Obama would not let his beliefs endanger our country.

ENDNOTES

(1):

FrontPage Magazine, 30 Apr 2009, Dumb Enchanted Evening

This tidbit was presumably gleaned from Niall Ferguson's 2006 piece Why Churchill Opposed Torture [URL:http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/why-churchill-opposed-torture. Accessed: 2015-03-26. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/6XJo7jXSM)] in the Los Angeles Times, or Andrew Sullivan's recent blog on a topic he's exploited for months. However, as Charles Johnson has long since pointed out, it's absolutely false. At the outset of World War II, the Chamberlain government passed Defence Regulation 18B, which allowed for the internment of anyone dubbed to be of "hostile origin or associations." Churchill biographer Martin Gilbert records how within a year Churchill detained "tens of thousands" of "enemy aliens," and some "were German anti-Nazi refugees…including many German and Austrian Jews." These detainees could be held indefinitely, without benefit of habeas corpus, and the ranks soon expanded to include native Britons of suspect political views. Shortly, Sir (yes, Sir!) Oswald Mosley would be carted off, along with most of the membership of the British Union of Fascists.

Nor did Churchill hold all uniformed German soldiers in placid dignity. Many were taken to a prison known as the "London Cage," a long-kept wartime secret, which operated from July 1940 to September 1948. Its commander, Lt. Col. Alexander P. Scotland, remarked how he would tell himself each day upon entering, "‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here.' For if any German had any information we wanted, it was invariably extracted from him in the long run." The (UK) Guardian reported the Cage's "prisoners had been forced to kneel while being beaten about the head; forced to stand to attention for up to 26 hours; threatened with execution; or threatened with ‘an unnecessary operation.'" (You can read more on the London Cage here.)

Not only did Conservative icon Winston Churchill support the measure, there is every reason to believe his socialist successor, Clement Atlee, approved of Regulation 18B (which he helped implement) and presided over even worse tortures of Germans

(2):

PBS Frontline, May 1998, Interview with Osama bin Laden
[URL:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/interview.html. Accessed: 2015-03-26. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/6XJoJlnSy)]

Describe the situation when your men took down the American forces in Somalia.

After our victory in Afghanistan and the defeat of the oppressors who had killed millions of Muslims, the legend about the invincibility of the superpowers vanished. Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world.... As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging and all that noise it was making in the press after the Gulf War in which it destroyed the infrastructure and the milk and dairy industry that was vital for the infants and the children and the civilians and blew up dams which were necessary for the crops people grew to feed their families. Proud of this destruction, America assumed the titles of world leader and master of the new world order. After a few blows, it forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers. America stopped calling itself world leader and master of the new world order, and its politicians realized that those titles were too big for them and that they were unworthy of them. I was in Sudan when this happened. I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim....

Caption for photo:

Witness Against Torture and Amnesty International USA marched from the US Capitol to the White House on April 30, 2009 to mark the end of the first 100 days of President Obama's term and demand accountability for torture and abuse.
Photo by Shawn Duffy