War metaphor is icky misses the point
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Editorial Board
Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 commission, called Tuesday's staff report an "indictment of the FBI." Commission member John Lehman called Wednesday's staff report an "indictment of the CIA. "One complaint is that the FBI treated terror as a crime, pursing evidence and compiling cases with a mind to their succeeding in a court of law. That would seem the very least of the agency's failings.
| I dunno. It seems a reasonable approach, since terrorism arrests within the U.S. go into courts of law. They just have to work on the details... |
If anything, it may be time to just give up the fight and get the wife fitted for that burqa rethink our "War on Terror" response to the Sept. 11 atrocities. The fiery assault by those associated with a shadowy foreign-based organization certainly felt like an act of war, at least in an unconventional, metaphorical sense.
| To me, it felt like an act of war in the blown up buildings, thousands of dead people sense... |
But conventional war is between states and governments.
| If you lack imagination. Wars are actually fought between armies (actually between military establishments), though up until now they've been fought as matters of government policy. This particular war is being fought as a matter of religious policy, something that hasn't been seen since the Crusades. That doesn't make it not a war. Al-Qaeda did in fact declare war on us. They did it three years before the 9-11 attacks. |
One nation is attacked overtly or threatened by another, and the governments of one or both nations respond with military force. But no nation attacked America on Sept. 11.
| ... wrote Procrustes in his editorial. |
No government - to our knowledge - dispatched the attackers and operational or financial support doesn't count. So there was no nation to attack in defense, no government to condemn.
| Oh, certainly there is. There was the government that gave the armed forces that attacked us refuge and comfort. There are the governments that finance them. There are the governments that shelter the organizations that provide their cannon fodder and their ideologues. There are the governments that provide them space for training centers and that provide them the resources of war. I could go on all morning... |
A crime, though, is an act of individuals, committed for the pursuit of their own aims, not in service or allegiance to any nation or government. And that little trifle about radical Islamists believing that faith and government are indivisible? Fuhgeddaboudit Justice, then, lies not in the destruction of a nation's government or infrastructure but in giving sleazy leftist lawyers a chance to get the murdering scum off the hook assembling evidence, proving guilt and meting a slap on the wrist proportionate punishment.
| No. Justice lies with stacking up dead bodies of armed bad guys and their supporters, at least a hundred of them for each of our own dead. That's justice. Legalism involves bringing them to trial and blah blah blah. |
"The mission is to root out terrorists, to find them and bring them to justice," President Bush said on Sept. 26, 2001.
| I think he might have had my kind of justice in mind, though he probably hadn't put a quantitative analysis on it... |
When the government of Afghanistan clearly stood in the way of that pursuit of justice, military action was justified.
| But the Seattle bird cage liner wasn't happy about military action then, either... |
And had Iraq stood in the way of that pursuit, similar action would have been justified. But, administration allegations to the contrary, there was no demonstrable Iraq connection to 9/11.
| Except that the administration didn't allege a direct connection. |
| Logic 101: Osama bin Laden is a terrorist. All terrorists are not Osama bin Laden. |
What might have been accomplished had the United States invested $87 billion sending Officer Friendly to the Hindu Kush with an arrest warrant and an Arabic Miranda card in the pursuit of a criminal investigation of those who devised and directed the 9/11 attacks?
| Oh, you mean $87 billion worth of kill squads, running from country to country and assassinating the ass hats that run the war against us? That might be a good idea. I've got a little list... |
By assimilating the metaphor of war in combating terror, we may have become obsessed with actually defeating the bastards instead of currying the favor of leftist media asshats the pursuit of revenge instead of the pursuit of justice.
What more can be said? F***ing leftist scum-sucking fifth column media bastards. |