August 26, 2004

WSJ.com - A Rumsfeld Vindication
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[...]
So notes Tuesday's report from the Independent Panel to Review DOD Detention Operations, empowered in May by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and chaired by former Pentagon chief James Schlesinger. The report offers invaluable perspective on the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib and is devastating to those who've sought to pin blame on an alleged culture of lawlessness going all the way to the top of the Bush Administration.
[You Dims and Leftists know who you are.--Jen]
John Kerry must be even more disoriented by the Swift boat story than he appears if he thinks now's the time to call for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation.
[Kerry's desperate: he's in trouble from the Swifties for violating all kinds of rules of military conduct as embodied in the UCMJ and he decides to call for the top Pentagon chief's job, as if he would know military leadership?...pathetic and sad!--J.T.]

"The behavior of our troops is so much better than it was in World War II," Mr. Schlesinger told us yesterday, by way of comparison. Of the Abu Ghraib photos, he added, "It is preposterous that what these pictures show is we were prepared to use torture to get information," as Senator Ted Kennedy and others have alleged. Rather, Mr. Schlesinger characterized the photographed Abu Ghraib abuses as "free-lance activities on the part of the night shift," echoing the testimony we've heard so far during the courts martial for the accused.
[...]
Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, for one, would seem to owe some apologies. In a May hearing he accused Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Peter Pace, and the rest of the Pentagon of sanctioning war crimes. Also owing apologies are all those journalists who applauded his demagogy as some kind of gotcha moment, and who threw around words like "torture" so glibly.

Hope these fine men and women at the Pentagon don't hold their breath waiting for an apology from virtually all the 4th estate/5th column. Swine!
And the American people shouldn't either.
The Lying Liberal Left Mainstream Media owe a lot of us a huge apology--and not just for this story--but we won't get it.
The "journos" who gave us this "story," and "Bush lied" and the "Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame scandal," and the Swift Boat "smear" on Kerry and...and....and...etc, etc., etc. have so much to answer for it's staggering, but the only satisfaction we may get is when their "news" is replaced with cartoons and travelogues.
But there's an even bigger issue than the fact that the American people have been short-shrifted on the truth about the war here at home:

[...]
Worse than being wrong, these accusations have endangered the lives of soldiers by forcing a retreat in interrogation techniques so severe that it's hampering the U.S. ability to fight the counterinsurgency in Iraq. "We can't even use basic police interrogations tactics that they use in the States," a Marine officer is quoted as saying in a Journal news article yesterday by Greg Jaffe and David S. Cloud.

And the good old International Red Cross meddled in the mess, too:

[...]
In particular, the ICRC is rapped for insisting that the U.S. adhere to a controversial document known as Protocol 1, which the U.S. long ago explicitly rejected and which would grant terrorists and other non-uniformed combatants all the privileges of normal prisoners of war. The ICRC, the report says, promulgates this standard dishonestly "under the guise of customary international law."

"At the end of the day,"(I hate that clichéd phrase!) the conclusions of both the report and this op ed are damning--not to Rumsfeld and our top brass--but to the Dimocrats and their media enablers:

[...]...
While the Abu Ghraib abuses deserve to be punished, like other wartime excesses, the allegations that they had anything to do with so-called "torture memos" and a Pentagon "culture of permissiveness" are nothing but a political smear.

Which is what "far right wing" cheerleaders like myself and Rush Limbaugh have been saying all along!
Now if only we could do the same for our Vietnam experience and get John Kerry to explain what he meant in his sworn testimony before Congress in 1971 about war crimes being committed by all our soldiers including himself and being sanctioned up and down the chain of command!
What did you do in country, Sen. Kerry?
Who else did you see commit abuses and war crimes?
Why didn't you report it, as an officer of the U.S. Navy?
I want an answer to these questions before November 2 but there are tens of thousands of our Vietnam viets who've been waiting for 30 years to be cleared of these smears!
(A weirder question that needs an answer are these: Why didn't Congress press Kerry for details at that time and launch a similar investigation?
Why did they just take Kerry's word for it?
And why wasn't he prosecuted for his war crimes back then?)