S

ix very long paragraphs into a seven-paragraph column in Slate, Christopher Hitchens finally gets around to the big question, as if it was an intellectual breakthrough of such import it needed a hefty introduction:

Which brings me to a question that I think deserves to be asked: Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran?

Oh, you mean like the Bush Doctrine?  Show them a little Democracy and stand back? Hitchens hedges his bets, saying “one swallow does not make the summer,” and subheading the article (possibly by editors, not Hitchens), “Given the connections between Iraq and Iran, it’s not as unlikely as it sounds).

Unlikely? One swallow? Iraq has a Shi’ite majority and Iran is a Shi’ite country.  Iranians know what the condition of Iraqi Shi’ites was before the war, and they know their condition now.  They see elections that are fair and open being held just across the border, and they know of candidates now holding office in Iraq that would never be approved by the Mullahs to even run in Iran.

The Bush Doctrine meme has been remarkably thin in all the coverage, blogging, punditry and tweeting over the Iran elections, but it stands in the middle of the story like an 800-pound gorilla no one wants to write about. Bush’s war in Iraq so obviously led to the deep yearning for freedom in Iran that the leftist readers of Salon are howling in defensive, unsustainable protest:

Trace192 lays out the familiar diatribe:

Hundreds of thousands of American injured.. millions of innocent Iraqi civilians displaced or killed.. billions of taxpayer’s money wasted..

And there’s Hitch, still desperately grasping at straws in an attempt to justify it.

The loss of life in Iraq, while exponentially smaller than leftists predicted prior to the war, remains tragic and the Left refuses to let a single one of those deaths stand for something.

Candoxx has a disbelief of biblical proportions:

Well well well, not since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ has the extrication of one man and his sons from the planet resulted in so much, eh?

On planet Hitchens.

Philadelphia Steve is so sure of his worldview that he doesn’t want to be bothered by being asked to think about any opposing view. He’ll just remain 100% sure of himself about everything, despite history, despite events:

Do the Neocons ever give up their attempts to justify Bush’s bungled, incompetent, wasteful invasoin and occupation of Iraq?

No.

And they never will.

The only question is why Slate, or anyone else, continues to waste space on people who have been 100% wrong on everything.

why?

Sir Real turns logic on its head, seeing a democracy (of sorts) ruled by Shi’ites as a threat to Iraq just like that big bad Sunni Saddam was:

On the one hand, it’s self-evident that people’s experiences (with, say, a brand spankin’ new neighboring government) color their perceptions.

On the other hand, are you effing kidding me?

You could, AT BEST, argue that the Iranian people are willing to demonstrate because they no longer have to fear Saddam on the border. (The Iran-Iraq war killed 188k+ Iranian men and boys- not the kind of thing you want to re-occur by, say, destabilizing your current government). But to imply that Iraq is some sort of democracy showroom, and that the events of June ’09 are the Iranians just itchin’ to buy is deeply self-serving, especially on the part of those who cheerleading led us there in the first place.

Geopolitics as dominoes- Stupid then (RIP McNamara), Stupid now.

And of course there’s always the leftist who can’t put together a thought without profanity, like the commenter blahblahblah, who’s so jaded, so cool to it all, so above it, so blithely unbothered that he/she actually comments as if thinking in poems; obscene poems to be sure, but poems nonetheless:

Every f****** Iranian you know
believed in the lie that was Moussavi’s lie
which he enunciated at a press conference before the g**d*** returns came in
when he declared that he was the winner of the election,
when in fact every lucid fact and number
before and after the election nationwide spoke otherwise.
So why the f*** should I care about your f***** friends,
when you’ve all become just a bunch of wishful thinking lying b******.

Give me change or a revolution based on the f****** truth
and not the hopeful lies with which you peddle so dearly hateful sir.
Good f****** grief.

I’ll leave out the obscenity, since it’s just not needed: Good grief.

No Comments yet »

H

ostile, America-hating jihadists captured in battles in Afghanistan were shown U.S. hospitality in Guantanamo – given Qur’ans and a proper Muslim diet, offered exercise and prayer time.  Each individual’s case was carefully researched and heard, a lawyer by the jihadist’s side to represent his interests.  Many were simply freed after this process, others ascertained judiciously to be too dangerous and returned to their cells.

And for this process, Leftists in America and anti-Americans around the world howled and spat and said vile things about our country and our president.  Even our new president joined in the condemning chorus, staking out the most left-wing of all candidates’ position on the matter.

Now, with the capture of a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, we have a sad and tragic opportunity to measure the behavior of America against the behavior of those who fight us on the battlefield, betray us on our shores, and denigrate us from the comfort of their protected European easy chairs.

We certainly can’t expect anything approaching equal treatment and respect from those jihadist thugs who captured the soldier. Here’s what WaPo reports on them:

“Our leaders have not decided on the fate of this soldier.” the AFP quoted the Haqqani commander, identified only as Bahram, as saying. “They will decide on his fate and soon we will present video tapes of the coalition soldier and our demand to media.”

So Haqqani leaders, not a tribunal, will decide his fate.  And he will be videotaped and used as a propaganda tool, a violation of the Geneva accords.  And they will use the soldier to make demands of us, rather than treat him as a prisoner of war.  Anyone who has followed these sorts of cases has to fear for the life of this soldier; I hope that is not the case, but he has suffered the great misfortune of being captured by people who are not Americans.

Check out the several stories posted on Memeorandum about this breaking event, and you will find no Leftist outlets or blogs listed; you will not be able to link over to any stories or posts from the Left, calling for justice and demanding compliance with Geneva. They are uninterested, just as they are suddenly uninterested in civilian deaths in Iraq or military operations in Afghanistan.  Hypocrites.

Don’t count on this story even breaking through the Michael Jackson storm in the European press, obsessed as it is with deviant behaviors – especially by Americans.

Those who demanded full rights don’t even much care about this soldier’s right to life.  Guantanamo was all about serving a purpose other than protecting jihadists; it was about destroying a presidency and denigrating America, nothing more – and the Left’s disinterest in the fate of this soldier is all the proof we need.

2 Comments »

B

ush hatred runs deep, burns bright and lasts long; it pumps up the American Left like the taste of blood enrages a pitt bull.  Witness the latest coldhearted hatred, from that sump of leftist hate, Salon:

In May, the U.S. economy lost 345,000 nonfarm jobs, pushing the unemployment rate from 8.9 percent to 9.4 percent. According to official statistics, 14.5 million Americans are now looking for work and, as a recent headline at Time.com put it, “The jobs aren’t coming back anytime soon.” In fact, a team of economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank recently reported that “the level of labor market slack could be higher by the end of 2009 than at any other time in the post-World War Two period.”

The news, however, is not altogether grim. While times are especially tough for teenagers (22.7 percent jobless rate) and blacks (14.9 percent jobless rate), one group is doing remarkably well. I’m talking about former members of the Bush administration who are taking up prestigious academic posts, inking lucrative book deals, signing up with speakers bureaus, joining big-time law firms and top public relations agencies and grabbing spots on corporate boards of directors.

What a shock! The free market economy still exists despite all Obama has done in the last six months to destroy it, and the very best of the last eight years have found a market for their skills. America should be ashamed!

The author, appropriately monikered Nick Turse, sums up the Bush years, and the efforts of those around the president for those years, as “high-priced wars, ruinous economic policies and shredding of economic safety nets.” Obama has spent more and committed us to more in six months that Iraq cost us through the Bush years. His economic policies have taken the ruin Bush started to new catastrophic levels. And I have no idea what Turse even means by shredding safety nets. Are people starving in the street? Unable to get health care?

I guess when the president you worship is performing disasterously, the best cover is to go back and attack the Bush administration. It keeps the ol’ heart pumping, maintains the vitality of all those dark insults, and distracts one’s attention from the running fiasco that is Obama’s Washington.

1 Comment »

W

e learn this morning from the left-wing mag The Nation that the man who won the election in Iran is the “radical right” candidate Mah – I’m in the - moud - for re-election Ahmadinejad (rhymes with “Two-to-one margins make me glad”).  That comes as a surprise to me; I always saw him as a leftist.

After all, he likes a big central government upon which the people are dependent, and he’s a fan of government control of the economy rather than a free market.  Here in America, that would define the leftist Obama, not any “radical right” party.

I’m backed up by Ken Ballen of Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, and Patrick Doherty of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, who report the results of their May 11-20 polling in Iran in today’s WaPo. (The main thrust of their article is that their polling proves Ahmadinejad won the election by a two-to-one margin, fairly or not.  Yes, they say they prove it, but that’s them talking, not me.)

Ballen and Doherty also found that university students and the highest income Iranians were the only groups largely opposed to Ahmadinejad.  University students in Tehran have been fighting for less government control for years, and you know those rich people – voting conservative from polling stations set up in their country clubs.

The pollsters also found that a free press and free elections were the top priorities of Iranians, followed by a free economy.  The powers that be in Iran support none of the above – but does that make them radical rightists?  Here in America, leftists support the Fairness Doctrine to repress a free press, the radical left-wing ACORN group is rewarded by Obama with millions in grants for its efforts to suppress free elections, and we’re left shaking our heads and saying “What free market?” after just six months of Obama.

The evidence is clear.  It’s a radical left-winger who’s back in power in Iran.  Maybe that’ll give Ahmadinejad and Obama something to talk about if our president ever succeeds in grovelling his way into talks with his counterpart in Tehran.

2 Comments »

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

T

hat’s the lead of Paul Krugman’s column in the NYT today – a column you just knew was coming.  You can imagine the gleeful smirk on his face as his fingers smashed away at his keyboard.  But Krugman’s just turning over his liberal outrage engine; the howling rpms build from there, as he rushes to build the “conservative political establishment” as junior Von Brunns:

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Interestingly, Krugman’s column is almost identially mirrored by Alex Kingsbury in U.S. News:

A month before a suspected white supremacist walked into the Holocaust Memorial Museum in downtown Washington and opened fire, the Department of Homeland Security warned that domestic right-wing extremism was the most pressing domestic terrorist threat that the country faced.

Conservatives were outraged that the DHS analysts had singled out antiabortion and antitax radicals for scrutiny. But the report was part of a series that DHS compiles on domestic dangers from all sides of the political spectrum, an area that’s taken a back seat to overseas threats.

A series of recent incidents shows the prescience of those reports and illustrates the worrying reality that terrorism often comes from inside the homeland.

And that’s hardly the end of it.  Just check out the piling on by the Left at Memeorandum.

While Kingsbury mentions the assassination of Pvt. William Long, an act of terror most mainly marginalized media managed to report without mentioning the word “Islam,” Krugman fails to mention Long at all.  To his credit, Kingsbury approached the subject pretty fairly and didn’t go on to condemn mainstream Republicans, as Krugman did.  I thought this excerpt from Kingsbury’s piece was particularly even-handed:

In another recent high-profile incident, George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who performed legal abortions, was shot and killed last Sunday as he stood in the aisle of his church. Scott Roeder, the man charged in Tiller’s murder, echoes the DHS report on right-wing extremism. Believed to have been a member of an antigovernment militia in Montana during the mid-1990s, Roeder had a history of railing against taxes and abortion, according to news reports. “We can see from these incidents that the U.S. is not immune from these types of attacks and that a lone gunman or cell can kill just as effectively,” says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “But it also shows that those operating outside an organized terrorist network lack the training and tradecraft to make their attacks either sustained or a systemic threat.” After the killing, the U.S. Marshals Service was instructed to increase security at the country’s abortion clinics.

There was no call to reinforce security at military recruiting stations, however, after Abdulhakim Muhammad allegedly shot two soldiers smoking cigarettes in the parking lot of an Army center in Arkansas. Pvt. William Long was killed and another soldier was wounded. Muhammad was reportedly angry over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On Tuesday, he pleaded not guilty to murder charges.

Kingsbury should have reported that Muhammed has said his act was jihad, and he (Muhammed) should not be deemed guilty because Islam requires such actions.  Still, he’s no Krugman.  Here’s the NYT columnist’s evidence that we are dangerous:

Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.

Where was Krugman for the last eight  years?  Where was his concern when the Left called Bush a baby killer? When they launched conspiracy theories from Haliburton being behind the war in Iraq to Bush being behind 9/11 – the same whacked out theory that was part of Von Brunn’s lunacy? Did he condemn the film about Bush being assassinated?

No. When the Left attacks the Right, it’s all good, justified and exactly the sort of thing Jefferson was thinking about when he wrote that a little revolution is good and necessary from time to time.  Let Code Pink harrass military recruiters and block the entrance to recruiting stations, but never, never, allow abortion protesters to be anywhere near an abortion clinic.  This is logic, leftist style.

Krugman has particular villification for Glenn Beck, but probably has never written a critical word of Keith Olbermann.  He says Rush Limbaugh has “joined hands with the lunatic fringe.” He accuses the R.N.C. of of somehow being unstable because it wants to change the leadership of the nation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  So he’s a hypocrite.  So he can’t stand looking in mirrors.  So he trumps up fear where no fear need be.  No matter.  He’s got a trump card:

What will the consequences be? Nobody knows, of course, although the analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even worse than in the 1990s — that thanks, in part, to the election of an African-American president, “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”

And that’s a threat to take seriously.

Oh, yeah.  We’re all racists and we wouldn’t be so angry if Obama were just white.  What a masterful example Krugman has given us of the Left’s ability to use hate speech in order to ignore the issue at hand – whether it was global jihad under Bush, or unconstitutional economic lunacy under Obama.

3 Comments »

“I don’t know anything about cars.” – Edward E. Whitacre, Jr., Newly Annointed Chairman Of GM

I

really can’t believe I’m in America, reading in American media what an American president is doing to an American enterprise.  But I am.  It is true.  The government has named a new chairman for General Motors.  Not the GM board of directors, not the shareholders, but Steven Rattner, Obama’s car czar, who knows about as much about cars as the new chairman, Edward Whitacre.

This is far more radical than anything I thought Obama would be able to pull off, even in eight years, let alone 14 weeks.  Following on yesterday’s SCOTUS decision which said, basically, a contract is no longer a contract so investors can expect no protections, the critical condition of glorious American capitalism could not be more apparent.  I worry that it will not survive until 2010′s mid-term elections.

Whitacre was picked for two reasons.  The published one is that he guided AT&T through the transition from land-based wire telephone carrier to a leader in the wireless industry.  The Obamaites see a similar future for GM, with it transforming from a market-driven car company to a government-driven car company, manufacturing cars Big Brother wants us to drive, whether we want to or not.

The unspoken reason for his selection is because Whitacre can be counted on to do what government tells him to do, as was evident when he quickly (and rightly) acquiesced to government pressure to open AT&T’s hardware to the feds for post-9/11 surveillance purposes.  Not all telcom CEOs folded so quickly to government pressure, and since folding to government pressure is what’s in store for GM, Whitacre will make an ideal Obama-era chairman for the company.

The appointment should infuriate the Left.  Besides being a lackey to George Bush’s gestapo security machine, Whitacre received a peon-snubbing $158.8 million retirement package from AT&T and was involved in some pretty brutal corporate downsizings (probably in no small part due to shifting jobs overseas).  Oh, and let’s not forget that under his tenure AT&T censored (oops!) a Pearl Jam concert right when the band was blasting George Bush.

But Daily Kos has nothing posted on him as of his hour.  Democratic Underground? Mum.  [By the way, I typed "democraticunderground" instead of "democraticunderground.com," and was redirected to one of those stupid sponsored-link pages.  Guess who came out on top?  Barbara Boxer!] As for Huffington Post, which as I predicted in a tweet earlier today leads with how Homeland Security foresaw today’s attack on the Holocaust Museum in its report on right-wing radicalism, it also couldn’t find a reason to cover – let alone criticize – Whitacre’s appointment.

Of course not.  They know what’s going on.  Their long-awaited revolution is happening and they don’t want to crow about it too early because suddenly they’re very concerned about the enemy getting wind of our intentions.  Not al-Qaeda – tell them anything - they don’t want their enemy, normal Americans, to wake up to what’s going on.  No, they want to be much further down the road to economic ruin in the name of wealth redistribution before they haul out the red flags and have a victory parade.

No Comments yet »

S

o a chubby, coddled conservative talk radio host gets waterboarded and immediately repents his evil ways and declares the practice to be torture – what does it prove?  Despite the much that has been made of this clip, it proves nothing more than that one chubby, coddled individual got frightened by a procedure some consider to be torture.

I’m old school.  I still think torture involves breaking bones, stretching joints, electrocuting testicles, raping or murdering one’s spouse or children before your eyes, creating long-term craziness and, possibly, exposing one to lengthy recordings of Nancy Pelosi.

But I’m no dummy.  I realize that the left has succeeded once again in seizing a perfectly good word and transforming it for their purposes.  Remember tolerance? Gay? Torture has joined the club.

Now torture is widely accepted by liberal westerners to mean anything that causes discomfort – being growled at by dogs, having bugs in your cell, being exposed to heat or cold, or being waterboarded.

If that’s the case, it’s time for the United States to stand up and embrace torture … at least those interrogation techniques that a few short years ago no one ever thought of as constituting torture.

Given that once a word is trashed, it seems to stay trashed forever, what president will be brave enough to say that in order to protect its citizens, the United States condones the carefully controlled and monitored use of a defined list of “tortures?”  It has gotten down to that – we are either going to have to become a “torturing” country under the leftist definition, or we are going to have to accept a greater likelihood of a terrorist attack on our shores.

1 Comment »

“There’s a coordination in terms of exposing the people who are trying to come out against reform —they’ve all got backgrounds and histories and pasts, and it’s not taking long to unearth that and to unleash that, because we’re all working together.” A Participant in the “8:45 A.M. Call”

A

nd you thought there was once a vast right-wing conspiracy?  If indeed there was – and why isn’t there one now, when we really need it? – it didn’t hold a candle to the 8:45 A.M. Call, a real, live in-cahoots between the Obama admin and radical progressive groups.

The quote above, from Jackie Schechner, communications director for Health Care for America Now, a labor-backed group harping for universal healthcare, shows one of the intents of the group:  Pound down, embarrass and attack anyone who opposes … er … “reform.” (Even if it’s more like revolution, what we’re opposing.) How typical of the Left; unable to defend their “progressive” tenants with reason or history, they resort to character assassination and intimidation.

The call also was pivotal in rolling out the Rahmbama smeer of Rush, says Politico’s Ben Smith in The new left-wing conspiracy:

The vast new left-wing conspiracy sets its tone every morning at 8:45 a.m., when officials from more than 20 labor, environmental and other Democratic-leaning groups dial into a private conference call hosted by two left-leaning Washington organizations.

The “8:45 A.M. call,” as it’s referred to by members, began three weeks ago, and it marks a new level in coordination by the White House’s allies at a time when the conservative opposition is struggling for a toe-hold and major agenda items like health care reform appear closer than ever to passage.

The call has helped attempts to link the Republican Party to radio host Rush Limbaugh, and has served as the launching ground for attacks on critics of Obama’s policy proposals.

Smith says the call is hosted by Progressive Media, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the Media Matters Action Fund.  In other words, it’s a George Soros play.

Robert Dreyfuss reports in the March 1, 2004 edition of The Nation: “The idea for the Center began with discussions in 2002 between [Morton] Halperin and George Soros, the billionaire investor. … Halperin, who heads the office of Soros’ Open Society Institute, brought [former Clinton chief of staff John] Podesta into the discussion, and beginning in late 2002 Halperin and Podesta circulated a series of papers to funders.” …

The Media Fund subsequently received more than $28.1 million in donations, much of it from leftist government labor unions such as SEIU and AFSCME. TMF also received many millions of dollars whose ultimate source is untraceable, since the money was first laundered through Joint Victory Campaign 2004 (JVC 2004). George Soros gave millions of dollars to JVC 2004, as did close Soros associates Peter B. Lewis and Stephen Bing. (Discover the Links)

Technically, the 8:45 A.M. Call is not a White House operation, but that’s just a technicality:

Though White House officials do not participate in the calls, [Jennifer] Palmieri [SVP/communications, Center for American Progress Action Fund] said, the new infrastructure is closely tied to the White House. Podesta directed Obama’s transition, and Americans United for Change exists largely to run ads promoting the White House agenda.

Now don’t thing I’m carping here; I’m not.  I’m just wondering if there’s a functional vast right-wing conspiracy that gets on the horn every morning at 8:45 A.M. to coordinate the conservative campaign to thwart the progressive’s march towards socialism.

Art: Bob Owens at Michelle Malkin

1 Comment »

I

firmly believe every social trend – no matter how wayward or right – will only go so far before the societal pendulum slows, stops and swings back the other way, but I have to admit I’m getting pretty impatient with the whole left wing whacko, statist, greenie, warmie pendulum paradigm.  And now impatience has swung into deep fear and overwhelming consternation.

I give you the Boston Globe:

Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to climate change, the young man was convinced that if he drank, millions of people would die. The Australian doctors wrote the case up as the first known instance of “climate change delusion.”

Robert Salo, the psychiatrist who runs the inpatient unit where the boy was treated, has now seen several more patients with psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change, as well as children who are having nightmares about global-warming-related natural disasters.

This was not a five year old waking up from a nightmare; it was a near-grownup reacting somewhat as could be expected from spending most of his life under the tutelage of hysterical teachers, hysterical reporters and, most importantly, hysterical former vice presidents.

There’s just one problem with this whole pendulum-swinging thing:  For all it’s glory, Warmie paranoia is just the latest installment in leftist-inspired hysteria.  Yes, it overwhelmed the short-lived Bush Derangement Syndrome, which had earlier replaced liberal-fired AIDS hysteria, which picked up from nuclear holocaust hysteria, which took over from the great leftist fear of capitalist nightmare greed hysteria.

Nervously, I get the sence we’re on a continuum, not a pendulum.

No Comments yet »

W

e hear a lot about the prisoners in the war on terror, folks like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his buddies in Guantanamo, but we hear precious little about people like Piotr Stanczak, who suffer the great misfortune of being captured by the other side.

As the new administration moves forward with its plan to close the prison that is the world’s best option for holding the world’s most disgusting criminals, it does so in the face of reason, ignoring the threat jihadists pose, which they demonstrated most recently with their handling of Stanczak. Why is this crazed charade moving forward?

Well, as near as I can tell it’s because the Leftists of the world have united in orange jumpsuits to howl in protest that America is protecting the West from those who would destroy it.

After years of reading Leftist drivel against Guantanamo, it’s all really boiled down to policy – the trials aren’t happening fast enough. Sure, the hardcore left still equates Guantanamo with torture – against overwhelming evidence of humane treatment and limited, temporary use of techniques that are not life-threatening against only a few of the most important intelligence targets … who happen to also be the most deadly of the prisoners.  Yet the symbol-driven Obama admin proceeds with its focus on the facility – the perceived need to close the prison – giving itself a terribly thorny problem that is nothing more than Leftist hype.

This situation is uniquely driven by the left. No one else is protesting or raising issues. Oh, sure, there’s a periodic peep of protest from the U.N., but do a search for “Guantanamo” at the U.N. News Center and you get nothing.  Even though the housing of prisoners in Guantanamo doesn’t shake the world, it particularly shakes the American anti-Bush, anti-war Left, and Obama is listening.

Do you think the American anti-Bush, anti-war Left will protest how another prisoner in the war on terror, Piotr Stanczak, was handled?

A Taleban group in Pakistan is reportedly claiming to have killed a Polish engineer, Piotr Stanczak, who was kidnapped in September last year.

Reports quote a Taleban spokesman as saying he was killed after a deadline expired for the Pakistani government to free captured militants.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Warsaw had received “informal confirmation” that the man was killed.

Pakistani security officials said they could not confirm the Taleban claim.

A Taleban spokesman said Mr Stanczak was beheaded after a deadline expired on Friday for the release of a number of militants in government hands, Reuters reported.

“We have killed the man after authorities refused to release our colleagues,” the spokesman, calling himself Mohammed, told Reuters. (BBC)

Let’s review this terrible news.  Stanczak was not an enemy hostile; he was abducted while doing survey work for the Pakistani oil ministry 40 miles from Islamabad, far from the front.  He was held under conditions we will never know because the Red Cross/Crescent was not allowed access to the facility … if we can even call it a “facility.”  He was held without trial – and murdered without trial.  His death was, to put it mildly, inhumane.  Say what you will, that is not the portrait of a Guantanamo detainee’s life.

The Left will not mourn the death of Piotr Stanczak.  Obama will not consider the contrasts between his ordeal and the daily life of Guantanamo detainees.  He won’t compare the innocence of Stanczak to the evil in the heart of the detainees.

Will nothing will be learned from Stanczak’s death? A few of us might memorialize him, but do any among us think his death will lead to more rational decision-making by the Obama administration?

12 Comments »