RUTHFULLY YOURS

Torture is one of those topics that often overwhelm sober reason with lurid emotion. Even people who usually are clear-eyed and rational sink into sloppy thinking and incoherent argument when it comes to torture. Peggy Noonan’s recent Wall Street Journal column about the Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation techniques illustrates this phenomenon perfectly.

Noonan is usually an astute analyst, but her column on the report is riddled with received wisdom and unexamined assumptions. For Noonan, the “important lesson” of the report is not that progressives, as usual, are shameful hypocrites and partisan hacks who will damage their country’s interests for ideological or political advantage. It is not that when fighting a brutal enemy who obeys no laws of war, things are done we’d rather not do in order to save lives. No, her “lesson” is that the enhanced interrogation techniques, “torture” in her view, are “not like us” or “part of the American DNA,” and that, quoting John McCain, such techniques damage “our reputation as a force for good in the world.” These assertions, however, are based on simplistic psychology and flawed reasoning.

First, with very few isolated exceptions, none of the interrogation techniques meets the U.S. Code’s legal definition of torture, which requires the intent to cause severe suffering “other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions,” in the words of the statute. Noonan may think the EITs are “what I believe must honestly be called torture.” But what Noonan, or I, or anyone else “believes” does not trump what the law actually says, and it is the law (Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113C, § 2340) that our officials must follow, not subjective perception or even international laws that conflict with our own. As I said before, if people disagree with the law, then there is a political process for changing it.

The begged question that the EITs are torture undermines by itself the rest of Noonan’s argument. But it suffers from other problems as well. She also makes the fuzzy but simplistic statement that it “won’t help us fight it [war against jihadism] to become less like ourselves and more like those we oppose.” This is a version of the progressives’ mantra since 9/11 that the “terrorists win” if we do certain things that the critics believe are immoral or contrary to our “values”––as if our crisis of national identity is more important than destroying the enemy, the only way we “win.”

The Obama administration is shamelessly outsourcing the United States’ historic leadership in facilitating negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel of a workable, secure two-state solution to the United Nations and European governments. In putting its trust in these two centers of anti-Israel sentiment, the Obama administration refuses to say categorically that it would veto a UN Security Council resolution setting some sort of deadline for the creation of a Palestinian state and Israeli withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 lines.

In the words of an unnamed senior U.S. State Department official quoted by Reuters, “These things are all very much in flux, it’s not as if we’re being asked to take a position on any particular Security Council resolution right now. It would be premature for us to discuss documents that are of uncertain status right now.”

Any Security Council resolution the Obama administration would agree to, which imposes pressure only on Israel to make more unilateral concessions for an illusionary “peace,” will serve to legitimize a United Nations timetable for Israel’s surrender to forces that wish to destroy it. The Gaza debacle following Israel’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza in 2005 and give the Palestinians a chance to build a prototype Palestinian state illustrates the danger Israel would face from being pressured into more withdrawals at this time.

The Palestinian Authority leadership is pressing for action on just such a Security Council resolution as early as this Wednesday, according to a Palestine Liberation Organization official and Palestinian U.N. Ambassador Riyad Mansour. The Palestinian resolution, to be sponsored by Jordan (a non-permanent member of the Security Council), would reportedly set a two year deadline for complete Israeli withdrawal from all “occupied” territories, although Jordan’s UN ambassador told reporters it was news to her that any action to vote on the resolution would be taken as soon as the Palestinians are demanding. There is some speculation amongst UN insiders that a vote on a Palestinian resolution could be put off until early in the new year. The Security Council makeup will then be even more inclined towards the Palestinian position, because Malaysia will be replacing South Korea as a non-permanent member of the Security Council.

Small Business Administration (SBA) Abuses Lending Programs “The findings (re: OpenTheBooks.com report) are certain to spur new oversight of the SBA program on Capitol Hill.” The Washington Times | December 1, 2014     “We must never demonize success,  but we don’t need to subsidize it either.” SBA’s Welfare to the Wealthy Click here to read our editorial […]

The Democrats, suddenly shocked by the CIA’s tactics, dishonor the people who died on 9/11.

New York — I personally pledge to purchase for the Central Intelligence Agency as much Kleenex as needed so that those whom it waterboards can dry their noses after detailing their plans to exterminate Americans. This signals how little I am bothered by the “torture” alleged in Senate Democrats’ borderline-treasonous “report” on the CIA’s post-September 11 interrogation techniques.

Democrats’ highly convenient collective amnesia has erased their memories of being briefed on these probes. As a giant hole replaced the World Trade Center and Americans feared follow-on attacks, top congressional Democrats did not wail that interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects “are a stain on our values and our history,” as Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) now moans. Instead, top Democrats told the CIA to squeeze these scum even harder.

As the December 9, 2007, Washington Post explained, congressional leaders from both chambers and parties — including then-House Democratic boss Nancy Pelosi of California — received “graphic and detailed” updates on the CIA’s questioning efforts, including waterboarding, as early as September 2002. While then-representative Jane Harman (D., Calif.) counseled caution, the overwhelming response was applause.

“Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” Porter Goss, former House intelligence chairman and then director of Central Intelligence from 2004 to 2006, told the Post. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

According to an American official who attended these sessions, “The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough.” One official also observed that “there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, ‘We don’t care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.’”

Obama has fundamentally transformed America, all right — but not as he intended.

A perfect storm brought into power Barack Obama, a previously little-known Illinois community organizer. He had at best a mediocre record as a state legislator and rookie senator. Yet he quickly dazzled the liberal establishment. Joe Biden and Harry Reid were wowed by his sounding and behaving like a white liberal, while retaining the ability to turn on his supposedly authentic black persona when needed. That he had no record of achievement was seen as an advantageous clean slate. Teleprompted glibness was preferred to ad hoc repartee, as if an entire presidency could be scripted and Photoshopped with backdrops of Greek columns and Latin mottos.

In general, since World War II the American electorate has not voted into the presidency Northern liberals like Obama — or any Democrat (except JFK) without a Southern accent. A drawl apparently offered voters in the past some superficial reassurance of centrism. In the last five decades, Northern progressive candidates — Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis — all failed, whereas Southerners like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore all won the popular vote.

But the events of 2008 were exceptional, and were hyped as 1932 all over again: as evidence of the failure of market capitalism and the need for a neo-socialist correction. The McCain–Palin lead late in the campaign collapsed after the September financial meltdown, as Wall Street excess was, fairly or not, tied to the supposedly rich, uncaring Republican establishment. John McCain, we were told, did not even know how many houses he owned. The successful surge in Iraq was still dubbed by the media a failure and did not assuage American anger at the costly war. After Iraq, Katrina, and the failed reform of Social Security, incumbent president George W. Bush had grown abjectly unpopular.

McCain, in the manner that Adlai Stevenson had distanced himself from an unpopular Harry Truman, ran as much against Bush as he did against Obama. In 2008, there was no incumbent president or vice president on the ticket; it was the first orphaned and wide-open election since 1952.

Obama ran on his iconic status as the would-be first black president. For the most part, he hid his spread-the-wealth agenda. A plumber did better than establishment journalists at prying out a smidgen of Obama’s worldview. The media helped reduce Obama’s Chicago friends such as Bill Ayers, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and Tony Rezko to complete strangers. To evoke them was tantamount to racism.

Whatever spin is put on it, Islamic adherents’ frequent recourse to violence marks their creed as the fountainhead of a destructive cult. The siege in Martin Place — the work of a local jihadist, complete with an ISIS flag — proves once again that enlightened societies must set aside political correctness and challenge it at every turn, at every opportunity

Mohamed Karroum, the father of a young woman, Amira Karroum, killed in Syria in January has been widely reported as blaming the Australian government and Tony Abbot for allowing her to travel there. I don’t want to comment directly on the way Mr Karroum is expressing his grief. We can all feel for him. But where does the blame really lie?

How does a young woman educated in an Anglican girl’s school in Queensland end up radicalised and a member of an al-Qaeda offshoot. No-one can know what was in her head. As it happens, we don’t need to in order to find an explanation.

Many young people at impressionable stages in their lives have joined destructive cults. By all accounts, many seem to have had the benefit of good homes and good schools. Maybe some people are psychologically predisposed to this kind of wayward behaviour? Even if this is true, it can never be discovered in time. The best that society can do is to remove the temptation by exposing cults as they arise and, if feasible, by dismantling them legally.

Let me move from cosy concord to potential discord by hypothesising that Islam is the longest-lasting (from the 7th century is a long time) and most destructive cult the world has ever known. Sam Harris, featuring in the heated debate between Bill Maher and Ben Affleck, describes Islam as ‘the motherlode of bad ideas’. Geert Wilders describes it as ‘a violent totalitarian ideology’ (See Gatestone, 9 December). If they are right it is not surprising that it leads impressionable young people astray.

At question is whether Islam is a violent totalitarian ideology at its heart or a religion of peace or, as some would have it, both — depending on the version. A history of conquest and the current carnage and mayhem stretching from Sub-Saharan Africa across the Middle East; the terrorist bombings and killings which have occurred across Asia, Europe and America; the capricious beheadings and threatened beheadings; and the social dissention wherever Muslim migrants settle – is not, to be frank, a good advertisement for Islam.

Neither is the finding by Pew Research in 2010 that 84 percent of Egyptians, 86 per cent of Jordanians and 76 per cent of Pakistanis favoured death for apostasy. Then there are the various group incarnations of Islam like the Muslim Brotherhood, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, Jabhat al-Nusra; and, too numerous to count, radical preachers like Imam Adjem Choudary.

Over the days to come we’ll hear how the Martin Place gunman was a lone wolf, of which there seem to be entire, how he wasn’t acting in accordance with the religion of peace and, just for good measure, that he was undoubtedly insane. Like the killer himself, those tired and blind excuses have whiskers on them

Thirteen years have passed since that gloriously blue-skied morning in Manhattan, where the maps and posters on my son’s classroom shivered on the walls as a jetliner rumbled low overhead and, lucky for him, kept going for a few more seconds. It slammed into the World Trade Centre, the second to hit its target that morning, and helped consign some 3000 innocent souls to their doom. We were told that day how everything had changed. Except it hadn’t, not then and not today in Australia.

Within an hour of 9/11’s impacts, decent Americans were forming spontaneous posses outside New York mosques to protect innocent Muslims from the vigilante reprisals they fully expected. There were no payback attacks, of course, there never are. The dead were all down town, under the smoking rubble. But that was the meme, soon parroted, incredibly, by none other than President George W. Bush, who ludicrously assured the world that Islam is the “religion of peace”. Nineteen devotees of that faith had just committed mass murder for a morning’s work and there was the Free World’s leader papering over the vile philosophy that inspired them. Bush was far from the simian doofus his detractors insisted, but he came close that day and, when the topic was Islam, on many others thereafter.

Today, after Sydney was brought to a standstill, two innocents were murdered, a police officer wounded and several others injured, that same old kumbayah script is being dusted off and recited for the umpteenth time. On ABC radio just now, some well-meaning young woman was close to tears as she poured her sympathy on the “real victims” of the coffee shop siege. She didn’t mean the slain Katrina Dawson and Lindt store manager Tori Johnson, or Ms Dawson’s three now-motherless children. It was those poor Muslims who are going to be viewed with suspicion all over again.

Funny thing, that.

Australian kids get blown to bits by Muslims in Bali, and it’s Muslims who are said to suffer most.

Sydney sees a riot by a 1000-strong mob of rampaging weird beards incensed that someone on the other side of the world made a YouTube film about their precious Prophet, but it’s not the merchants who lost business or the cops pelted and thumped who are said to have suffered. Nor is it the amity and amenity of an otherwise modern and mostly peaceful metropolis that was done an injury. It’s those poor, oppressed Muslims.

On Monday, the Shin Bet security agency revealed that it had uncovered a terrorist cell in Judea and Samaria that conspired to mass murder Israelis. The announcement that the plot had been thwarted came after a two-month operation during which five Palestinians suspects were arrested.

The details of the plan, which the detainees spelled out under interrogation, are chilling. Yasmin Sha’aban, a young woman from the town of Jenin, was going to try to gain entry into Israel by faking a pregnancy. (Given the frequency with which Palestinians, including the families of Hamas leaders, receive top-notch medical care in Israeli hospitals, it is likely that she would have had little difficulty obtaining a permit.)

From an apartment in Israel set up as a terrorist base, Sha’aban would be disguised as a Jew, wearing maternity clothing over an explosive belt, which she was to detonate in a busy area of Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile her four male accomplices, residents of the village of Atil near Tulkarm, intended to commit other acts of terrorism, such as random shootings of civilians and the bombing of a bus transporting Israeli soldiers.

The group was in contact with and under instructions of an operative in Gaza, who supplied the guns, ammunition and material for Sha’aban’s suicide belt.

According to Sha’aban and her accomplices, Hamas and Islamic Jihad would claim responsibility for the carnage.

“The investigation … shows clearly that terrorists in the Gaza Strip are instructing terrorists in Samaria in the preparation of weapons and the planning of terror attacks,” Shin Bet officials said.

As if we didn’t know already.

With the hostage situation resolved — hopefully with no innocent lives lost (reports just coming in – UPDATE: Reports say that one hostage as well as the gunman are dead) — and the release of the name of the hostage taker, Iranian-born Islamic cleric Man Monis aka Shiekh Haron, this seems to be yet another case of what I termed here at PJ Media several weeks ago as “Known Wolf Syndrome.”

In that article, following two separate terror attacks in Canada in which the suspects were already well-known to authorities, I noted that in the U.S., too, in many of the domestic terrorism cases the culprits had already been identified to law enforcement as problems. In the present case, not only was the suspect well-known, but he was out on bail on murder charges related to the stabbing and setting on fire of his ex-wife, with whom he was in a heated custody dispute.

Monis came to Australia in 1996 from Iran and his immigration status was that of political refugee. He has since had other well-known run-ins with law enforcement. In 2009, he sent a series of hate messages, which he deemed as “flowers of advice,” to the families of Australian military members who had been killed in action. He likened their deaths to the deaths of Hitler’s soldiers, as well as to families of Australian victims of international terrorism attacks. He was given 300 hours of community service.

In another case, Monis was charged with 50 counts of sexual assault, where it was claimed that he lured victims in and assaulted them claiming it was a “spiritual healing technique.”

We’ll undoubtedly learn more in the days to come about the intentions and motives of the suspect in the case. The evidence at hand clearly indicates that Monis was another example of the two-faced Islamic cleric. In this case, Monis claimed that he was “an Australian who wanted a safe future for our country” (HT: Stewart Bell) while simultaneously — and openly — hating the very country that gave him refuge.

Yet again, we have a case in the West in which a domestic terrorist was well-known to law enforcement authorities and yet action sufficient to prevent the tragedy at hand was never taken despite the opportunity to do so (in this instance, he was out on bail).

The nation’s state legislatures are about to become embroiled in a battle of epic proportions as they line up on either side of the debate over the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

The struggle could define the future of, and indeed the very existence of, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wisc.), 49 members of the Wisconsin Legislature and the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin are part of a nationwide, state legislative backlash against the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

EPA officials proposed the plan in June 2014. It is designed to reduce carbon greenhouse gas emissions from fossil-fuel fired power plants.

The EPA believes by 2030 this rule would cut CO2 emissions from the nation’s power plants by approximately 30 percent from emission levels in 2005.

“This goal is achievable because innovations in the production, distribution and use of electricity are already making the power sector more efficient and sustainable while maintaining an affordable, reliable and diverse energy mix,” according to an EPA press release.

Walker and the others on his side of the issue see the EPA plan, which strictly regulates emissions generated by the nation’s power plans, as typical of the agency’s overreach.

Another group of 14 states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — mobilized by the Georgetown Climate Center are on the other side of the debate, arguing the EPA’s Clean Power Plan will give them “the flexibility to build on proven policies to cost-effectively achieve meaningful carbon pollution reductions.”