Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Leave them on the battlefield

I have often thought that we do ourselves more harm than good by taking terrorists alive on the battlefield. We end up releasing many of them only to fight them again. And it costs too much taxpayer money to lock them up.

Ralph Peters makes the case today:

INSTANT JUSTICE
GITMO? NO, KILL THUGS ON SPOT


WE made one great mistake regarding Guantanamo: No terrorist should have made it that far. All but a handful of those grotesquely romanticized prisoners should have been killed on the battlefield.

The few kept alive for their intelligence value should have been interrogated secretly, then executed.

Terrorists don't have legal rights or human rights. By committing or abetting acts of terror against the innocent, they place themselves outside of humanity's borders. They must be hunted as man-killing animals.

And, as a side benefit, dead terrorists don't pose legal quandaries.


I couldn't agree more. Sphere: Related Content

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

How does one know if the detainees are guilty of terrorist acts? Most were not caught in the act but were handed over by 3rd parties. Should the 3rd parties have murdered them on the spot or should the US military have murdered them when they were handed over?

Is that your position, that the United States of America should take no prisoners but murder all that surrender or are captured?

Shakes The Clown said...

Anon,

I don't like the current catch and release dance we have been doing, and it costs too much to keep them. We don't have to have Gitmo. Leave them on the battlefield.

PS: War is hell.

Anonymous said...

Ok. Thanks. It sounds as if you do support killing captives. Then you are also an advocate of the enemy killing captured American soldiers on the spot, right?

What branch of the service are you in now, or previously?

Are you comfortable with enemy states killing any Americans they designate an enemy combatant? Before answering, remember that many, if not most, detainees at Gitmo were not captured on a battlefield. Or do is your policy only to kill battlefield captives?

Do you advocate executing those at Gitmo now?

How much does it cost to keep them? (NB - US yearly budget > $3 trillion).

Finally, do you think the Bush/Cheney/Petraeus/Rumsfeld/US Army policy was incompetent related to enemy combatants?

Why doesn't the military support this policy now?

Shakes The Clown said...

I don't think you should easily dismiss the costs to keep them.

You pose a lot of difficult questions where we have no easy answers.

Maybe Bush was right after all in choosing Gitmo? Obama seems to be adopting many of the same tactics.

I don't want to release these guys so they can attack again. I don't want them coming to America either.

The simplist solution is to leave them on the battlefield. Again, war is hell, and fighting terrorism can be more dirty than clean.

I appreciate your support for Bush's policies though.