Even if you’re a relative of one of the 9/11 hijackers, that man was an out-and-out terrorist, and nothing you can say will change that. And if your great-great-great-granddaddy was a Confederate who stood up for Southern ideals, he too was a terrorist.

They are the same.

Their “Rhetoric vs. Reality” video is excellent.

The CNN article doesn’t once mention any sort of religious affiliation, desire to avenge muslim deaths, nor the desire to, “do jihad.”  I suppose it was not an important detail.

“…and I figured if I were to go back to Iraq and do something again that’s contrary to my belief structure, I wouldn’t be really able to live with myself.”

Really Christopher?  You know what would keep me up at night?  Wondering what was happening to my fellow unit members that I deserted despite my commitment to a term of service at a time of war.

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who’s been cramming on these issues for the last year, who’s never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of “a world that stands as one”), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as “the tragedy of 9/11,” a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama engaged in a pointed exchange over al Qaeda in Iraq today. Obama had said in a debate Tuesday that he’d strike al Qaeda if it established a base in Iraq. McCain responded that al Qaeda already is in Iraq, and Obama countered that al Qaeda came to Iraq only after the U.S. invaded.

So Obama admits Al Qaeda is in Iraq…but what do we do now Barack?

That of who has the moral high ground?
And what is torture?

I feel like we need to realize that we have captured very bad people who have done or planned very bad things against US citizens. The strange thing is, we’re willing to shoot or otherwise blow them up, but if caught alive, we have to treat them well?!

Most people can’t even define torture other than to say, “waterboarding is…and whenever anything else comes up we don’t like, that will be too.” John McCain, the hero of one side of the debate, was tortured in Vietnam. He had permanent damage done to his arms. That is torture. The “waterboarding is torture” crowd make me wonder if laying a hand on detainees is torture? Can you strike them? If so, how much? Is sleep deprivation torture? If so, at what point does it become so? Do our special forces and navy diving commandos undergo torture in their training? Oh, but it is by choice? Then is it not a psychological technique to waterboard or inflict severe discomfort? And discomfort it is, temporary at that. These people can walk away like they just got tasered.

And are terrorists’ actions in any way dictated by whether or not we subject them to water boarding or not when they’re caught? Not sure that is why they’ve been blowing things up for a couple of decades…

I’m all for less “aggressive” techniques if they are backed up by results, but when the case made in a liberal saturated media is that we should simply let ideals govern ourselves, it is unconvincing. Not a merit less argument by any means. Having the moral high ground indeed also hinges on how we treat detainees, but lets hear the case made for that more powerfully.

This article by Mark Davis on the subject clarifies some of my sentiments:

We have heard much from the portion of America that grows queasy at the thought of tough treatment for al-Qaeda detainees. But I’ll share what makes me queasy: my countrymen in tattered clothes perched at windows a thousand feet high against the Manhattan skyline, their lungs burning with jet fuel, making the decision to jump to their deaths because it was a better fate than what awaited them if they did not.

Against the backdrop of that memory, anyone worked up about the occasional, carefully targeted waterboarding is simply not serious about protecting our nation.

Instead of trying to force the US to take the license to operate in Iraq from Blackwater, why don’t the Iraqis create a national mandate to take the license of life away from terrorists and then actually do it?

Tom Tancredo suggests we threaten to attack Mecca in the event of another terrorist attack.