Abusing Words

There are some words in the English language that have a tone of gravity attached to them which makes them very dramatic as they are used in everyday conversation. By the same measure, there are situations when these words are used so often and in an erroneous context that their value is diminished and their impact is greatly tempered. Some of these words, and the ones that mostly trigger my reaction, are hero and, especially these days, torture.

When following the 9-11-01 attack against the United States, and the US Military begun to hunt for the masterminds behind the attacks, several Taliban and al-Qaeda combatants were captured while fighting our troops in that wasteland called Afghanistan. These enemy combatants were transported to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and imprisoned.
President Bush at the time was faced by probably the worst security breech that any US president ever had, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On one side he had 3,000+ dead American civilians, the almost certainty that additional attacks were going to be launched against the country and a devastated intelligence community that had been completely blindsided. I am convinced to this day that our intelligence gathering capabilities and capacity had been reduced enough that nobody involved was able to put any of the hints together to see the general threat. On the other side, President Bush had to insure that the civil rights of the American people would not become additional victims of our enemies. This was most trying for our institutions, because as the investigation on the 19 terrorists became more clear and the pieces of the puzzle started coming together, the large number of Middle Easterners residing in America, posed a potential risk of civil right abuse.

In the meanwhile, some of those enemy combatants captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan, could have knowledge of upcoming attacks against our Nation, so enhanced interrogations were employed to find out.
Initially, the anti-American forces on our soil timidly spoke out against things like profiling and eventually begun to address the interrogations of these terrorists as “tortures”.
Torture, in my mind, is a very serious term as it applies to interrogation, because it involves the infliction of extreme pain and suffering to someone who is bound, imprisoned and incapable of defending himself. The problem for me is the abuse of the term.
Between the more than humane treatment used against the prisoners in Guantanamo and the farce that Abu Graib was, every time a Liberal calls something “torture” I have a chuckle.
I can still remember the words of the senator from Illinois Dick Durbin comparing the events in the Iraqi prison to the Nazi tortures and the Soviet Gulags, and I can still remember my reaction to that hyperbolic parallel. What came to my mind is some of the numerous readings I did regarding the Gestapo treatment of French Resistance prisoners and I felt enraged by the comparison of the actions of a small group of criminal US soldiers, as despicable as they were, to the chronic application of sadistic procedures that the Nazi employed or the Japanese employed on allied prisoners or the Vietcong employed against our captured troops in Vietnam.
And yet, for months after the Abu Graib incident, Sen. Ted Kennedy continued to carry the infamous pictures in his pocket, hunting for any available Media camera, which appeared to always be available, ready to flick the pictures out. And all this was for ultimate political gain, regardless of any damage that such actions could bring to the hundreds of thousands of honorable service men and women serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. Using the action of few bad characters to qualify the multitude of our Military so to attack the President, was the Left way to “dissent”, to be patriotic, to enhance American moral standing.

The continuous abuse of the word “torture” as it applies to the interrogation of enemy combatants in Gitmo, dramatically lowered the intensity of the meaning of the word in my mind. Ironically, as our troops moved across Iraq, they discovered real torture chambers that Saddam Hussein, and his miscreant sons, had institutionalized in their maintenance of power and just for kicks.

So what is “torture” as defined by the Liberal nutcases today? Well, the now famous waterboarding where water is poured on the face of the subject giving him the sensation of drowning. This practice has been applied for few seconds at the time, with medical personnel at the ready in case it was needed. Lets compare this watery “torture” to a Nazi interrogation technique that also involved water: a garden hose was inserted in the rectum of the subject, who was bound hands and feet and made to lay naked on the floor of a room, then the water would be turned on, causing the subject to slowly fill with water, swell up and die a horrendously painful death and that regardless if he talked or not. This treatment was also applied to women.
So much for comparison with Nazi tortures, senator Dick Durbin!

Another “torture, as defined by the power hungry Liberals, is to forcing the subject to stand for long periods of time. I guess no Liberal ever heard of the Bataan Death March of April 1942.
After the fall of Bataan, approximately 100,000 allied and Filipino prisoners were taken by the Japanese captors on a forced march from Bataan to Camp O’Donnell in suffocating tropical heat. The prisoners had surrendered because of lack of food, medicine and ammunitions, so by the time the Japanese took possession of them they were already sick and starved. Of the total number of prisoners, only about 57,000 actually reached Camp O’Donnell. The rest died of malaria, starvation or the bayonet of practicing Japanese soldiers. The captors particularly enjoyed stopping and drinking water in front of the thirsty prisoners not allowing them to have any. At times the prisoners would be so crazed with thirst that they would leave their ranks and go to the water, only to be either bayoneted or beheaded with Jap swords. Locals along the route of the march who would be moved by the suffering of the prisoners and attempt to bring some water to them would receive the same treatment.
See, Liberal Nutcases, that’s torture.
When the enemies of America use the word “torture” ad nauseam just to achieve political gain, all they achieve in my mind is the total diminishing of the real meaning of the term. If the decision to stop the enhanced interrogations of the Gitmo prisoners is reached, so be it, but I would really prefer if these techniques would be addressed as what they are: interrogations, not torture, so that the American people will be able to get the proper prospective on our real enemy (not the US Military as Napolitano tells us, but the Islamic terrorists) and its methodology of disembowelment, throat slashing, castration and the stuffing of the removed parts in the mouth of the prisoner (trick al-Qaeda learnt from the Vietcong) and ultimately beheading.

Comparison? Caterpillar-in-the-box vs. being immersed for days in an excrement pit with rats swimming around (another Vietcong favorite).
Body slamming against a padded wall as neck is protected by a brace vs. slowly lowering a prisoner into a wood chipper feet first (Uday Hussein favorite punishment for contractors late on finishing their construction work).
Sorry, but I do not feel the world deserves an apology from America for abandoning its moral grounds. The only person that needs to apologize for abandoning his moral values is Obama to the American people, for defaulting on his constitutional duty to safeguard the American people and the American institutions in the manner the US Constitution dictates him to, for the sole purpose of satisfying the agenda of his Leftist fringe.

Of course what would constitute real torture would be to have a redundant recording of Nancy Pelosi laughing and speaking, and forcing the viewing of her face, but that would really be cruel punishment.



And these are my thoughts!
Frank “Semperpapa”