A Post For My Anonymous Critic

Dear App and Really App,

This is, I guess, a somewhat red-letter day. After right at seven months of blogging, I got my first hate comment. If you want to know what I’m talking about, read the comments on the last post. App/Really App didn't leave a link, so other than what Sitemeter tells me, I don't know who he or she is. A/RA, Google and the Pentagon do know.

App has done me a favor. He’s (I've decided App's a guy) provided the impetus to do a follow-up post on the other side of my disgust for our government’s absolutely stupid treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo. This post will set out a view that I thought about while writing the post that App doesn’t like. I’ve actually been thinking about it a bit while driving, not walking, down the streets of greater Atlanta today.

Just before I came home to read App’s criticisms of my views, I spent an hour at the neighborhood pub talking to a friend that is a policeman. My policeman friend is not a liberal/commie/pinko like I am.

A bit of disclosure, most of my friends and relatives initially think I’m a bit of a LCP (see last paragraph). I think of them, to an extent, as being just this side of the Attila family tree. Over the years, we’ve jibed at each other, but then we talk, that First Amendment stuff that App seems to disapprove of, at the end of the day, week, month and year, we find out we are closer to agreeing about many things than we thought at first. Yeah, that talking rather than yelling will get you in trouble – you might learn something. Here's some guilt. The post yesterday yelled. Not my normal style. Probably, had I been more compelling, App might have not felt complelled to yell back.

So anyway, I told my cop friend about the article that led to the post. He shook his head, not in a dismissive way. Rather, in a “can you believe that stuff” way. (I’m using no expletives or bad language in this post.)

I then went on to lay out what you will read in this post and what, were I and App to talk about, we might come to agreement about. App, leave a link. It won’t hurt.

I’m a big boy, figuratively, not literally. The old cliché is “war is hell.” I know for thousands of years people have been killing, maiming, torturing and coercing other people to get an upper hand in conflicts.

I spent much of the last four years giving our government the benefit of my doubt about Iraq, not Afghanistan, that one made and makes sense. From what I can see now, our government lied to us, not once but many times. I think we need to get the, oops no swearing, out.

Leaving that conclusion out, and assuming for the sake of the post that we should have invaded Iraq, the Bush Administration, leading or being lead by the Military is/are the most inept and duplicitous prosecutors of a war that I know of, and I have a major in History. Forget the strategic and tactical errors.

Let’s bore down to the detainees and others that didn’t get to Guantanamo.

Here we’ll take a side trip first. Another friend, referred to in a previous post as Big Rick, in another conversation enabled by that pesky First Amendment, while I was ranting about the Justice Department’s efforts to afford no protection to detainees, and while they were at it, to stack the deck against what turns out to be about 300 now innocent people, not my conclusion, that of the State Department, stopped me and asked me “do you want to know how hot dogs are made?’

To cut out the point of the story, he was asking me what App yelled in his comment. “You people want to be free and safe, but don't want to hear or take any of the actions necessary to keep you/us safe.”

I told Big Rick, and now tell App, that I know about what happens to keep us safe. No, I don’t take those actions. I have friends and family members that have. I respect them for having done so.

Here’s the payoff. Torture and coercion are real parts of war. I may not like that; but, I’m enough of a realist to know that that is the case. What is not part of war is for our government to keep a bunch of guys in a minimally humanitarian environment, and I think I’ve way over described the environment, for as many as five years, while going out of its way to describe them as “the worst of the worst,” try to, and succeed in getting Congress to finesse a definition of torture and coercion that protects the military and intelligence services from the consequences of what they did to these people ( the Administration wouldn’t have had to worry about this stuff had it done what its predecessors had done in the past, do it and keep your mouths shut), try to get the lawyers that represented them fired by their bread and butter corporate clients, and then, finally when they found out, apparently some time ago, that they had made a bit of an “oops,” complained about those darned (not a swear word) other countries that won’t take back the people we, how’s this for a benign statement, “in error,” swooped up. (Having read that, I’m pretty sure that is a real live sentence, just a bit long and obtuse.)

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Attorney General Gonzalez, Secretary of State Rice and the people that work for them have gone way out of their way to do stupid and unnecessary things to harm people down in Guantanamo and us civilians with First Amendment rights, not privileges App, up here in the States.

So talk with me App, no yelling. I can take it.