How Would You Like Your Corpses This Morning?

I’ve been thinking about the “terror war really ought to be a police action” argument and I’m no longer so sure that even that’s a good idea at least in the context of what some people are saying which is send in the special ops goons to take out the bad guys. The problem with that idea seem manifold to me. First how do you know that the people you intend to “take out” are really who you think they are. Intelligence is infamously bad when it comes to this sort of thing. What people who advocate the James Bond approach are saying is that it’s okay to kill some people without really knowing if they are who we think they are or if they are really guilty even if they are those people. Another thing to consider is that having read some accounts of these “commando” type raids there is usually plenty of what we call “collateral damage” or as in most cases that’s all there is, collateral damage.

People keep saying al Qaida is down to less than one hundred members but since this number is based on “intelligence” it would be safe to say we really don’t know a damn thing about how many al Qaida there are. The best approach to terrorism, the only moral approach that avoids hypocrisy on a cosmic scale, is to stop doing things that fuel it. This means dismantling the empire though the first steps should be total and complete withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq and it should begin immediately. This would go much further in mitigating any terrorist threat than our military actions ever could. Then we need to stop supporting Israel and take a much more even handed approach regarding the Palestinians and Israel rather than giving Israel everything it wants. Eventually we’ll need to close our wasteful and completely unnecessary military bases in foreign lands as well as the secret torture gulags. This is just common sense and anyone who is cognizant knows this is all true.

If people are looking for some kind of justice for 9/11 they won’t find it by murdering people who are completely innocent of any involvement in 9/11 which are the same people we are murdering as I write this lousy post. So a police action you say is what you want? Okay, fine then let’s have a real police action and I say that recalling that the police are not lawyers, judges, or jury members and their job is not to judge who is guilty or who isn’t rather it is to enforce the law. So a police action should consist of a serious investigation perhaps followed by the arrest of suspects if there is sufficient evidence followed by a trial. Sending commandos in to murder people based on hearsay and highly questionable evidence such as that provided by intelligence is nothing more or less than a terrorist act itself.