There is One Cry Baby, ...
June 04, 2005
Holy smokes! Things are totally out of control in Guatanamo Bay! Interrogators have thrown water balloons at detainees, causing some to get wet! An obscenity was written in the cover of a Quran! Another Quran was kicked, and yet another was stepped on!
Stop the torture now!
I can't tell whether the attached news report is a spoof, perhaps something to test our credulity. Oh, my goodness!
Don't get me wrong. I think the war on terrorism is a mistake; the invasion of Iraq premised on a lie about weapons of mass destruction; and, our current posture in the world a guarantee of more, not less, hatred in the decades to come. Watch the growing body count in Iraq -- this is victory? This is a safer world?
And I am mindful of the outrage in the Arab world in the wake of reports that interrogators flushed a Quran down the toilet. (It now turns out one of the detainees may have done so, a terroristic attack on the plumbing, no doubt.)
But the fuss and furor about Quran abuse leaves me cold and unmoved. This is not torture. This is not a human rights abuse. We waste our time investigating, worrying and fussing about whether our interrogation techniques are politically correct in the eyes of Islamic fundamentalists. Weren't several thousand of us incinerated as a result of some idiosyncratic reading of the Quran?
A Quran got kicked. So?
Please tell me there is not now forming in the Arab world a new call to arms: "There is one Cry Baby, and Allah is his name."