Thursday, May 10, 2018

Fight Evil, not the Evil Fighters


"The Left almost always opposes fighting evil, and almost always wants to disarm those who want to fight."

Dennis Prager has offered that insight, in minor variations, many times over the years that I've read and listened to Prager's radio show - as examples of that insight come up often.

This week's example of that insight is found in the Senate confirmation hearing for Trump's nominee to be CIA Director - Gina Haspel. Trump has nominated her, the first woman to be nominated for that position, because she has an accomplished career at CIA on the front lines of the Cold War and the War on Terror. Democrats, and near-Democrats like John McCain, oppose the confirmation of Haspel because her work fighting al-Qaeda in the Work on Terror included supervising a CIA black site where rendition and enhanced interogation took place - and they consider her a "torturer".

I got a glimpse of Prager's insight on this story when I read a Tweet from the ACLU yesterday,  which read:

"Haspel won’t answer whether she oversaw the torture of Nashiri. She did. It involved:
• Locking him, naked, in coffin-like boxes
• Slamming him into walls
• Waterboarding him"


Who is "Nashiri"? You can find that answer in an article inProPublica that is linked in the ACLU tweet:
"Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a 37-year-old Saudi, did not deny having been a terrorist operative for Osama bin Laden. He admitted his role in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, an attack that killed 17 Navy sailors. Captured two years later in Dubai, he talked openly about planning more attacks."

Wait. Stop there. Why did ACLU westernize Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri's name down to simply Nashiri in their tweet? And why did they leave out his al-Qaeda resume which includes killing Americans and planning to kill more? Because they want Westerners to be sympathetic to this high-ranking terrorist, and his murderous resume doesn't help in casting him as the good guy and Haspel and the CIA as the bad guy to defeat Haspel.

Did the interrogation techiniques work on Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri?

"Nashiri did not do much resisting. After he was locked into the smaller box for the first time, early in his stay at the black site, he began to talk about two of the main operations to which he would be linked in U.S. intelligence summaries: an aborted plan to attack oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and a plot — for which he was trying to raise funds when he was captured — to crash a small airplane into a ship in the Emirati harbor of Port Rashid."

So, he was an al-Qaeda planner, like Khalid Sheik Muhammed (KSM) was. He was the "ticking time bomb" that we talk about when we talk about justified interrogation.

Did the CIA injure the terrorist in their custody

"Various psychological evaluations of Nashiri have found lasting scars. In addition to a phobia of water, he has been diagnosed with anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. A psychiatric expert, Sondra Crosby, called him “one of the most damaged victims of torture” she had ever examined."

The 17 Navy sailors that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri murdered on the USS Cole were unavailable for comment on whether it bothered them that the terrorist who killed them was depressed and has PTSD...

Me, I'm wondering why we haven't shot him yet....

You know who wants to testify to help Democrats defeat the nomination of Gina Haspel to be CIA Director? Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in Gitmo, who we also should have shot by now. KSM and the Democrats are aligned against Haspel. Boo.
Sometimes I believe that those on the Left forgets not only the devastation of the 9/11 attack, but the uncertainty in the months following over whether there would be further attacks, including the anthrax attacks in the US. That would explain their opposition to Gina Haspel, who was on the front line overseas tasked with discovering whether al-Qaeda was planning further attacks.

The broader explanation is Prager's insight: The Left doesn't fight evil, it fights those who fight evil.

The GOP should confirm Trump's CIA Director, Gina Haspel, immediately - Democrats and John McCain notwithstanding. Do it.  





Me, a Russian Bot?

I got dismissed as a Russian bot on Twitter this week, so there's that...

Because, hey, why would an American citizen support Trump on social media? Must be the Russians...

Nyet!

Monday, May 7, 2018

I'm back, with more to say...

It's been a while since my last post at the holidays of 2015. A little thing called the presidential election happened in the meantime.

I was right about the election. I picked Donald Trump in October of 2015. I supported him in the primary season, and took a ton of heat for it from my NeverTrump friends. I was right about his chances in the general election, when I took a ton of heat from my liberal friends. But, I was right. So, there's that.

Which means that I wake up every day since the election with Donald J Trump as our president - and not Crooked Hillary - working to erase the terrible legacy of that last guy - what's his name.

I've still been having long pointless threads on Facebook. There is agreement from my Trump-voter friends, grudging okay-maybe's from my NeverTrump friends, and the same tired old rehashes with my liberal friends who didn't learn a damn thing from the election and are lost in their Resist! fantasies of the Russia-ate-my-homework collusion conspiracy and the coup to take down a duly elected president.

I'm still on Twitter where I'm at just short of 40k tweets, but I seem to be "shadow-banned" by the leftists that run that place. I opine into the void there now.

Instagram is where my self-actualization takes place, as I find my joy daily in capturing an image that's interesting but no one else saw or got. Fun!

Having said all of that, I'd like to rekindle this blog and express my thoughts here instead of the other venues. I hope someone reads it, but that's not required for me to get something out of posting here.

So, we're caught up - and the Master's Class on Life is back in session...