Gitmo

Fire of Liberty

Colonel Oliver North has an excellent column today on how the MSM has such an fascination with "Gotcha Journalism" when it comes to Gitmo that they are willing to expose US interrogation techniques of deadly terrorists. In an effort to blacken the eye of the Bush administration, the editors of these media outlets provide to the whole world the techniques that our soldiers use to pry needed intelligence from the terrorist thus allowing the terror masters with a handy training manual on what terrorists should expect if they are captured and interrogated. Just look at what Col. North has to say on this matter:

In much of our media, the Iraqi butchery was offered as further proof that bringing democracy to Baghdad is a futile endeavor. Absent from U.S. reporting about the atrocities in Iraq and the Philippines is the fact that the architects of the attacks cared neither about how many non-combatants were killed, nor whether the perpetrators themselves survived. Yet, according to "experts" interviewed by Time magazine, the techniques used by the U.S. military to interrogate terrorists detained at Guantanamo are an "outrage on personal dignity."

The real outrage isn't the affront to the "dignity" of suicide terrorists being interrogated and kept alive against their will by our military at Guantanamo; the greater offense is our mainstream media's lack of context for what transpires there -- and the apparent disregard for the consequences of such revelations during a time of war.

The right of the American media to publish classified military information -- such as that in Time magazine's "exclusive" account from Guantanamo -- is well established. During World War II, the Chicago Tribune divulged that the Battle of Midway had been won thanks to the code-breakers at Station Hypo in Hawaii. Though Americans fighting for their lives in the Pacific theater died because the Japanese immediately changed their JN-25 naval code, no one was ever prosecuted for revealing the secret.

Nor will anyone at Time magazine be arrested for publishing classified data on U.S. military interrogation techniques at Guantanamo. But there should be no doubt that the material detailed in the periodical is now being incorporated in the next editions of training manuals used to indoctrinate members of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Abu Sayyaf, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, et al. That begs a broader question about the whole controversy surrounding the Guantanamo detention facility: Does our so-called mainstream media have a "death wish"?

I'd agree with the death wish part. The only problem is they're directing it to the White House, looking for some Watergate or Clinton-gate scandal to bloom. But, this 'wishing and hoping' for a scandal to emerge(that they are trying to create now, just watch Hardball on MSNBC or read The New York Times) in hopes of crippling the Whhite House will only make the war against these evil terrorists much harder to fight because of a lack of actionable intelligence. While the various Senators and Congressmen continue banging their drums to close Gitmo they only make it harder on our soldiers who depend on timely intelligence gathered from the interrogation of the terrorists. There's no doubt in my mind that the information gathered from Gitmo has been more benefical and saved more lives than we can imagine. So, I'd say that we should keep up the good work at Gitmo and laugh at the absurdities of Sen. Durbin.