Great post from the Milblog Blackfive:
This is not the most scholarly look at the legal niceties regarding enemy combatants, the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of Land Warfare. But is is refreshingly honest and common-sensical. If you pick a fight with us and pose a threat to the safety of our people, then you better watch your ass Fred.
Here’s why I don’t care that al-Qaeda operatives Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah were waterboarded after Sept. 11, 2001: I remember where I was the day before.
Every American who recalls that day can probably remember where he or she was when those jets hit the World Trade Center. I do too. But I remember where I was on Sept. 10, 2001, at about the same time.
In the lowest level of the World Trade Center, getting off a commuter train from Jersey City, N.J. I had an appointment in midtown-Manhattan and had to take a subway train from the WTC. Had I done that a day later, I’d have arrived at the WTC at just about the time the first or second jet hit......
Several books have hit the market in the last few years about the plight of German civilians during World War II. Some tell the story of their fate during the bombing raids. At least one claims that some two million German civilians died during the Allied occupation of Germany. And of course, for decades, we’ve had the handwringing and whining about what we did to the Japanese with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As for the latter event, it occurs to me that there were exactly 1,337 days from Dec. 8, 1941 up to Aug. 5, 1945 – the day before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The Japanese government could have surrendered – and surrendered unconditionally – on any one of them.
As for the plight of the Germans, which applies to the Japanese as well, I invoke that great black American adage that goes like this:
Don’t start nothing, won’t be nothing.
That saying has been around Afro-Americana for decades. It basically means this: if you don’t want to suffer the consequences of starting some trouble, then don’t start any trouble.
