The American Spectator

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Patriotic Indecency

2.15.05 @ 12:01AM

HAGELIAN INQUIRY
Re: George Neumayr's Chuck McHagel:

As a conservative Nebraskan, I'd like to thank you for the spot-on article on Hagel. The move to more moderate social views are bad enough, but he acts like the "International community" elected him. It's all he talks about anymore. I'm sure that the rest of the world is a nice place, but I live in Nebraska. I'd like a Senator who will work to make my little slice of the world a little better.

Anyway, thanks. Please re-run this piece in 2007/08 when the campaigns are heating up. We need to make sure people know what they're getting.
-- Russ Bader
Lincoln, Nebraska

I would love to see a grass roots effort to un-seat Sen. Hagel, and replace him with a REAL Republican.
-- Rick Bradley
Columbia, South Carolina

YOU WILL REAP
Re: Jed Babbin's The Gitmo Girls:

As a conservative, I dislike sending our women into combat. I dislike the pornographic cesspool into which our culture has descended. When I see our women sent into combat so that they may behave like porn stars, I start at "dislike," proceed quickly to "abhor" and go on from there. What sanctioning this sort of interrogation does to American society is the real issue. As to Iraq, this gross insult to Islam, and indeed Christianity, is known to the average Iraqi, and he will not forget it. We have planted a seed that might yet bear bitter fruit.
-- Gary Martin

Assuming that the Washington Post story is correct, I am horrified by it and the thesis of "The Gitmo Girls," by Jed Babbin.

What worries me is not the moral implication of our relationship to the prisoners; it's the moral implication for the interrogators.

For a woman to use her body to buy information is prostitution. The military and our government should not be pimping, period. The president was re-elected partly on the premise that he would uphold Christian values.

It's not enough to say, "Should we require female interrogators to do these things? Certainly not." Like all of us, soldiers also feel peer pressure and want to advance in their careers. We are tempting them to behave immorally. Jesus said: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe to stumble, it would be better for him if, with a heavy millstone hung around his neck, he had been cast into the sea."

For our government to permit such techniques is to condone them. Any person of faith and most secularists would be appalled that such behavior was being done in their name.

Besides, it's a stupid strategy. Far more effective would be for these military women to use their role as professional soldiers to challenge the prisoners' concepts of America. The hyper-sexualized America of the media just supports the "Great Satan" mythology, and it's not accurate. Why play into it?
-- Carol L. Douglas

I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I read about the hellish conditions in Gitmo, being questioned by chicks wearing t-shirts and rubbing up against the suspects. Civil liberties groups and the New York Times seem completely unaware that prisons around the world are packed with men begging for the opportunity to be abused that way. Coming to mention it, there are plenty of men outside of prisons who don't mind that that as well. Terrorists who are so easily offended and who complain so loudly about so little don't even come close to being fearless warriors -- whining, sniveling poltroons is the description that comes to my mind.

Contrary to popular opinion, it looks to me like the madrassas have been doing an awful job of turning out combatants for the faith -- no need to worry about beating these guys, they can't take a hit. The madrassas would do a lot better by recruiting school girl hockey players, because I have regularly seen them take much more punishment without complaint than the whining, gutless cowards in Camp X-ray. Compared to what POWs had to put up with from the Japanese and from the North Vietnamese, the complaints about Gitmo are worse than ludicrous. It's about time somebody said so and stood up to this silly nonsense, instead of making out there is something to be ashamed of. There isn't -- Gitmo sounds as threatening as an open plan office that employs a lot of young women. And if Osama bin Laden thinks he can destroy Western civilization using snivelling weaklings like those in Gitmo, then he doesn't even begin to understand the world he lives in.
-- Christopher Holland

In re the use of sex for interrogations: Think about sex in terms of its purpose. Sex was made for marriage because marriage is an institution the primary purpose of which is the begetting and raising of children. Therefore, any sexual expression outside of marriage is intrinsically immoral. Which obviously includes titillating prisoners by sexual means. Mental coercion and some degree of physical force are not inappropriate, because violence during wartime interrogations is an extension of what must happen on the battlefield.
-- Kenneth A. Cory
China, Michigan

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