The Cure Worse Than the Disease

I'm all on board with Ralph Peters as he complains about the lies that the global left believes about Guantanamo Bay, about the allies who refuse to help us hold the monsters held at Gitmo even as they have condemned us for our supposed cruelty, and our own politicians who score points on the Left by condemning Gitmo but would never support housing the prisoners in their own district.

But I part company when it comes to his solution:

WE made one great mistake regarding Guantanamo: No terrorist should have made it that far. All but a handful of those grotesquely romanticized prisoners should have been killed on the battlefield.

The few kept alive for their intelligence value should have been interrogated secretly, then executed.

While it is true that unlawful combatants could be simply executed on the battlefield and be a violation of no laws of war, I would never make our troops executioners. It is one thing to say that we shouldn't make efforts to capture terrorists. I'm fine with that. Shoot to kill, by all means.

But if a terrorist attempts to surrender, our troops must accept that surrender. I could not ask our troops to bear that kind of burden, one that blurs the line between killing as a soldier must and murder.

We have a problem with our prisoners held at Guantanamo, one largely created by ourselves for not vigorously defending against false charges about what our own attorney general calls a well-run prison. We must not solve the problem by relying on our troops to kill them all. Who will defend our troops when photos of that mission go public? Or do you think nobody will complain or ask questions when terrorists suddenly stop flowing in to our hands?

The Gitmo prisoners are our problem. We need to man up and tell the human rights lobby to bugger off, and that we treat our prisoners just fine, thank you. Tell these punks to go investigate the jihadis if they want real human rights abuses.

UPDATE: I'm certainly not immune to expressing similar sentiments. Yet while I am all on board the idea that we should vigorously seek to kill our enemies, I was letting the frustration talk in that post when I wrote we are not obligated to take unlawful combatants prisoner. That is technically correct but it should not be our policy. I hope that in my blog as a whole I've consistently portrayed the need to fight the war with honor so our troops come home with their heads held high, knowing that they were soldiers and not executioners.