Army Post Road

     With this whole debate raging right now about what exactly Common Article 3 of The Geneva Conventions means as far as what “outrages upon personal dignity,” and “humiliating and degrading treatment,” mean I stop and wonder what the liberals in America and abroad really want to accuse the average American soldier of, what they really want to say each and every one of us is no better than to need detailed, specific, and explicit outlines of just exactly how to treat detainees. Do they want to say that the soldiers, operatives, and whomever else is in the course of their duties entrusted with the task of harvesting actionable intelligence are systematically ignoring the balance that must be stricken between gathering that which is essential for the security of our nation and preserving the dignity and health of the evil people they are tasked to parlay with?
     This whole debate was sparked when the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan case that the military tribunals the president prescribed to try the preponderance of people being held in US custody in Cuba and around the globe were unconstitutional and failed to live up to Common Article 3. One of the biggest sticking points now to write legislation establishing the courts or tribunals that will hear these cases is just how much of the evidence against them the defendants and their attorneys are entitled to see, classified for national security reasons or not. Several senators, namely John McCain, Lindsey Graham, John Warner, and a multitude of Democrats, believe that these terrorists (and believe me, 99.9% of the people in custody are terrorists, they weren’t just picked up and taken half-way across the world because they were drunk in public in Kirkuk) deserve to see information that I as an average Joe American soldier can’t see. Information that 90-some percent of the uniformed service members in the Department of Defense, even if they had a need to know, do not possess a security clearance high enough to see the information. Information that is known as Top Secret- Secret Compartmentalized Information. Information that less than 50 people, and usually fewer, ever know the whole picture of the information as it’s usually broken up into the smallest of chunks so people with very high security classification only know a small chunk so they can’t piece together this seriously detrimental stuff and even incidentally and inadvertently pass the most seemingly innocuous part of it along to their wives. Messrs. McCain, Graham, and Warner want this information to be made available to the terrorists at their trials.
     It all makes me think that they really are more concerned with fairness for the captured terrorists than they are in protecting American lives. I can’t help but come away with the impression that safeguarding every single last Constitutional protection for the terrorists is more important to them than gathering the information that could protect soldiers on the frontlines, pedestrians and workers in New York, the throngs of people on Capitol Hill and all around the Potomac, or even their grandchildren. Making things right for the terrorists seems more important to them than making things safe for Americans.