Chris At Home

Yes, it is a surprise. He makes the obvious point: one does not release POWs in the middle of the war and one does not put them each on trial. You put them in a camp until the war ends, and keep them from killing more people.

Faced with dark forces that want to destroy our civilization, we might recall that the U.S. is not only Europe's ally but the flagship of all free nations. If America can sometimes make errors, the sort of anti-Americanism that drives the hysteria over Guantanamo is always in the wrong. Guantanamo, though, is not an error. It is a necessity.

Demagogues, and European parliamentarians are among the shrillest, claim that it's inconceivable to keep prisoners locked up without trying them in courts of law. With this simple statement they annul -- or, better, ignore -- customary law and legal tradition as well as basic human-survival instincts. Whether they are legal or illegal fighters, those men in Guantanamo had weapons; they used them; and they will likely use them again if released before the end of the conflict. This is the meaning of their imprisonment: to prevent enemy combatants from returning to the battlefield, the only humane alternative to the summary execution of enemy prisoners practiced by less enlightened armies. Which French general would have released German prisoners in 1914, before the end of that great war, at the risk of seeing these soldiers mobilized again? Which American general would have organized the trial of 10 million German soldiers, captured during World War II, before Berlin's unconditional surrender?

More common sense from JAK, via Betsy:

Indeed, it would be accurate to say that both MSM and the Human Rights community is involved in a major struggle to convince the world of the essential moral equivalence between democracies and terrorist organizations(tyrannies are presented as morally superior put upon "moderates.") They do so by focusing on the imagined or real transgressions of democracies and by covering up the purposeful viciousness of the terrorists.

Think. When was the last time you saw the NYT show a picture of a summary executions in the public square of Palestinian or Iraqi "collaborators?"

It is the bigotry of low expectations: terrorists kill innocent people, so it is not news. American troops rarely kill innocent people, so that is news. Combine that with the usual internationalist path of least resistance (terrorists don't listen to Amnesty International, the US does; therefore Amnesty accuses the US of torture, mistreatment and atrocities while ignoring real torture and atrocities by terrorists) and you get the current media reporting.

Update: Michelle has more in this line of argument.

James Taranto has an interesting take:

This rhetoric about "cycles" appears to reflect a theory of moral equivalence, but in fact it is something else. After all, if the two sides were morally equivalent, one could apply this reasoning in reverse--excusing, for example, the alleged massacre at Haditha on the ground that it was "provoked" by a bombing that killed a U.S. serviceman--and hey, violence begets violence.

But America's critics never make this argument, and its defenders seldom do. That is because it is understood that America knows better. If it is true that U.S. Marines murdered civilians in cold blood at Haditha, the other side's brutality does not excuse it. Only the enemy's evil acts are thought to be explained away by ours.

Implicit in the "cycle" theory, then, is the premise that the enemy is innocent--not in the sense of having done nothing wrong, but in the sense of not knowing any better. The enemy lacks the knowledge of good and evil--or, to put it in theological terms, he is free of original sin.