Wednesday, May 13, 2009

from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals The Stories Behind the News









Scapegoating US Military Interrogators - The Real McCarthyism



Posted: 12 May 2009 06:57 PM PDT






The Obama Administration's release of the torture memos, Senator
Dodd's obscene comparison
of the US interrogations of terrorists and the
Holocaust and the media's ongoing demonization and exposure
of personnel
involved in forcefully interrogating captured Al Queda
terrorists brings to mind McCarthyism. The real and original McCarthyism.

And by that I don't mean what is often inaccurately referred to as McCarthyism
by liberals, namely Anti-Communism, something that occurred when the sleazy
Senator from Wisconsin hijacked the genuine Anti-Communist efforts of people
like Richard Nixon or Whittaker Chambers.... in order to promote himself and
pursue his longstanding animus against the US Army. McCarthy's buffoonish
antics then allowed liberals to delegitimize Anti-Communism as McCarthyism,
a victory for American Leftists and for the USSR that was so spectacular that
The Manchurian Candidate openly implied that McCarthy was a paid Soviet
agent.

Before that however McCarthy became involved in the Malmedy Massacre
trial, a case that carries strong similarities to the War on Terror today. The
Malmedy Massacre involved the murder of hundreds of American POW's by
the Waffen SS, who after the war were put on trial for their crimes. The Nazi
prisoners however began claiming that they had been tortured by the
American interrogators, with stories that became increasingly detached
from reality.

Senator McCarthy however put on a full court press on behalf of the SS
men sentenced to death. He repeatedly accused US interrogators of
committing all sorts of atrocities against the convicted Nazis. He accused
the US Army of engaging in a cover up, insulted US soldiers who had
survived the massacre and demanded lie detector tests for several US
Army officers. McCarthy compared the US military to the Gestapo and
the Soviet Secret Police.

Very soon the Nazis became the victims, often inaccurately described as
frightened teenagers, and the US interrogators became the criminals,
"torturers" who were painted as monsters for working to bring the
murderers of hundreds of US POW's to justice. Senators who supported
the interrogations, became complicit in torture. The final picture, then
as today, was of a monstrous and corrupt US military system illegally
brutalizing the innocent.

McCarthy got his way. The death sentences were commuted and the
majority of the defendants wound up walking away. Repeated investigations
found nothing worse than various forms of confinement, isolation and
hooding. And possibly the occasional guard who delivered an unsolicited
but well earned punch. None of that mattered though. The moral axis
was shifted. The bad guys became the victims, and the good guys
became the bad guys. That was the lesson distilled from the headlines.

It's the same lesson meant to be distilled today. And that is the real McCarthyism.
The scapegoating of US troops and interrogators fighting to protect and serve their
country, by politicians who don't want them to be able to do it. Who think the
very idea is evil.

McCarthy's passion for the Nazis who murdered US troops was fired by his
sympathies for Nazism. Just as the outrage by the left against the waterboarding
of Al Queda terrorists is motivated by their sympathies for Terrorists.

The sudden enthusiasm by MSNBC leftist talkers for waterboarding Hannity
is yet another reminder that the left doesn't really believe waterboarding is
wrong. They believe fighting against Muslim terrorists is wrong. It's not the
tactic, it's never the tactic. The left isn't against torture, anymore than they
are against war.

The tactic isn't the issue, the target is.

The same press which cheered on Clinton's war on Yugoslavia on behalf of
Muslim separatism, that included aiding and arming Muslim Jihadis who
would later go on to kill Americans; suddenly joined the anti-war
movement when Bush was bombing Muslim terrorists and their pet
dictators. It isn't the tactic, it's the target.


The real McCarthyism, as practiced by the far right and the far left, is to
smear US troops and interrogators, in order to protect murderers and
terrorists. The same ugly tactics used by McCarthy at the Malmedy
hearings have been revived, dusted off and can be seen on the Senate
floor, on the editorial page of the New York Times and in the speeches of
Barack Hussein Obama.


That shift of perspective that turns patriotism into ugliness, national defense
into brutality and service into crime-- is exactly the kind of propaganda victory
on behalf of evil that the real McCarthyism is built on.

And it works in two stages, first minimizing the real evil of the perpetrators...
and then treating them as the victims, and those who kill, capture or interrogate
them as the real villains.

The Good Nazi of yesteryear has become the Good Terrorist of today. An
innocent boy, a patriot fighting in defense of his homeland or a soldier
wronged. And the men and women of the US Army as always remain
the villains for fighting against their kind.

That form of ugly anti-Americanism is where the far left and the far right
meet, and shake hands, over a pile of corpses. It is where Communism and
Nazism and those who support them agree on one guiding principle,
that Americans should not be able to defend themselves from their enemies.

Then as today.














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