Cold Fury

The terrorists have posted a video of their multiple desecrations of the bodies of Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, the two American soldiers who were captured in Iraq. The video apparently shows one of the corpses being beheaded; thankfully, it appears that both men were already dead by that point.

The terrorists who were responsible for this atrocity need to be hunted down and killed. When Russian diplomats were murdered by Iraqi terrorists, Vladimir Putin publicly directed Russia’s secret service to track down the perpetrators and kill them. And Russia doesn’t even have any armed forces in Iraq.

Has our government issued a similar order? Not that we know of. We chose this war; we chose this battlefield; we chose to send men like Menchaca and Tucker to Iraq because we believed it was important to our security. Their brutal murders have exposed, once again, the face of pure evil that we are fighting in this war. They must be avenged, and the American public must know that they have been avenged, not forgotten.

President Bush started this war with the right spirit, when he said, for example, that he wanted Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.” More recently, he has internalized and repeated the sophisticates’ criticisms of some of his early rhetoric. In this instance, he should put that reticence behind him and commit the full resources of this nation to avenging our soldiers’ murders. And I’m not talking about capturing the perpetrators and feeding them three religiously appropriate meals a day in Guantanamo Bay.

UPDATE: A friend in Washington decided to research the Washington Post’s coverage of the kidnapping and murder of Privates Menchaca and Tucker in comparison with alleged misdeeds by American troops:

I asked my intern to do a little research today because yesterday’s WashPost outlook section was just so over-the-top in its anti-American soldier articles.

I asked him to check how many article/editorials the Post did regarding the two soldiers who were grotesquely tortured, Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, Texas and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Ore.

There are 7 news articles in all. 2 or 3 of the articles are actually amalgamations of Iraq-related news stories. There are no editorials. One of the articles actually groups the kidnapping of the 2 soldiers together with a story about US soldiers charged with murdering Iraqis. When I put in a search for the names of the 2 soldiers plus the word “torture” nothing came up. The last of the 7 was published on 6/28/06.

I’m sure you’ll be gratified to know that when I typed in the word “Haditha” the search turned up 149 Washington Post hits, including editorials and news items. Since June 19th (the day after the first news story re: the 2 soldiers appeared), there have been 12 items published in WaPo on Haditha, compared to 7 on the soldiers.

When I typed in “Abu Ghraib” the search engine stalled because the search would’ve returned more than 1000 documents.

I think the over-the-top coverage of Abu Ghraib, the prison where no one died after it was reclaimed from Saddam Hussein, is the definitive proof of the American media’s bias against its own soldiers.

UPDATE: One of the goofball sites took issue with my statement that “no one died after [Abu Ghraib] was reclaimed from Saddam Hussein,” pointing out that there actually was one guy who died there in the course of an interrogation under circumstances that, last I knew, were murky. Actually, other people have died at Abu Ghraib, too; I’m pretty sure several died in the course of a prisoner uprising, for example, and it’s likely that some have died there of natural causes. So my sentence was carelessly written. The “over-the-top coverage of Abu Ghraib” I was referring to was the coverage of Lynndie England and her friends’ revels with nude pyramids, panties on the head, etc. (News coverage of the incident where the terrorist suspect died was not, to the best of my recollection, disproportionate.) So I’ll revise my sentence to say:

I think the over-the-top coverage of the escapades of Lynndie England et al, in which no one died, is the definitive proof of the American media’s bias against its own soldiers.

What’s interesting to me is the hysteria with which liberals react to the suggestion that press coverage of Abu Ghraib [shorthand for the Lynndie England et al episode] was so disproportionate as to show bias against our troops. The emails we got were abusive in the usual LIAR! and IDIOT! way. But none of them had anything rational to say about the point that our correspondent made: the Washington Post has had little to say about the outrages committed against our troops, while it has dwelled at absurd lengths on far less significant offenses committed by American soldiers. And the Post is by no means alone in this regard.

And let’s have some sense of proportion here. If we’re going to talk about the horrors of Abu Ghraib, let’s take just a moment to focus on the real horrors. From John Burns’ report in the New York TImes dated January 27, 2003:

In the unlit blackness of an October night, it took a flashlight to pick them out: rust-colored butchers’ hooks, 20 or more, each four or five feet long, aligned in rows along the ceiling of a large hangar-like building. In the grimmest fortress in Iraq’s gulag, on the desert floor 20 miles west of Baghdad, this appeared to be the grimmest corner of all, the place of mass hangings that have been a documented part of life under Saddam Hussein.

At one end of the building at Abu Ghraib prison, a whipping wind gusted through open doors. At the far end, the flashlight picked out a windowed space that appeared to function as a control room. Baggy trousers of the kind worn by many Iraqi men were scattered at the edges of the concrete floor. Some were soiled, as if worn in the last, humiliating moments of a condemned man’s life.

What our correspondent and I decried was the lack of proportionality in much of the mainstream media’s coverage of Iraq: a disproportionality so extreme as to indicate bias. If the liberals have anything meaningful to say in response to that point, we haven’t yet heard it.

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