Once Again, Col Peters Nails It

Terrorism's triumphant techniques
By RALPH PETERS

Our terrorist enemies are out-thinking us. It's not only embarrassing, but deadly.

The Taliban's latest innovation was on display again last week, when a suicide bomber, reportedly garbed in an Afghan army uniform, killed seven Americans, including a CIA station chief.

The terrorists are "inside the wire." Everywhere. From eastern Afghanistan to Texas. And we're stalled. For all of our wealth, technology and power, our enemies have the strategic and psychological initiative. The low-tech nature of most reported combat in our recent conflicts obscures the advent of four powerful innovations in warfare.

Unfortunately, three of those revolutionary techniques belong to our enemies. The single breakthrough we've exploited has been Unmanned Aerial Vehicles -- UAVs, commonly known as "drones." They're a terrific stand-off targeting tool. Our enemies, though, have mastered new forms of the tactical fight -- with strategic effects. They still lose every classic firefight, but they are pioneering the means to win without directly confronting our combat troops.

The first terrorist and insurgent innovation of this conflict era was the bulk employment of suicide bombers, dirt-cheap weapons with a high probability of success -- the poor man's precision arsenal.

Their second innovation was another cheap-but-powerful tool, the Improvised Explosive Device, the IED or roadside bomb. We still can't beat it.

Then, over the last year or so, we've seen the ever more frequent use of their most insidious psychological weapon: the suicide assassin disguised as "one of ours."

This is an anti-morale nuke. Our linchpin effort in Afghanistan is the development of Afghan security forces. (The Obama Doctrine: "When they stand up, we'll run like hell.") And building up the Afghan army and police relies on trust between our trainers and advisers and "their" Afghans -- as well as between Afghans themselves.

Last year, we saw incident after incident in which a Taliban cadre within the Afghan security forces gunned down our officers at meetings (the Brits took a really bad hit), turned their weapons on our combat troops or, most devastatingly, blew themselves up when we embraced them as comrades.

Don't let this weapon's low-tech nature fool you. This is the big one. President Obama's desperate "strategy" for Afghanistan relies on building trust -- between Afghans and their government, but above all on the security front. Our enemies have done what we refuse to do. They've analyzed the problem objectively and engineered ruthless solutions.

And we won't even block their Internet sites.

We make up fairy tales about the power of development projects to deter religious fanatics. We impose rules of engagement on our troops that protect our enemies. We ground our air power. We grant terrorists "legal" rights with no basis in existing law.
And our enemies do whatever it takes to win.

I want to see every one of those enemies dead. But I have to acknowledge their commitment, their maddened courage and their genius at waging war for peanuts. Our troops in the field know all too well what a self-imposed mess we're in. But the gulf between our grunts and their generals is immense and growing wider.

It's a (literally) bloody disgrace that our ragtag enemies innovate faster and more effectively than our armed forces and the legion of overpaid contractors behind them.

They ask themselves, "What works?"

We ask ourselves what the lawyers will say.

The crucial difference?

Our enemies believe in victory, even if we don't.

Scozzafava, ACORN and Doug Hoffman

Congressman Cantor, its not too late to step up and let Virginia know you stand for true conservative principles. Get behind Doug Hoffman. You're going to need every conservative you can get in the House to stop this headlong rush into socialism.

H/T Michelle Malkin:

The NYPost editorial board endorses conservative Doug Hoffman for Congress:

No, Republicans needn’t toe the conservative line without any deviation.

Moderate GOPers like Rudy Giuliani have managed to stray on some issues without wholly betraying their party.

But a Republican should adhere to certain minimum GOP principles. Scozzafava is just too far to the left too often.

And not only on social matters, like same-sex marriage and abortion. In Albany, Scozzafava has been such a profligate tax-and-spender, she can almost make Speaker Sheldon Silver blush.

With the backing of the ACORN-allied Working Families Party, she supports Big Labor’s favorite organizing bill — card-check — as well as the federal stimulus, opposed by every House Republican.

Hoffman, by contrast, understands the dangers of unchecked spending, monster deficits and ever-higher taxes — i.e., concerns of average working Americans.

ACORN Group Skirts Election Laws

The Working Families Party, an ACORN front group whose ballot line Newt Gingrich-endorsed radical leftist Dede Scozzafava has embraced on multiple occasions, is up to no good again.

The NYPost reports:
The labor-backed Working Families Party has engaged in “an audacious scheme to violate the law” to help the party’s favored political candidates get elected, a sweeping new lawsuit charges.

The first-of-its-kind suit says the WFP created a political outfit, Data and Field Services, that it is using to “circumvent state election and local campaign finance laws.”

The way the scheme works, according the suit, is that the WFP gets involved in local races, backing its favored candidates, who in turn hire DFS for vital campaign services, such as phone banking, polling and get-out-the-vote efforts.

But under the plan, the WFP-endorsed candidates pay only “a nominal sum, well below fair market value,” for those services — giving those candidates a major, unfair advantage over their opponents, whose spending is limited by law.

“This is a case about an audacious scheme to violate the law by using corporate subterfuge to hijack our local election process,” says the suit, which was filed in Staten Island.

“It goes to the very heart of our local democracy and undermines the fairness and integrity of our local elections.”

The suit, filed on behalf of five aggrieved Staten Island voters, highlights the relationship between the City Council campaign of Debi Rose, a WFP-backed candidate, and DFS.

The court papers provide a case study for how the WFP, which has been increasing its influence, operates.

With friends like these…

Want To Solve The Problem of Illegal Detention?

Combatants on the field of battle; with weapons; wearing no uniforms; operating under no flag; with no allegience to a sovereign government; killing innocents and American and Coalition forces without remorse; having demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that their surrender is not an option and their intention is to continue killing innocents, deserve to die.

Is that judgemental? You damn skippy it is. Will I be judged based on my belief that the enemy is dangerous and the world is safer without them? I hope so.

Its a Marine thing. If I have to explain, you wouldn't understand anyway.

You want to stop illegal detention?
Stop taking prisioners.

H/T Major Pain

Gitmo? No, Kill Thugs On Spot

By Ralph Peters

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.

Terrorists don't have legal rights or human rights. By committing or abetting acts of terror against the innocent, they place themselves outside of humanity's borders. They must be hunted as man-killing animals.

And, as a side benefit, dead terrorists don't pose legal quandaries. Captured terrorists, on the other hand, are always a liability. Last week, President Obama revealed his utter failure to comprehend these butchers when he characterized Guantanamo as a terrorist recruiting tool.

Gitmo wasn't any such thing. Not the real Gitmo. The Guantanamo Obama believes in is a fiction of the global media. With rare, brief exceptions, Gitmo inmates have been treated far better than US citizens in our federal prisons.

But the reality of Gitmo was irrelevant -- the left needed us to be evil, to "reveal" ourselves as the moral equivalent of the terrorists. So they made up their Gitmo myths.

Now we're stuck with sub-human creatures who should be decomposing in unmarked graves in a distant desert. Before reality smacked him between the eyes, Obama made blithe campaign promises and quick-draw presidential pronouncements he's now unable to fulfill.

Everything's easier when you're campaigning and criticizing, but the Oval Office view is a different matter. And suddenly your old allies, who rhapsodized about the evils of Gitmo, no longer have your back.

Odious senators, such as John Kerry and Ted Kennedy, damned Gitmo to hell. But they don't want to damn the prisoners to Massachusetts (given that few al Qaeda members can swim, Cape Cod seems a splendid place for a prison). Don't the icons of ethics want to solve the problem?

Or should we send the Gitmo Gang to California's Eighth Congressional District, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's constituents could guarantee an end to waterboarding? The good voters of San Francisco could put up their new guests in a grand Nob Hill hotel and stage teach-ins to explain why America's so nasty.

Another option -- which would save taxpayers millions -- would be to encourage a coalition of MoveOn.org, Code Pink and ACORN to sponsor an "Adopt a Terrorist" program.

The only requirement would be that the terrorist has to live full-time with the sponsor's family so he'd always get plenty of hugs.

On a serious note, it's not just voter NIMBY-ism that makes this problem so difficult. The practical catches came home to me when last I visited Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.

The grounds of a massive federal penitentiary adjoin that venerable Army post. One Washington-isn't-thinking proposal would park the terrorists right there in the Big House. But here's the catch: Ft. Leavenworth's home to the Army's Command and General Staff College, attended each year by hundreds of elite foreign officers.

At CGSC, our officers build international relationships that benefit our country for decades to come, while allies and partners learn how to work together. But with Islamist terrorists confined next door -- hardly a mile as the crow flies from the Staff College -- Muslim countries would withdraw their students from the program under pressure from Islamist factions at home -- who'd claim that Ft. Leavenworth was the new Gitmo.

Do we really want to sacrifice our chance to educate officers from the troubled Muslim world? Do we want to destroy an educational program that's been of tremendous benefit? One that's advanced the rule of law and human rights?

Other proposed prison locations have their own challenges (although Cape Cod still looks pretty good to me). Meanwhile, our foreign "friends" who shuddered at the imaginary horrors of Gitmo are unwilling to share the burden.

Which brings us back to this column's opening credo: Terrorists are anathema to civilization and the human race. By their own choice, they've set themselves beyond the human collective. Better to eliminate them where you find them than to let them live to become a lunatic cause.

Telling them that we'll just lock them up and treat them really nice is a better terrorist recruiting tool than Gitmo ever was. Why not become a terrorist, if the punishment's three hots and a cot, along with better medical care than you've ever had in your life?

Plus, you get your own fan club.

Those who worry about the rights of terrorists ensure that these beasts will continue to slaughter the innocent. In your back yard.