This article should make you sick to your stomach. For all their talk about "spying on Americans" and other such nonsense, at the end of the day, when Democrats are challenging so-called "warrantless wiretaps" or the Patriot Act, all they're really doing is ensuring that another horrible episode, whether 9-11 or the one below, occurs.

[NY Post] U.S. intelligence officials got mired for nearly 10 hours seeking approval to use wiretaps against al Qaeda terrorists suspected of kidnapping Queens soldier Alex Jimenez in Iraq earlier this year, The Post has learned.

This week, Congress plans to vote on a bill that leaves in place the legal hurdles in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - problems that were highlighted during the May search for a group of kidnapped U.S. soldiers.

...A search to rescue the men was quickly launched. But it soon ground to a halt as lawyers - obeying strict U.S. laws about surveillance - cobbled together the legal grounds for wiretapping the suspected kidnappers.

Starting at 10 a.m. on May 15, according to a timeline provided to Congress by the director of national intelligence, lawyers for the National Security Agency met and determined that special approval from the attorney general would be required first.

For an excruciating nine hours and 38 minutes, searchers in Iraq waited as U.S. lawyers discussed legal issues and hammered out the "probable cause" necessary for the attorney general to grant such "emergency" permission.

Finally, approval was granted and, at 7:38 that night, surveillance began.

"The intelligence community was forced to abandon our soldiers because of the law," a senior congressional staffer with access to the classified case told The Post.

"How many lawyers does it take to rescue our soldiers?" he asked. "It should be zero." [emphasis mine]

The FISA law applies even to a cellphone conversation between two people in Iraq, because those communications zip along wires through U.S. hubs, which is where the taps are typically applied.

Labels: antiwar loonies, civil liberties, Congress, Delusional Democrats, rules of engagement, surveillance, TSP, war on terror, wiretap

Going back to numbers of troops in Iraq is an argument that is tireless but at best academic. For instance, people often point to the days directly following the fall of Saddam's regime when Iraqis seemed to loot as old world Vikings. With more troops, perhaps the number General Eric Shinseki recommended, the argument goes, the coalition forces would have been able to restore order.

This argument assumes, however, that our upper echelon civilian and military leaders would have given our troops the authority to shoot looters. After all, what does it matter if one soldier or 10 soldiers or 100 soldiers are guarding a building if the looters know that they will not be shot for stealing? Indeed, this did not happen with the supposedly too few troops we had. Our troops were ordered to stand down.

Thus the answer: nothing would have changed with more numbers. It's not the numbers, it's how we're using them.

I've read a lot of articles and books voicing concerns and complaints from our soldiers and the one that most often appears regards the ridiculously strict rules of engagement that we place upon them.

The stories of soldiers like 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano, who must literally fight for their lives in a courtroom after doing so in Iraqi battlefields (murder charges against Pantano were ultimately dismissed), are becoming far too common. Likewise, the entire theme of books like No True Glory regard an unwillingness of our leaders to win the war in Iraq for fear of a perception of heavy-handedness or causing too many civilian casualties.

Someone need remind our president, the Congress, and the Pentagon politico-military leaders that we (the Allied forces) had to kill no less than 10 million German and 2.5 million Japanese to win the Second World War (the last war we clearly won). Those killed weren't all Goerings and Tojos, either. There were tens of thousands of children, women and old people killed by our bombs and bullets.

But that's the very point of war, which we seem to have forgotten -- to make it so horrific for your enemy that they'll never risk fighting you again.

So we, as a nation, either better begin to understand the amount of blood a nation need shed to win wars, or in turn get used to losing them.

Because our enemy of radical Islam has decided we haven't the stomach. And they don't care if you supported the invasion or not, who you last voted for or ask for your political affiliation before they kill you.

As a post script, here are the comments of Lt. Col. David Bolgiano, from his recent commentary:

We should also protect our warriors from the caterwauling of those such as the Washington Post reporters who "broke" the Haditha story and from those in the military who are more concerned about maintaining an "appearance of propriety" than in killing our determined enemies. Neither the law nor decency allows for the willful killing of innocent civilians. There need to be, however, allowances for unintended and unfortunate consequences.

When it comes to applying the correct legal standard, those judging the actions of warriors in combat should recognize the tactical realities of an engagement. It may be legally and morally appropriate under certain circumstances to kill "unarmed" individuals, such as those actively acting as lookouts for the emplacement of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or participating in the network of conspirators building such devices. In a recent Time magazine article a jihadist named Abdallah is quoted saying: "They are not going to defeat me with technology. If they want to get rid of IEDs, they have to kill me and everyone like me." Our young Marines are able and willing to make that happen, if only our leaders will display the moral courage to allow them to do so without fear of prosecution.

We have become our own worst enemy. Sadly, it is not the law that creates these restrictions, but rather an overly-restrictive interpretation of it by some commanders and their lawyers. Hopefully, the military will adopt a self-defense deadly-force policy akin to the FBI's, which reads in part that individual agents will not "be judged in the clear vision of 20-20 hindsight," but rather, based on how a reasonable person would act under situations that are "tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving." I can think of no circumstance more tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving than that faced by our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in the current counterinsurgency fight in Iraq.

Labels: Iraq, proxy war, rules of engagement, war on terror