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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Captain Jack who wrote (161)	11/17/2004 10:59:26 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

ENEMY PROPAGANDA November 17, 2004 -- Get set for another round of America- bashing — this time over charges that a U.S. Marine shot to death an apparently disarmed, wounded terrorist inside a mosque in Fallujah. Emphasis on apparently, please. Meanwhile, as the anti-American rhetoric has begun to fill the airwaves, the cold-blooded execution of a kidnapped female humanitarian aid worker by Iraqi terrorists is met with the usual, ho-hum, "ain't it just terrible" pablum. So let's have some perspective. All that can fairly be assumed about the terrorist who was shot in Fallujah is that he was member of a movement dedicated to twisting Western rules of warfare and humane conduct into lethal weapons to be used against Americans. And that he was effectively allied with the killers of Margaret Hassan, the Iraq-based British director of CARE — and the presumed victim in a videotape that shows a woman being executed by a pistol shot to the head. The West has learned the hard way what happens when terrorists are not dealt with in ways that make it impossible for them to terrorize again. They will terrorize again. They will wage jihad until their absolute last breath. And if it turns out that the dead terrorist was not, in fact, a threat to the Marine who shot him — well, the same can't be said of every apparently dead or wounded enemy fighter. Indeed, the NBC correspondent on the scene — whose film footage of the Marine's action is fueling the controversy — reports that another Marine in the same unit had been killed one day earlier by a booby-trap planted on a dead terrorist. And the Marine who fired the fatal shot was himself hit by gunfire just a day before. (That he was returned to the firing line so quickly speaks to his grit and courage — and should earn him the gratitude and respect of all those he acted to protect.) Was he legally justified in firing his weapon at the wounded terrorist — who, he may have feared, might have been up to some trick? That's unclear. Does he deserve the benefit of every last doubt — and then some? Yes, absolutely. "In a combat infantry soldier's training, he is always taught that his enemy is at his most dangerous when he is severely wounded," Charles Heyman, a senior defense analyst with Jane's Conultancy Group in Britain, said. If an injured enemy makes even the slightest move, "in my estimation they would be justified in shooting him." Not that any of that matters to some of the so-called human-rights watchdogs. Louise Arbour, the top rights official at the United Nations (where else?), has called for full probes of suspected "abuses" by U.S. troops in Fallujah, including the use of excessive force and — how's this for gross calumny — targeting of civilians. "This latest incident is just a further reminder that one cannot take it for granted that troops . . . will strive to abide by the . . . law if they are not given leadership on that matter," a spokesman for Amnesty International, Alistair Hodgett, said. Blah, blah, blah. But the "rights" fussbudgets have not a thing to say about the brutal murder of Margaret Hassan — even as they attack those brave soldiers and Marines who are risking their lives to cleanse Iraq of Hassan's murderers? The left-wing and anti-U.S. media has provided America's critics (and the terrorists) with wonderfully extensive coverage of the Abu Ghraib abuses. And, sure enough, yesterday Al-Jazeera TV was happily airing the footage of the Marine's action in Fallujah. At the same time, the network self-righteously declared it would not air the slaughter of Margaret Hassan — no doubt, to avoid generating bad publicity for the terrorists. No one should be fooled by what's going on here. Those who equate the head-choppings and cold-blooded executions by terrorists with battlefield shootings by Americans acting in self-defense only bolster the terrorists' cause. Some do so deliberately. The others are useful idiots. Both, in the end, are complicit — morally, if not legally. nypost.com