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Nov. 28, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:29
November 28, 2005, Monday, Hour #2
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Yes, and greetings, my friends, and welcome back.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have El Rushball with the official start of the Christmas season.
Great to be with you.
It's one of our favorite times of year here at the EIB network.
Great to have you with us.
Our telephone number is 800-282-2882.
Email address rush at EIBNet.com.
Steve Mariuchi fired as coach of the Detroit Lions.
We had a caller up there who's going to ask me what's wrong with the Lions.
Of course, that's, I mean, if somebody can answer that question, it'd be forever enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and become a gazillionaire.
All I can tell you is what I've heard.
They've got these three great wide receivers, these number one draft picks.
They've got the personnel, but I heard something last week in the pregame shows that these guys don't show up to practice well.
They don't.
Apparently, how did I interpret it?
This was not actually said, but my interpretation was that there's just not a whole lot of commitment there.
I couldn't tell you why that is.
Mariuchi has proven his coaching bona fides out in San Francisco with the Fortiners.
And he was on Holmgren's staff with the Green Bay Packers, as was Andy Reed of the Philadelphia Eagles back during their Super Bowl years.
I couldn't begin to tell you.
But it's a sad day.
Not all of his assistants, just a couple of them, have been canned.
Just to go over some of the news I imparted to you within the closing 30 seconds of the previous hour.
A CNN switchboard operator, switchboard, not a switcher, but a switchboard.
Somebody answers the phone.
In other words, operator was fired over the holiday after the operator claimed that the X placed over Vice President Cheney's face was free speech.
We did it just to make a point.
Tell them to stop lying, Bush and Cheney, the CNN operator, said to a caller, bring our soldiers home.
The caller initially phoned the network to complain about the flashing big X over Cheney as he gave an address live from Washington.
The telephone operator at CNN said, was it not freedom of speech?
Yes or no?
If you don't like it, don't watch.
Laurie Goldberg, the senior vice president for PR at CNN, said in the release a Turner switchboard operator was fired today after we were alerted to a conversation the operator had with a caller in which the operator lost his temper and expressed his personal views, behavior that was totally inappropriate.
His comments did not reflect the views of CNN.
We are reaching out to the caller and expressing our deep regret to her and apologizing she did not get the courtesy entitled to her when she called.
Now, this is, you know, this is on the heels of CNN saying it was a computer glitch and that they couldn't recreate this X if they tried.
They did try and they couldn't recreate it.
Yet somebody calls to complain and a phone operator at CNN proudly, oh yeah, yeah, we did it.
And if you don't like it, tough toenails.
Free speech.
Tell Bush and Cheney to stop lying.
Of course, there's no anti-Bush culture at the place.
This was just the words of one ragtag phone operator at CNN.
And Mother Sheehan went back down to Crawford, Texas over the weekend.
She had a book signing near President Bush's ranch on Saturday.
The picture here is pretty telling.
They've got a little table set up, and they got a whole bunch of chairs for the admiring throngs who've gone out and bought her book to come in, stand in line, and have her sign it inside this big tent.
Well, nobody showed up.
This picture shows two photographers taking pictures of Mother Sheehan looking rather bored.
The headline to the caption, it's the AP.
No one shows up at her book signing near President Bush's ranch on Saturday in Crawford, Texas.
Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son died in Iraq, called for anti-war activists to return to Crawford this week as Bush celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday.
Not only didn't they show up, they didn't show up to get their books signed by Cindy Sheehan.
Such, such a shame.
You think she realizes her 15 minutes are up?
Probably not.
And that's even, that's even, you know, that's even sadder the way this woman's being exploited.
Washington Post today, interesting story.
Actually, it was yesterday.
I'm sorry.
Sympathetic vibrations by Chris Salizza and Peter Slevin.
Washington Post Sunday, November 27th.
Democrats fumed last week at Vice President Cheney's suggestion that criticism of the administration's war policies was itself becoming a hindrance to the war effort.
But a new poll indicates most Americans are sympathetic to Cheney's point.
70%, 70% of people surveyed said that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale.
44% saying morale is hurt a lot, according to a poll taken by RT strategies.
Even self-identified Democrats agree.
55% of them believe that criticism hurts morale, while 21% say it helps.
The results surely will rankle many Democrats who argue that it is patriotic and supportive of the troops to call attention to what they believe are deep flaws in President Bush's Iraq strategy.
But the survey itself cannot be dismissed as a partisan attack.
The RT in RT strategies are Thomas Riedel, a Democrat, and Lance Terrence, a veteran GOP pollster.
Their poll also indicates many Americans are skeptical of Democratic complaints about the war.
Just three out of ten adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq.
A majority believes the motive is really to gain a partisan political advantage.
Now, I have to tell you, this doesn't surprise me in Iota.
Doesn't surprise me in Iota because I think I understand human nature.
And I also understand what's happening with the respect that is being lost by the members of the mainstream press.
And when they get on these things, they won't let go of it.
They just never let go of it.
They ram it down everybody's throats.
And after a while, people see it for what it is.
Now, contrast this poll with all the other polls we saw in the last two weeks.
Bush's approval numbers at all-time low.
More people want to get out of Iraq than ever before.
Iraq policy of failure.
Iraq policy of this and that.
Take this poll and compare it.
Just shows you these polls are all over the board, and you can create a poll and get the result that you want.
And we know that news agencies now use polling specifically to create news.
Actually, you know what?
I think polling is, I think polling has just replaced the editorial page in large measure.
It's a way to get the editorial page on the front page.
You have a newspaper editorial policy that says Iraq is wrong, the war is wrong, that Bush is horrible, that Bush stinks, and that Rumsfeld and Rice and Cheney need to go.
You go out and you send your polling unit out there with certain questions to ask, come back, ooh, look what our poll just found out.
It happens to agree with our editorial position.
I think it's just a way of doing news or editorials, actually, and disguising them, and then having the audacity to proclaim that the polls are news.
And by the way, When these various news organizations do their own polling, I would submit to you that the results of their polls are not at all representative of the actual opinion on an issue as they're represented by the American people.
They are a reaction to the news coverage that the people being polled have seen.
And that's why the media trumpets their own polls.
Oh, look at us, because they're doing this to try to prove to themselves they still have the power to bend and shape public opinion.
And what they are, they have joined at the hip now with the Democrats.
They've been joined at the hip with the Democrats a long time, but in this particular instance, they are now invested in America's defeat because America's defeat equals victory for them.
It really hasn't changed.
What's bad for America, good for today's Democratic Party.
What's bad for a Democratic Party is good for America.
And they've put themselves in this position, and it is, I don't care what anybody says, 06, 08 coming up.
They think that slam dunk.
I think it's already over.
They haven't the slightest clue where they really stand because they'll look at this poll and they'll ignore it as being flawed somehow or biased or somehow.
Yet all this poll does is represent basic human nature.
You can't run out there and start calling our troops the equivalent of Nazi thugs, Soviet gulag troops, and poll pot equivalents.
You can't keep running around portraying our troops as nothing but a bunch of evil, barbaric torturers and have the American people just accept it, hook line, and sinker.
They're going to, of course, this is going to affect.
And many people in this country know military families and know members of the military, and they know these people personally.
They know this is a crock.
So it's great news here.
It shows up in the Washington Post on Sunday.
Did you hear anything about this anywhere?
No, of course you didn't.
Showed up in the Sunday paper.
And of course, there's a reason for that.
Rush, they bury things in the Sunday paper.
Well, stuff like this, yeah.
There's no big news cycle on Sunday.
The Sunday shows are the news cycle, not what's in the Sunday papers.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back and move right on right after this.
Okay, back to the phones we go.
I have not forgotten it.
No, no, no.
We'll get to the economic news on Black Friday.
You know why they call it in just a second?
You know why they call it Black Friday?
That's, yeah, well, the Libs call it Black Friday because it's a doom and gloom day.
It's a day of profit.
Profit's bad.
Profit's exploitive.
Profit subjugates and imprisons people.
To them, that's why it's Black Friday.
But Black Friday is called Black Friday because the theory goes that for most retailers, Black Friday is the first day of the year that they actually go into the black on the profit loss ledger.
That sounds a little late in the year for me, for a lot of people, but nevertheless, that's the tradition.
And we've got conflicting reports on just how successful Black Friday and the weekend was.
And we'll get to all that in due course.
But first, here's Dave in Clarksville, Tennessee.
Hello, sir.
Good morning or good afternoon, Rush.
How are you?
Fine, sir.
Never better.
Great.
Hey, thank you for taking my call.
Yeah.
Wanted to talk to you a little bit about the torture issue that is going on.
I think that as a country, torture is beneath the United States.
Okay.
Torture is beneath the United States.
Well, if one of our soldiers is captured and tortured, we all take great offense at that.
I beg to disagree.
I've not seen that.
I've seen a bunch of Americans beheaded on videotape.
I've seen a bunch of torture take place.
I heard about it.
I don't see a lot of Democrats and American liberals acting upset about that.
In fact, they take the occasion of those instances to blame us for it.
Somehow we're responsible for our own people being tortured.
I disagree with you on that.
Well, I'm not talking about liberals, Rush.
I'm talking about in general.
I'm talking about reasonable people.
I mean, you know, if you were to take an individual.
You mean like Neville Chamberlain?
He was a reasonable guy.
He didn't believe in the evil of the Nazis and came.
We can do business with these guys and we just act a certain way.
No, that's not the same thing, Rush.
We're not talking about World War II and Nazi aggression across Europe.
We're talking about terrorists.
I know, and it's worse.
It could possibly be worse because it's got its grips on much more of the planet than Hitler ever had hopes of.
But here we are, 60 years later.
We have someone, a prisoner.
We can give them drugs to get the truth out of them.
We don't need to put them in pain and all these 500-year-olds.
No, that's drugging them.
Why?
That's torture.
The way we define it today, it's torture.
It's semantics, Rush, but nonetheless.
You know, I understand what you're saying.
I know exactly where you're coming from.
You have a high ideal.
You think America is a beacon of all that's good and just in the world.
I know you firmly believe that.
And as a result, you believe that anything that we do that compromises those high ideals only harms us.
And so you don't want that to happen.
You think that kind of barbaric behavior is beneath us and it will eventually destroy us.
And I disagree profoundly, although I totally understand where you're coming from.
I think a good and decent and just people such as the United States and the American people are are fully capable of remaining that while doing what's necessary to put down threats that threaten our national security.
But we're not even having that debate, Dave.
And your call illustrates the point I made in the previous hour.
We ought to be talking about what we need to do to secure this country, what we need to do to give our troops in the field the greatest chance of victory.
And instead, what we're talking about is how barbaric they are and how harmful it is to us.
And in the process, we are conferring due process rights on the guilty.
We are treating the guilty as though they're guilty because of us.
We're making ourselves out to be the bad guys in this whole circumstance.
It's all based, as I said, on a complete lie.
That we are somehow involved in torture on a grand scale, that we have to spend all this time in Congress worried about the enemy post-9-11, and it's upside down.
The concern should be to prevent the destruction of American cities and the mass destruction of American people, millions of Americans.
We're not focused on that.
And it's gotten to the point here that people think that all we do is commit torture.
And now you add to that that it doesn't work.
Now we're incompetent barbarians at the same time.
And I just, I don't believe that history demonstrates.
If you think that this is the first time torture has been used or has been alleged to have been used in any armed conflict in which the U.S. has been involved, I would urge you to rethink it because it isn't.
There were plenty of things that were done.
I mean, talking about torture.
How about FDR and the Japanese internment?
We never hear about that in the discussion of how rotten presidents, past presidents are, what wartime presidents do.
So while I understand your high ideal argument, I think it's naive and dangerous because it's ignorant.
It is taking place in a vacuum, absent reality, without a true focus on the depth of the threat that we face.
Ron in Jackson, Michigan, you're next.
Welcome to the EIB Network, sir.
Hello.
Oh, I am amongst greatness.
I've listened to you forever, Rush.
I'm happy to talk to you.
I just want to say as a former Special Operations soldier that interrogation and torture works completely.
It works very well.
We attend a school called Sears School, which is a subversion, escape, reconnaissance, and evasion.
Wait, wait, wait.
Slow down a bit.
What's the school called?
Sears School.
We refer to it as Sears School, but it's Suversion, Espionage, Reconnaissance, and Evasion.
And in the school, the only torture form of torture that they use in the school is sleep deprivation.
And they have a man there, I believe he's still there.
They refer to him as a bearded one.
And he's allowed to open-handed smack you.
And the soldiers that attend this are all SOCOM soldiers, the Special Operation Command soldiers.
Task Force 160th, Special Operations Command.
Now, wait, hold on.
I want to make sure and understand.
This is a training exercise for people like you.
It is a school that pretty much opens your eyes to the ability that the enemy has as far as torture goes and the things that you may experience or go through if you are captured.
Okay, great.
Well, let me ask you a couple questions about that.
Are you told, are you told when you go into this Sear school that if you get caught and are tortured, that you will break at some point?
Well, you're told advanced by word of mouth by soldiers that have gone to it before that there's no two ways about it.
You will get caught and you will spill the beans.
You go there with a chip on your shoulder, as most guys do, that, well, I'm going to be that one guy that doesn't.
And, you know, you go on two, three hours of sleep a night and you've got a really large grizzly atom guy who's open-handed smacking.
You tend to give up the information that they want.
You hold out long.
You hold out the best that you can, but in the end, they get their result.
It works.
But Ron, in your special ops training school, you're never actually facing the threat of death, are you?
As you would be as an enemy if you were captured by a genuine enemy.
I mean, there you'd be facing death if you held out.
In your training, you're not.
You're just threatened with various forms of humiliation and pain, whatever.
Yeah, basically, you know that they can do nothing more than open-handed smack you and deprive you of your sleep.
Whereas if you were taken by enemies, let your imagination run wild.
They can cut off toes.
They can threaten your family.
There's any number of things that they could do.
But it is completely successful.
You're talking about Special Operation Command guys that go in there, and these are not your run-of-mill men.
These are men that are top of the line that have excelled in the branch of the military that they're serving in.
They are the top dogs.
These are the top guys.
I know.
And every one of them breaks.
Every one of us did.
Yeah, it doesn't surprise me.
To me, this is all common sense.
And it's not even common sense.
It's just knowledge of history.
And if you've had any conversation, as I have, over the years with people who have been in the military, the idea that torture doesn't work and that it's rare and that it's non-existent is poppycock.
Once again, it's naivete.
It's just willful ignorance.
But again, all of this talk of torture still focuses the debate on the wrong thing.
It focuses everybody's attention on horrible and rotten we are, which is no way to win a war, folks.
Yes, yes, yes.
800-282-2882.
Welcome back, El Rushbo.
Sometimes I feel like I'm pushing against a brick wall.
Rhinelander, Wisconsin, Doug, welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, how's it going?
Hey, Doug, pretty well out there.
Well, I just wanted to make one quick point.
I'm an Army officer in the National Guard, and when we're taught about the Geneva Conventions and the UCMJ and how it relates to torture, one of the main points they make is that if the enemy combatants know that you're not going to mistreat them, that they will be treated well, they're much more likely to surrender in the long run.
You know, I understand the theory.
Let me better step in here and say something.
I'm not trying to conduct a seminar on the advocacy of torture here today, and I'm not suggesting that it become a staple.
I'm not suggesting it to become a primary technique.
What I'm trying to do is to say that the whole debate on torture is upside down, and it's casting us as the bad guys.
And the legislation that came out of the Senate does nothing but tie the hands of the men and women in uniform trying to protect us.
And it makes them out to be the bad guys.
Furthermore, in that legislation, Senator McCain makes the point torture doesn't work.
All I'm telling you is that I can find a bunch of people who tell you it does.
And so the purpose of the bill is wrong.
I mean, the intellectual underpinning of it is just flat out wrong.
Torture does work.
And McCain even allows for that by putting in the recognition in his own bill of the ticking time bomb exemption, where it would be, well, we'll just talk about torturing somebody with few moments remaining before a nuclear device detonates in the United States, and the guy who knows where it's going to go off has to be tortured before he'll reveal the information.
It obviously works if you're going to make an allowance for this.
McCain doesn't exempt that behavior, doesn't make it legal, but he theorizes in his legislation that, well, people will be so grateful that we will not punish the person for violating my law, even though he has saved country.
All that's poppycock.
I mean, obviously the implication is it works.
Now, the theory that if the word gets around among our enemies that we aren't going to torture them, that they'll be more likely to surrender.
This may be in theory, but in practical application, it's like a lot of things you'll learn in law school, a lot of things you'll learn in school in theory, yeah, but when you get out in the real world, how many of you actually go back to your college lectures to find out what to do in a real world situation?
It's just theory.
The real education begins when you get the degree or get out of school and put your foot in the water and start getting wet.
Now, this notion that no torture will equal more enemy surrenders, yeah, may work in theory.
But by the same token, it would also seem to me that if we don't torture, that you'll have more cooperative prisoners once they surrender.
And it doesn't seem to be the case.
It seems to me that we don't, this to me is evidence that if we're going to rely on theories like this, that we're not living in the real world.
We'd rather live in a theoretical world where things seem to make sense.
It's like Andy McCarthy's piece today.
We assign McCain expertise on this simply because he was in a prison camp in North Vietnam.
And we will ignore whether he's right or wrong simply because he thus has the moral authority.
McCarthy said about himself, look, I have been in courtrooms and I have prosecuted these jihadists.
Does that make me the authority on how to deal with them?
Nope.
Not just because of that.
Same thing with anybody else.
What makes somebody credible and an authority is if they're right.
Now this, the fact that we can sit here and discuss theoretically whether or not more Al-Qaeda will surrender, if we somehow get the word out that they're not going to, the word that probably is coming.
I'm going to tell you what's coming out of Club Gitmo and Abu Ghrab nine out of 10 times.
When these prisoners are released, they go back and they're laughing.
And they're telling their friends, my God, you wouldn't believe what the Americans do.
They let us pray three or four times a day.
They gave us three meals.
We had air-conditioned cells.
I mean, it was incredible.
I will guarantee you that the word spread about how America is bending over backwards to behave according to this theory, that the nicer we are, the nicer they'll be.
Well, the problem is we're dealing with evil.
And you don't moderate evil.
It's like the old joke, you've heard this.
There's a snake and a, I forget how it goes, a snake and a turtle or something, and the snake gives a turtle a ride across the water.
And then after the ride across the water, the snake bites the turtle, and as a turtle's dying, says, what?
Or no?
Is the turtle that did something for the snake?
Something did something for a snake.
Treated a snake as a nice guy.
Saved the snake's life.
And then after that, the snake still bit the benefactor and killed it.
And before it died, what did you do?
I just saved your life.
Hey, I'm a snake.
That's what I do.
A tiger is a tiger.
An Islamic jihadist is an Islamic jihadist.
They don't moderate.
They laugh at you when you show weakness.
I've been trying to drill this into people's heads for as long as I can.
The moment you show weakness to an aggressive, evil barbarian, you are showing yourself, showing him you can be had.
You don't affect the way in war and with people like this.
You don't affect their behavior by showing them how you'd like to behave.
You succeed by killing them.
It's a war.
The purpose of war is to kill people and break things.
It's not to test theory.
It's not to show how wonderful and nice we are.
You don't go into it saying, you know, we better be careful about this torture business because, you know, if word gets out that we're really torturing them, they won't surrender.
Screw surrender.
Capture them and kill them.
That's what they're trying to do.
This is why I said people are not, they're not mentally prepared for this, mentally or psychologically.
People are not jimmed up for what we face.
If we're going to sit here and still talk about the theory of things, and we're going to talk about this, and we're still going to talk about terror and torture as something we are more guilty of than the other side, and we need legislation to rein our people in.
Folks, we don't have a prayer winning.
And I'll tell you, we don't deserve to win.
We won't deserve to win.
If we're going to handcuff the people who are charged with securing our freedom, handcuff them this way, and presume that they're nothing but a bunch of evil torturing barbarians.
And we're going to send that message out around the world.
I'm going to tell you what.
If this theory is accurate, we should have had gazillions of people surrendering already because of what the Democrats have said about our armed forces on the media, in the media, for the past year and a half.
The Democrats have been demanding fair treatment.
Democrats have been demanding courtrooms.
Democrats have been demanding that the Bush administration get out of Iraq.
Why, the Democrats have been doing exactly what all this theory says.
The Democrats have been saying to the world, hey, we don't hate you, and we don't think you're the problem.
Why, that extended hand of friendship and fellowship, why, some of these jihadists should have been laying down their arms and joining with us already.
Don't do that.
They're blowing up Madrid.
They're blowing up Britain.
They're trying to blow up France.
They're going to blow up every place they can.
And everywhere you show weakness, ask the Spanish about it.
Ask the people in Spain after Madrid.
Oh, we're going to show them that we don't like Bush's policy.
We're going to pull our troops out of Iraq.
And right after that, demo.
Kablooey.
It's the real world.
And I just don't think enough people want to face the real world as it exists.
They blow themselves up.
I mean, they blow themselves up to avoid being captured.
And you can't tell me that they blew themselves up because they were afraid of what was going to happen to them.
Because one thing, for sure, they're not going to die.
They're not going to die in captivity.
We don't kill them.
And yet eight or ten guys blew themselves up in Mosul to avoid capture.
And it's not because we torture.
It's because they are not going to give us the pleasure.
And it probably is because they know torture does work and they're not going to give up what they know.
But if, you know, it's just plain as day and obvious to me.
But if we want to sit here and continue to be hamstrung by, well, it's beneath our ideals.
It's beneath us as a country and so forth.
What is more important?
The national security of the country and preventing future acts like this, which is what the war on terror started out to be?
Or is it to show the world that we're X?
Folks, I'm going to tell you something.
I've said this over and over countless times.
It's true one-on-one.
It's true with groups of people and other groups of people.
It's true nation to nation.
If you are obsessed with what other people think of you, you're sunk.
If your sole reason to exist is to make sure that people only think certain things of you, you are not going to be happy.
You are going to be miserable.
You're going to be forever disappointed.
You are going to be not even who you are.
You're going to hide who you are because if you obviously think that you have to act in certain ways so people like you, you must also believe that the way you really are is not very likable.
So you're going to put on a phony front and you're going to try to show everybody you mean them no harm or you're this or that.
You've just described a lot of politicians here, by the way, who live on the spin, live on PR, live on image.
But it's all based on this phony belief that is as fallacious as any belief I know, that you can affect people's behavior.
You can affect evil, mean people's behavior by showing them you have no intent to harm them.
You're just making yourself out to be a sap, a 100% sucker.
You're being looked at and laughed at behind your back and you don't even know it.
Yeah, there are occasions where you can treat people nicely and they'll treat you nice back, but we're talking about civilized people.
But even at that, you spend all your time trying to prove you're something to somebody else, and in the process, you're doing what you think they want to see or hear.
You're accomplishing absolutely nothing.
And that's what I hear in all this talk about the way we're conducting torture.
Well, you know, we just want to show them we don't mean them any harm.
More of them will surrender.
And by the way, after they surrender, they'll be far more cooperative when they know we're not going to hurt them.
And then furthermore than that, when we are captured, they'll be nicer to us because they know that we're not torturing them.
That's all.
Absolute lunacy.
When practiced in war.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back in just a second.
Stay with us.
Let me ask you this question, folks, for the theoreticians of you out there.
Let's say that today, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Osama bin Laden announce that from this day forward, there will be no torture committed against American soldiers by al-Qaeda operatives.
Do you think more American soldiers would surrender?
If bin Laden, if al-Qaeda, all these guys say, we are sending message to all American soldiers, torture is no more.
It is indeed, we're not tortured you any longer.
Do you think our troops are going to surrender?
By the same token, we put it out there.
McCain's legislation, McCain's bill, no more torture.
It's not allowed.
They're going to surrender?
They are going to surrender?
Come on, folks.
Mr. Snardly has a good point.
You know what some of your people's problem is?
Not all of you people, but some of you people in this audience.
You know who you are?
You know what your problem is to you?
Freedom is an abstract.
It's just, oh, it's there.
It's as normal as the clean water that comes out of your tap or in the bottle that you buy at the store.
You're not aware of what it took to make it clean.
You're not aware of how hard it is to do.
You're not aware of it.
It's just there and bamo.
And so everybody should have clean water rights.
I do.
Now you start talking about these wacko Islamic jihadists, and there's nothing abstract about them.
Their religion is not even black or white.
It's black.
There are not two options.
There is not even the option of right and wrong.
It's right.
There's no other possibility.
They do not live in the abstract.
And too many Americans do.
Freedom is just an abstract.
We don't have a great enough history of understanding of the history of securing it, of maintaining it, of how it's constantly under threat by people who look at it, freedom, as a threat to them, as these Islamic and militant Islamists do.
And so when you think freedom is an abstract, we start talking about it in theory and torture in theory and all this sort of thing.
Somebody sent me a note, and I have only a vague memory of this.
But maybe you know, Mr. Snurdley, as a result of his torture in the Hanoi Hilton, did McCain sign a piece of paper admitting he was a war criminal?
Rumors.
There are rumors that, okay, there are rumors that he did, and that he signed it because he was tortured, and he said it was his biggest regret.
That's the story.
I can't confirm that individually.
There are rumors that he did.
But obviously, if it's true, torture works, which, of course, is actually beside the point of all this, too.
Here's, let's see, Rich in Portage, Wisconsin.
Hi, Rich.
Nice to have you on the program.
Good morning, Rush, or good afternoon.
One thing that I want to make clear, and I need you to focus on, is the Bush administration's irregrettable mistake of granting Geneva Convention rights to unlawful combatants, these prisoners that are at Gitmo and other camps.
Wait, when did that happen?
What do you mean, when did it happen?
When did we start granting them?
I don't think we have granted them.
Any rights that we've granted them, any protections that we've granted them that they do not deserve under Geneva Convention as non-signatories of the Geneva Convention, as unlawful combatants under the rule of international law of armed conflict, any rights that we've granted them of right to justice, right to trial, it has painted us into a corner that will never escape.
They have set an unbelievable.
No, no, I understand how it works.
I'm just not aware that that's the official position of the Bush administration to grant them Geneva Convention status.
I didn't think we had done that.
The words that I understand that they said were rights that the same rights that would be enjoyed by legal combatants, lawful combatants under the Geneva Convention.
Well, I'm just going on what I've heard the president say.
The president and others have made the case that they do not fit.
I don't think it's the official position of the government.
You may be saying that once we grant them rights, that we have waived the Geneva Conventions and granted them access to it.
I'm not even aware of that.
What I know is that it is certain liberal judges in this country and Democrats who want them and McCain who want them to have access to the court system.
And I know that the Clinton administration fought the war on terror that way.
You know, that the guy that blows up your house and blows up your office building the way the Clinton administration fought it goes into court innocent.
We've never fought a war like that before.
I just don't think the administration has officially proclaimed that they have rights under the Geneva Convention.
I got to run here, though, close to it on time.
Be right back.
Stay with us.
Okay, we are back.
I'm going to make you a promise, ladies and gentlemen.
We will get into the economics of Black Friday.
I've got some points I want to make about this, too, in the next hour.
I let off teasing you with it, so to speak, at the beginning of the program.
We'll get to it the next hour, plus, obviously, more of your phone calls.
And I'll have the reminder again.
We're going to be starting video downloads, complimentary, already part of the price.
If you are a subscriber, Rush 24-7, it starts on December 12th.
The morning update, recorded every afternoon after this program, will be sent down as a video podcast along with the podcast of the radio program that day.
That starts December 12th.
And if you're a member, you will get it already.
There's no additional charge.
We'll be back.
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