is nothing sacred?

By Aziz P. -
I'm not even going to excerpt this smear job from Drudge. The insinuation is that there was "pressure" on the military to expedite Charlie Dean's repatriation and the forensic identification, ahead of the queue. It's laced with anonymous outraged servicemen "fuming" at the flag honors and other "special treatment" afforded to Charlie.

Note Charles Dean, although a civilian, is considered by the U.S. government to have been a prisoner of war, according to Larry Greer, spokesman for the Pentagon office in charge of POW and MIA issues:

There are currently 1,875 Americans missing from the Vietnam conflict, including some civilians such as Dean, Greer said. He did not have a precise number of missing civilians but said they include government contractors, missionaries and those like Dean who had no connection to military operations.

The military tracks those missing Americans for two reasons: Government contractors deserve the same effort as military members and civilians need to be tracked so their remains aren't mistaken for those of soldiers, Greer said.

"We track everybody who's an American," he added.


The military honors for Charlie - and all POW-MIA recovered from the war - are entirely appropriate.

What is inappropriate, and worthy of outrage, is the attempt to use even this somber and emotional homecoming as ammunition against the Dean family.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A fair solution to Jerusalem

By Aziz P. -
I remember reading one of the books by Tom Clancy in which Jack Ryan was credited with coming up with a solution for Middle East peace which was pointedly never actually detailed in the novel. It was just a way to give his character some foreign policy cred, but ended up like that mysterious suitcase in Pulp Fiction. I couldn't help but be reminded of that, though, when I read former New York mayor Ed Koch's innovative solution to resolving the status of Jerusalem . Instead of putting the hot-button issue of Jerusalem last on the agenda, the issue should be addressed first. If the Jerusalem question is solved, everything else should fall into place more easily. I believe there is a way to keep Jerusalem unified. I am talking not only of the old walled city, which is a very small part of the city of Jerusalem, but the whole city, east, west, north and south. [...] My suggestion is to situate the new Palestinian capital in that part of East Jerusalem that is occupied overwhelming
Read more

Conservatism's shari'a, liberalism's ijtihad

By Aziz P. -
An interesting meta-debate by intellectual conservatives over conservatism's future is playing out. It started with David Frum's Waterloo essay, which led to his political excommunication. Julian Sanchez observed that this represented an epistemic closing of the conservative mind , a thesis that was validated by the retribution visited upon Jim Manzi for daring to suggest that conservatives will achieve more persuasion by using honest, strong arguments instead of weak, emotional ones. All of this has led John Quiggin at Crooked Timber to argue most wisely that as conservatism implodes, liberalism needs to find its own rationale that is more than just "not conservatism". Quiggin has a list of priorities for the liberal movement to address, and closes with the general plea, ...the left has to stand for something more than keeping the existing order afloat with incremental improvements. We need to offer the hope of a better world as an alternative to the angry tribali
Read more