Earlier today a team of Arab terrorists were apprehended while boarding a plane in New York’s JFK airport, obviously from the same gang that perpetrated the atrocities in the US this past week. They were grabbed by an FBI SWAT team.

This is proof that the same Arab nazis who blew up Manhattan and the Pentagon are planning additional atrocities.

This is also as good a demonstration as any of why terrorists should be tortured.

Because there is now proof that additional atrocities are being planned and will be attempted against the US, it would be absurd for the US authorities to deal with these people as ordinary prisoners of war or as common criminals. Common criminals get questioned under rules of civilization, they are entitled to lawyers and due process. Prisoners of war are protected under the Geneva Convention. But these terrorists - the ones grabbed in JFK airport and the others that have been rounded up - are people who in effect possess information about "ticking bombs" and worse. Any means necessary should be used to extract this information from them. If there are treated with niceness and legal formalism, then other atrocities will be committed and other people will die because of this hypocritical squeamishness.

Now I mention all this because for years the issue of "torture" has been in the headlines with respect to Israel, and has been a favorite target of the Israeli Left’s jihad against national existence. Palestinian terrorists are allegedly "tortured" when interrogated by Israeli intelligence. Now never mind that this "torture" is so benign that no terrorists ever emerge from it with bruises nor wounds. None emerge disabled and none paralyzed. Indeed, the "torture" about which the bleeding-hearts are up in arms usually involves "shaking from side to side", questioning at night, and similar human rights abuses.

The only problem is, these are terrorists we are speaking about. Like the ones yanked off the plane in JFK by the Yanks today, they have critical information about imminent atrocities to be committed against children and other civilians.

In other words, because of its special nature, terrorism is a special category and deserving of special rules. Terrorists should NOT be protected by the rules of civility regarding prisoners of war. They should NOT be treated as common criminals, being "Mirandized" and then represented by skilled leftist lawyers in trials lasting years.

Terrorists should be treated as terrorists. They SHOULD be mistreated. They SHOULD be maltreated. They SHOULD be abused. They SHOULD be tortured. And they SHOULD be executed. They are beyond the pale of humanity. They are undeserving of the privileges of civilization. They have excluded themselves from the human race and they should be exempted from treatment as humans. And they possess information whose extraction is necessary to save lives.

Perhaps one of the lessons that will at last be learned from the horrors this week as that the world needs to terrorize terrorists.

Copyright © 2001 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission