Stephen Den Beste over at Daily Pundit covers the Gaza withdrawal from a dispassionate viewpoint. I agree with the allegation that it is unfair, anti-Jewish racism. I agree that Israel has bent over backwards to be accommodating to any hint……

government analysts seem convinced it’s him

Did they say it was a slam dunk? It is someone who looks like Bin Laden using his pre-death recorded voice to read a script. Easy enough to do if you have average technical skills. Of course I can’t prove that but the CIA can’t prove it is him either.

If an American citizen is fighting with rebel forces and is picked up, that’s his tough luck. However, we would insist on some sort of due process for him. Whether the people at Gitmo are terrorists or simply people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time is something we will never know, as there has been no effort to give them a fair trial and any evidence which may once have existed is shrouded in doubt.

Iran recently detained some Americans for no apparent reason, and there was howling here which was entirely justified. Without bringing people to trial and presenting evidence, howling from other countries is similarly justified, if not more so. After all, we claim to be a nation of laws, based on the principle of habeas corpus.

The issue is not that America detainees foreigners. It is that we have betrayed our principles by incarcerating foreign nationals indefinitely with dubious or non-existent evidence in violation of the principles which the country is founded upon.

It probably wouldn’t be very positive, but then, we treat the detainees better than the Chinese treat common criminals (including political prisoners), so that’s not a very good comparison.

What if French forces in Afghanistan had captured John Walker Lindh? It would only have upset the US if they were too lenient on him.

Furthermore, I doubt there would be a big political fuss if a US citizen were found fighting alongside Tibetan or Uyghur rebels and captured accordingly. The US gov’t didn’t get up in arms with Israel over Rachel Corrie, did it?

One could only imagine the howls from the right if a Democratic President was chronically unable to catch public enemy number one, despite all of the power and leverage of the US government.

The fact is: bin Laden won. We’re the ones who are fearful and divided, and they’re the ones who are winning hearts and minds. How an ideology which condones killing innocents could trump an ethos of freedom can only be ascribed to the military and diplomatic decisions the government has made. We went from having global sympathy as innocent victims to the world’s bully whon tells other nations to act as we say and not as we do. (One example: could you imagine the reaction here if China, for example, decided to incarcerate an American citizen indefinitely because it decided he was an “enemy combatant?”)

The sad thing, however, is that there is seems to be no strategic thought from any quarter beyond whether the level of violence in Iraq is incrementally better or worse than it was when the surge started. Perhaps a strategic vision for the Middle East is too much to expect of a man who confuses Austria with Australia, but the Democrats — except for maybe Biden — don’t seem to have any thoughts as to how to change things — if not for the better — at least to the status quo ante. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been outsmarted and outmaneuvered by a bunch of guys living in caves, but that’s where we find ourselves.

Have you seen any video or stills from the tape? A bad body double. Fake, dyed beard.