Is the War on Terror "Self Declared?"

Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post Foreign Service began his front-page article on Israeli treatment of prisoners with this:

NABLUS, West Bank -- The accounts of physical abuse of Iraqis by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad sounded achingly familiar to Anan Labadeh. The casual beatings, the humiliations, the trophy photos taken by both male and female guards were experiences he said he underwent as a Palestinian security detainee at an Israeli military camp in March of last year.

The third paragraph begins:

Many of the questions raised by the Abu Ghraib scandal, and by the United States's self-declared war on terrorism, are the kinds that Israel has been wrestling with for decades.

“Self declared?” Has 9/11 really slipped into the media’s memory hole already? Has Frankel not heard of Osama’s declaration of war against the US? Have thousands of deaths from terrorist attacks, going back to the Reagan administration simply slipped his mind?

It takes a certain kind of mind to refuse to accept that we are at war after being attacked. The kind of mind that is so hidebound that it defines war as uniformed armies marching across a border. If it isn’t the Germans invading France or Grant taking Richmond, it isn’t a war. Everything else is a matter for the cops. Blow a hole in the Cole: send the FBI to Aden. Kill 3,000 people by ramming passenger planes into tall buildings: ask why and ask the Afghans to extradite Osama bin Laden.

Frankel continues:

Where is the line in a democracy between coercion and torture?

Why the reference to “democracy?” If a terrorist chops off your fingers or hooks your private parts to an electrical generator, isn’t it torture? If a terrorist uses a dull knife to saw off your head, isn’t it torture? If you are raped in Saddam’s rape rooms is it different than if you are raped by democrats? Is torture in a democracy different than torture in a theocracy, in a dictatorship, in a terrorist cell?

What kinds of interrogation techniques are morally acceptable when dealing with a suspect who may have knowledge of a "ticking bomb" -- an imminent attack? And what about the damage those techniques inflict on relations between an occupying power and its subjects?

The damage that the Abu Ghraib activities have inflicted are largely confined to the US, and even here they are largely the property of the Liberal media. Polls have shown that the average American is tired of the issue, believes that it is being dealt with and believes that it is being exploited by the media for political purposes.

The average Iraqi, accustomed as he is to Saddam’s brutality, wonders what all the fuss is about.
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