Things About Which I Do Not Care

Here's one: the "despair" felt by terrorists imprisoned at the Gauntanamo Bay prison camp.  What kind of nation are we, if the despair of our enemies troubles us?  I'll point out (presumably unneccessarily) that in every other war ever fought in history, the despair of one's enemies was considered a good thing. Now our hearts are supposed to bleed because poor Mr. Benchallali, who freely admits to having spent time in an al Qaeda jihad-training camp , then had to spend a couple of years in a US military clink?  Please. 

(By the way, I really like this particular gem:

I cannot describe in just a few lines the suffering and the torture; but the worst aspect of being at the camp was the despair, the feeling that whatever you say, it will never make a difference.

Now, I've never been incarcerated and/or tortured.  I'm thinking, though, that if the worst part of Mr. Benchallali's Afghanistan/Pakistan/Guantanamo adventure was that his confinement hurt his stupid feelings, and that people weren't listening to him, then torture wasn't on the menu.  Just a guess, I know, but there it is.  Note also that this carefully constructed sentence falls short of actually reporting torture and therefor remains true even if Benchallali did not suffer any torture at all.  An accident?  I report, you decide.)

As a general rule I do not consider myself a hard or heartless man.  But I'm getting awfully tired of the growing Western cultural push to decouple bad decisions from ill consequences.  Mr. Benchallali made a series of spectacularly bad decisions that culminated in his choice to spend several months training to commit acts of terrorism in one of Osama bin Laden's jihadi factories.  He was then arrested by the Pakistani authorities while trying to return to the West.  He claims that he was "horrified" by the 9/11 attacks and that he just wanted to go home.  This may, in fact, be true; after all, the Gitmo people did ultimately release him. But were we supposed to take his word for it?  "Yes, I've spent the last few weeks learning to make bombs and boning up on the virtues of murder and martyrdom.  Yes, I've now finished this training and am en route to one of the nation's I've been training to attack.  Yes, the caliph of the camps claims that the recent attacks were only the first strike, and that right now he's dispatching trained jihadis just like me to do mayhem all through the West. But, hey, it was all a mistake; I'm not really planning on blowing up a school bus full of filthy Jew-loving infidels when I get there.  Trust me!"  Sure thing, chief.  But bad decisions have ill consequences, and attending that camp was about as bad a decision as you could possibly make.  Now shut up and take your medicine.