RUSH: “A Republican congressman has called for a deadline to pull US troops from Iraq, while other members of President George Bush’s party urged his administration to revamp Iraq policy. Republican Walter Jones, a North Carolina conservative, said on ABC’s This Week that he would offer legislation this week setting a timetable for the US withdrawal from Iraq. ‘I voted for the resolution to commit the troops, and I feel that we’ve done about as much as we can do,’ said Jones, who coined the phrase ‘freedom fries’ to lash out at the French for opposing the Iraq invasion. Other Republicans on television talk shows joined Democrats in criticizing the administration for playing down the insurgency, while overestimating the ability of Iraq’s fledgling forces to fight without US soldiers in the lead, and failing to plan for the post-invasion occupation.” Senator Lindsey Graham back in action here, said, “The insurgency is a alive and well. We underestimated the viability of that insurgency.” Representative Curt Weldon… By the way, I just want to remind you people. What did I say early on in this? Didn’t I tell you that there’s no insurgency? It’s a bunch of terrorists, and who are we really at war with? This has to go back six months to a year. We are really at war with Iran in Iraq. That’s who’s sending people in, also Syria, but I said, “We’re actually battling Iran.” This is not a bunch of Iraqis that are rising up. Well, it was with a certain element of the Saddam party, the Ba’athists, but I don’t even think it’s correct to call this an insurgency. These are just a bunch of terrorists imports. An “insurgency” inspires home grown rebels and that’s not who this is.
“Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican who just returned from Iraq, joined several Democrats saying the administration had to be more candid and acknowledge that it could take about two years to train Iraqi forces to replace US soldiers and allow a significant pullout. ‘We can’t come back to America and have our people being convinced that the Iraqi troops are prepared to take over, when they’re not,’ he said on NBC’s Meet the Press. Weldon also said the administration had to ‘come to grips’ with a rising insurgency boosted by fighters from Syria and Iran.” Weldon said, “For some reason our intelligence community does not want to acknowledge or deal with this rising insurgency.” Well, if the insurgency comes from Syria and Iran it’s not really an “insurgency” at all, is it? I’m not trying to split hairs on the definition of words here, but I just don’t think that this is an insurgency. This is what it’s always been. This is a battle against worldwide terrorism and the playing field happens to be Iraq because that’s where we went and the terrorists all over the world are coming to that spot to fight this, but I’ll tell you it’s clear that there’s starting to be some wavering even on the Republican side on this. Remember the story I told you last week, and I think I have a bit of an understanding of why this may be happening. I think some of these people are hearing from their constituents, and their constituents are watching television every day, and on television you see ten more Iraqis killed or ten more Americans killed or a car bomb here or a car bomb there, and these constituents say, “What are we accomplishing here? All we’re hearing is, ‘We’re losing people; we don’t seem to be winning anything.'” There obviously could be other reasons for this as well. This is one way for Republicans to get their names in the paper and on the wire services is to criticize the administration. You know the press will love them for that, but this is pretty widespread. I mean, with Curt Weldon and Walter Jones and Lindsey Graham — John McCain, Jr. But nevertheless these comments are being made.
Then of course TIME Magazine has this great profile of just how horrible G’itmo is, and we’ve got this controversy raging here about whether we should close down G’itm, and Vice President Cheney has said, “We’re not going to close G’itmo. The president has never said we’re going to close it. We’re not even thinking of closing G’itmo,” but this came up last week in a way that was reported that the president was considering it, and that would be an absolute disaster, particularly in the face of all this criticism, to close down G’itmo and move these prisoners of war elsewhere, and that leads me to some thoughts, folks, and if you are a constituent of Lindsey Graham or Walter Jones or Curt Weldon or if you are a citizen concerned about the day-to-day news coming out of Iraq: “Ten Iraqis killed here, 20 Iraqis blown up there; ten Americans killed. A car bomb here, insurgency attack there.” Let me try to put some things in perspective for you. I’m not trying to sound cavalier about that, but I want to try to bring some historical perspective to this again. 
Does anybody remember Iwo Jima? “Oh, there he goes. Rush going back to the old fuddy-duddy archives.” Well, this is World War II. Iwo Jima. It’s a famous landmark battle in World War II. We’ve even got a monument based on photo taken, that we planted a flag there. Do you know that we lost 7,000 Marines in a little more than a month on Iwo Jima? Seven thousand in one month. I think we’re up to 1,700 soldiers dead in Iraq, close to 1,700. Seventeen hundred dead after a year and a half. We lost 7,000 Marines in just over a month at Iwo Jima. So I just want to ask you to imagine if today’s media and today’s liberal politicians existed back then, we lost thousands on the other islands, too, Guadalcanal, Midway.
Why hasn’t today’s media run any stories on how prisoners of war were treated back then for some context? Why no stories about the internment of 110,000 Japanese which would show how Bush has been an icon of civil liberties when it comes to fighting a war? We’re fighting a war in the most humanitarian way a war has ever been fought, folks, particularly regarding our enemies. We’re treating our enemies sometimes better than we treat some of our friends. We’re doing this with this new humanitarian umbrella over everything, and the media reports it as the absolute worst it’s ever been. We’re a gulag according to Amnesty International and we are just losing our humanity all over the place. We never get stories about how US prisoners of war have been treated over the years in World War II, in Vietnam, other than the McCain story. But we never hear any context on this, 7,000 Marines dead in a little over one month in Iwo Jima. Tom Brokaw wrote this book called The Greatest Generation, remember that? The Greatest Generation that Tom Brokaw wrote about would not have cared about kicking a Koran. He wouldn’t have cared about treating a German, Italian, or Japanese prisoner of war in accordance with some group like Amnesty International. A member of the greatest generation wouldn’t have given a rat’s rear end about rounding up suspects without probable cause, about providing lawyers and due process to illegal enemy combatants. They didn’t care about it, and they’re called “the greatest generation.” They are the greatest generation. Brokaw wrote the book; everybody picked up on it, and they didn’t give one rat’s rear end, folks, about civil liberties and humanitarianism in the middle of a war — and they were called the greatest generation.
Now, what’s changed? As I’ve said to you countless times, in the 1960s the same people who undermined our war effort in Vietnam, that same bunch of people is at work today — the worst generation, if you ask me, and I’m a member of it. The 1960s. We’re still fighting the 1960s generation which controls the mainstream media, which controls the Democratic Party, and which controls academia. You know, the greatest generation, then the worst generation. You can compare these two. How the same people who rightly hold that generation up as a model really don’t. If the people who brought Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation, had read it and really praised these people and really held them up as the greatest generation, how in the world can they do that and believe what they believe today? Because the greatest generation wouldn’t have been caught dead having its hands tied the way our hands are tied today, either in Iraq or at Abu Ghraib or at G’itmo. We’re tying our hands to the point the only way we can win a war is if the other side decides to give up, because they’re making it impossible for us to succeed militarily and with any kind of sense of real victory and triumph. And it’s the same bunch of people that gave us the template of how to get a Republican president out of office in the 1970s and gave us the template of how to report and write and think about any war that the United States is involved in, which started back with the Vietnam War. Where are all the stories on how we handled the prisoners on Iwo Jima or throughout Europe and North Africa? Let’s see how we did it back in World War Two, that we won. Where’s the context?
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RUSH: Here’s my point, folks, however inarticulately made here. The liberals who praised Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation, they love to talk about the greatest generation, but they must not really accept it, certainly not when it comes to the brutalities of war and how it must be thought to be won. I don’t mean to be criticizing our treatment of POWs in World War II, but why aren’t the liberals since they demand lawyers and meals and Korans and all kinds of treatment to prisoners, why aren’t they looking back at what we did in World War II and criticizing that?!
If the US has an institutional problem with all this, why do they on the one hand cite World War II and the greatest generation in glowing terms, and yet take a look at what’s going on now and condemn this country. I maintain that the way we fought World War II, the losses that we incurred, and the losses that we handed out and the treatment that prisoners of war got — we interred 110,000 Japanese. What in the world are we doing today that comes even close to that? Zilch, zero, nada. I don’t know what we did to POWs in World War II but I’ll guaran-damn-tee you we didn’t go out of our way to make them feel comfortable, to give them whatever they demanded and wanted. We certainly didn’t have lawyers come in and give the right to these people to be represented before US courts of law. We are allowing the debate over this war to be argued in the context of the anti-war mentality during Vietnam rather than the mentality that existed in World War II, and I’ve always said that one of the things that worries me — and I’ve been saying this for 20 years, by the way — is that someday this country is going to elect a president that has no memory in his lifetime of a United States victorious in war, and it seems to me that that’s what we’ve got here.
Forget the president in this case, George W. Bush. We’ve got a whole generation whose template for war is Vietnam, and that template includes, “We have to lose it. We cannot fight it. It’s immoral. It’s ignoble. It’s unjust. It’s all that rotgut. We shouldn’t be there. We’re too powerful. It’s not fair. We cheat. We’re not honest,” all of these things. That’s the template under which this war is being fought but not any other war. We don’t go back and look — it’s no different than in your personal life, if you have a dream, a career dream or any other kind of dream, go talk to the people who succeeded at it. Why in the world would you want to surround yourself with a bunch of failures and a bunch of embittered people who are only going to tell you that you can’t make it because they didn’t and it’s not fair and the business will eat you up and spit you out and this sort of stuff. That’s exactly what we’re doing here. We are listening to people who do not think we should win a war, who think we cannot win a war, who think that we cannot do one fairly, who think that we can’t behave as civilized human beings, that’s the template under which both Iraq and this whole G’itmo and Abu Ghraib thing is taking place — and it’s being done on purpose. The template that was created in the 1960s from the Vietnam War is what is animating the media today, the Democratic Party today, and it’s why I asked last week, “I don’t understand…” Well, intellectually I do, but it still is amazing to me how whenever a controversy arises around the world, how it is that so many people in this country can instinctively blame this country, that whenever there is an open question about anything, the instinct is to point fingers of blame at us. This country is to way too many people reviled and despised, and I’m talking about people in this country. I understand that we have enemies around the world. We’ve got enough enemies within our own borders here that we have a real problem with this as well.
You know, some of these people who praise the greatest generation are some of the very people who are the most rejectionist when it comes to applying the values and standards of the greatest generation in fighting and winning the war. If there’s a template for winning a war, it’s World War II. If there’s a template for losing war or botching it, it’s Vietnam. Which template is being used today by the Democratic Party and the media? I don’t want to get into an argument over did we lose Vietnam or not because I know that’s something that’s open for debate as well, but the PR spin, the image clearly is that we were humiliated and we got out of there and that we did not achieve victory, and of course in one sense that has to be correct because we had all this genocide afterwards and we have communism that reigned over North and South Vietnam and Pol Pot in Cambodia, and all that. I predicted that if the enemy combatant issue ever came to our court system, that chaos would ensue, and it has. You cannot fight a war in court, particularly when you have too many liberal judges on the bench who are willing to insert and assert their power over the commander-in-chief. When have we ever had lawyers for prisoners of war who can sue in federal court? Where do we get that template? Where did that come from? At G’itmo they’re not even garden variety POWs. They’re the worst of the worst. They don’t even receive the protection of the Geneva conventions. That’s how bad they are. They legally are not entitled to them, which were adopted after World War II. I wonder why? What do you think went on in World War II to cause the Geneva conventions to come into being? What do we do with these barbarians that are at G’itmo?
We have a federal judge who has ruled that they cannot be returned to their home countries unless we can guarantee they won’t be tortured. A federal judge, even if we close the place down, where are we going to send them? We can’t send them back to their home countries unless we guarantee they won’t be tortured. How the hell can we guarantee that, especially when, to the media and to the Democrats in this country, we are the sole architects of torture? There is no other torture. I know there are beheadings, but that’s not torture. “These people are entitled. They’re the enemy of the US. They’re smaller. They have to do what they have to do, Rush. They have to do what they have to do because they’re going up against the biggest superpower the world has ever known.” It’s maddening, and as this debate continues, I have to tell you, I get frustrated that there’s not more of an assertiveness on all this from high levels of the administration. If we bring these prisoners on US territory — and remember, G’itmo is a leased base in perpetuity on foreign soil — if we bring them to the United States, for example, if we close G’itmo and have to move these people to the US, then all kinds of rights for these people kick in. This is the 9/11 Commission report. I cannot help but mention that within the context of all this.
We have all the talk about missed opportunities, how the FBI and the CIA didn’t communicate, how they didn’t connect the dots, how the intelligence was bad — and we’re going to take some of the best sources of information, the most violent Al-Qaeda types and deny ourselves the ability to extract information from them. It’s just, to me, I say inexplicable, but it’s not. I totally understand it because I understand liberals. And I understand their desire to defeat George Bush no matter what the consequences for this country, no matter what the consequences to any individual in this country, meaning a soldier, male or female, wearing the uniform of the United States. Whatever it takes to beat Bush, whatever it takes, even if it means losing the war on terror. Then I keep hearkening back to the lament after 9/11, the Democrats are all out there saying, boy, you know, it’s just too bad this didn’t happen when Clinton was in office. He didn’t get a real challenge, didn’t get a real crisis here to define his presidency. Even jealous of Bush that 9/11 happened on his watch. Well, now that it happened, and now that Bush is trying to do something about it, guess who’s trying to tie his hands? We have some audio sound bites as well. This TIME Magazine story, they talk to the reporter who did the big article on G’itmo in TIME Magazine, and I’ve got some sound bites of this, and it’s amazing. The guy who wrote the article is just savaging us at how rotten things are and how G’itmo really works. When you listen to this guy on television talk about it, why, you wonder how the article could have gotten written the way it did.
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RUSH: It’s amazing. I just got an e-mail. “Rush, we didn’t treat those 110,000 Japanese harshly.” For crying out loud, folks, we didn’t treat them harshly? You’re missing my point. We interned a bunch of American citizens that had nothing to do with Japan. FDR, 110,000. “Oh, they weren’t treated badly.” This is not about treatment. For crying out loud. This one little e-mail sort of expresses, or illustrates, the dichotomy that we have here, and we have some phone calls coming up that I think will, too. Now, the White House, according to Duncan Hunter, congressman from California, is split over whether to close G’itmo, and this comes as TIME Magazine has its big story about how horribly we’re treating prisoners down there. “Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, said that some members of the Bush administration wanted to close the camp to end a high profile debate over allegations of abuse at Guantanamo.” It’s not going to end anything. If we close the base, everybody in the Democratic Party is going to go nuts and say, “Bush admits it, we are inhumane, we are treating people rotten,” and then we’re going to follow wherever these prisoners are sent and we’re going to have press access to see how they’re treated wherever we send them or wherever we put them. It’s just going to ramp it all up. It’s not going to quell this or stop it. Here’s Brian Bennett. Brian Bennett, the Washington correspondent for TIME Magazine, was on Fox this morning. E. D. Hill, Brian Kilmeade, Steve Doocy. They’re talking about the log at G’itmo. The logs that are outlined in this week’s issue of TIME, and Steve Doocy says, “What are some of the things according to your report that the guys at G’itmo were doing to the captives?”
BENNETT: Detainee 063, he was kept in stress positions, which is a technique that Rumsfeld himself had approved for use specifically on this detainee and another couple of detainees. He was chained to the floor in a sitting position for hours and hours on end or made to stand for hours on end. And you can see in the log that it’s recorded that his limbs started to swell up, a doctor was —
KILMEADE: Oh really?
BENNETT: — to check him on a regular basis.
KILMEADE: That’s too bad. I really feel bad about that. First off, his limbs started swelling up, but he did give up some other people among the 500 that were possible bodyguards for bin Laden, correct?
BENNETT: Yes, he did. He gave up names–
KILMEADE: And while those limbs were swollen he gave that up?
BENNETT: Yes, he did. He gave up the names of detainees that were also at Guantanamo Bay that he said were members of Al-Qaeda.
RUSH: I thought that was supposed to be a story about how rotten we were behaving down there? This is what goes on in war. We got good information from the guy, and he ended up getting a doctor. Next question from Doocy, says, “Brian, do you have any evidence that anything the guards did down at G’itmo or the interrogators did was against the law?”
BENNETT: There’s one technique which was simulating suffocation by dripping water on the head that Rumsfeld had not approved, and there is in the log mention of constantly pouring bottles of water on the head of a detainee. That is unclear exactly which techniques had followed that course.
RUSH: Oh, man, folks, I’m so embarrassed, how do we deal with this? This is horrible. This is unspeakable. We poured water on these guys’ heads. We poured water! You know what? I ought to turn myself in to the Cape Girardeau police because on Halloween when I was a little kid, when I was ten or 11 years old, when I got too old to go trick-or-treating because it just wasn’t cool. I would camp upstairs in a bedroom window above the front step and when these little urchin trick-or-treaters would come in their humorous, you know, rotten looking little costumes bammo! I’d bomb them with water balloons. As soon as my mom closed the door after handing out the candy, bammo, there went the water balloons, and I struck gold a bunch of times. My mom never even knew it, either, you know, because they ran off. They didn’t come back and tattle, they ran. By the time the next trick-or-treater– it was dark out there, my mother couldn’t see the water stains on the sidewalk. I must have done this for two hours. I didn’t know I was engaging in torture, and I wasn’t even trying to gain any information from these little kids. I didn’t even want to get the candy back that my mom had given them. I just wanted to bomb them with water balloons because I thought it was harmless little fun. They were pretty big balloons, but not to big, but just big enough. Maybe the size of a grapefruit by the time you filled them up with water, just lob them out there. It was fun. I can’t believe this, folks, dripping water on the head and constantly pouring bottles of water on them. You know, it’s hot down there at G’itmo. They might have actually felt good to these guys. Here’s Duncan Hunter. He’s on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, and he has a little story here on how the guards are treating the detainees. In fact, what he’s going to read here is the menu for the prisoners of war at G’itmo.
HUNTER: How do we treat these people? I sat down yesterday with the menu from Guantanamo so the average American can understand how we’re brutalizing people at Guantanamo and I’ve got it right here. They’re going to be having orange glazed chicken, fresh fruit Group A, steamed peas and mushrooms, rice pilaf, another form of torture for the hijackers. We treat them very well. If you go back to Sunday, it looks like it’s lemon baked fish as an entr?e, and if you look at the food and you also look at the list that has been prepared for the Armed Services Committee, which lists abuses of the way that you can abuse a prisoner, feeding them the food that we feed our soldiers, that is the MREs, which is the new C rations, is considered actually to be a form of abuse, something probably the manufactures of C rations or the new rations don’t agree with.
RUSH: Precisely my point. What our own military eats is considered abuse when given to a prisoner. And these are barbarians down there, folks, these are not just… I mean there’s a story out today, “Do you know there’s even some minors? We’re holding some minors at G’itmo. How horrible. There’s a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old.” Does anybody remember the name Lee Boyd Malvo? Lee Boyd Malvo was 16 when he was shooting people in the Washington sniper case. I mean, it’s come to pass, what I have feared has come to pass. We just do not have, apparently, a significant number of people who were alive to remember an America victorious in war. We have way too many people from the sixties generation whose template of war is the US deserves to lose because the US is institutionally corrupt and Satanic and evil and mean. That’s what’s guiding all of this today; get out of Iraq, it’s not fair, it’s not right, we didn’t find any WMDs so we need to split totally ignoring what’s really going on there now, and then this Abu Ghraib and G’itmo stuff. New York Times — what did I see today? This is the first day since April that there has not been a front-page story on Abu Ghraib. I’ll have to check this, I’m not sure, but it’s a long time, there have been many consecutive days, front page stories, Abu Ghraib, New York Times.
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