re: Bin Ladin's Treaty Oh yeah!

First a history lesson Al Qaeda

Al Qaeda has at the very least, since the 1990's, killed American soldiers and desecrated their remains in Somalia; urged the murder of all Americans - civilians and military alike - wherever on the globe they may be found; conducted simultaneous sneak attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, resulting in the mass murder of over 240 civilians (the vast majority of them Muslims and non-Americans); killed 17 American seamen in an attempt to blow up the destroyer, the U.S.S. Cole; murdered 3,000 Americans in hijack attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; and spearheaded guerrilla wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have killed well over a thousand American military personnel and countless civilians.

In addition to killing civilians in sneak attacks - commonly, detonating bombs within nondescript cars parked or driven in broad daylight in densely populated areas - they also secrete themselves among their once and future victims. They wear no distinguishing insignia to segregate themselves as a militia. They use mosques and schools and hospitals to plan and store weaponry. They feign surrender and then open fire on unsuspecting coalition forces attempting the civilized act of detaining, rather than shooting, them. As for treatment of their own detainees, their practice ranges from execution-style homicide to beastly beheading - usually captured on film and circulated on the Internet to buck up the other savages while scaring the living hell out of everyone else. So here's an idea: Let's make a treaty with them! Yeah! Let's reward this behavior with a grant of honorable-combatant status. Let's give them the same kind of benefits the Geneva Conventions reserve for soldiers who play by the rules: who identify themselves as soldiers; who don't intentionally murder civilians; who do not threaten schools, hospitals, and houses of worship by turning them into military targets; who grant quarter honorably; and who treat their captives with dignity and respect.

Of course, we'll have to find someone from al Qaeda able to sign the treaty, which is no small issue. Leaving aside the whole fugitive-on-the-lam problem, treaties, you see, are signed between and among nation states.

Now name for me the first senator who will vote for a treaty with Al-Qaeda? Kennedy? Kerry? Feinstein? And then after this vote is taken, and let's say there are 67 votes -- even though there wouldn't be one but let's just play the hypothetical game -- let's then go find somebody in Al-Qaeda to have the big signing ceremony with. Do we bring the Al-Qaeda representative to the White House? Do we have a big fanfare and a state dinner where we announce the signing of the treaty like we did when Gorbachev and Brezhnev and Khrushchev and all these other worthless scoundrels from the Soviet Union showed up?

Can we envision this, ladies and gentlemen? Maybe we go find bin Laden. That's what we need to do! Sign a treaty with bin Laden granting them the status of the Geneva Conventions, even though we don't require them to put on uniforms, to be members of a nation state. They exist exactly as they are, and they don't have to change a thing they're doing. They can still try to blow up buildings, hijack airplanes, attack the U.S. military. We're just going to have a treaty with them where we grant them Geneva Conventions POW status.

So let's do. Let's make it official. Let's try to get a treaty with Al-Qaeda. Big signing ceremony in Washington. Everybody will feel better. Liberals always love treaties, especially treaties made with lying skunks who have no intention of upholding their end of the deal. Liberals like treaties even when the nation that signed the treaty no longer exists. The old Soviet Union signed all these SALT treaties (Strategic Arms Limitations Treaties). When the Soviet Union disbanded and became Russia again, Bush said, "We're going to tear that one up. It doesn't apply." The liberals went nuts. "You can't tear up an arms treaty!" Bush said, "Watch me." He tore it up. Libs are still fuming over that. So they love treaties. Let's have one, with bin Laden. I hope I'm invited to the state dinner.