SOD grieves with the families who lost loved ones in the tragic and senseless shootings at Fort Hood.  Without devaluing the sacrifices of service men and women who have perished in war zones, these cold blooded murders are especially heinous.  Our prayers today are with the bereaved families and friends of those killed.

We also cannot help but wonder about the motivations of the man at the heart of this carnage.  Was it his religion that caused him to betray his country and his fellow service members or did this psychiatrist suffer a mental breakdown himself?  We hope the Army, and government at large, have the courage to look honestly at this incident and report all the facts to the American people.

Did you hear the one about a Democrat who gets elected President and 11 days after his inauguration is nominated for a Nobel Prize? Its even better than that because the punch line is that he wins after less than 9 months in office. Truly the Nobel Peace prize has become nothing more than a reward for thinking or speaking in ways the political left approves. Accomplishments or personal sacrifice that promote peace obviously mean nothing.

Don’t believe me? Lets look at the some winners from the last 10 years.

• 2007 – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore – need I say more?
• 2005 – The International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohamed el Baradei – If anyone or anything can be said to have done little to keep the peace it is the IAEA and Baradei.
• 2003 – Shirin Ebadi – kook who thinks AIDS is a biological weapon
• 2002 – Jimmy Carter – arguably the worst President of the United States until Barack Obama.
• 2001 – The United Nations and Kofi Annan – Mentioning the UN and peace in the same sentence is an oxymoron.

And a few other notables:

• 1994 – Yassar Arafat – Are you kidding me? This man was dedicated to exterminating Jews and wiping out the nation of Isreael.
• 1990 – Mikhail Gorbachev – The ideological heir of Stalin, gets the prize for not blowing up the world and the man and woman who stopped him (Regan and Thatcher) get bupkis.

Along the way there have been a few good picks, Lech Walesca and Mother Teresa come to mind. But by and large, the formula for becoming a Nobel Peace laureate appears to be some combination of:

• Be a communist or at least a Democrat.
• Be a bureaucrat for a giant international agency that sucks up tax dollars (and demands more) but does nothing substantive unless it actually impedes peace.
• Be a mass murderer or at least someone who kowtows to dictators.
• Be opposed to American ideals of individual liberty and opportunity.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the administration cannot hold prisoners indefinitely and they may not try them before military tribunals. While the logic of both of these decisions escapes me, after all they are foreign nationals who were not in our country when apprehended and should have no rights under our constitution, they have left only one viable option. Since these dangerous individuals cannot be set free and they cannot be held, they must be pumped for all the information they have, taken out behind the prison and shot.

Not the solution I would have crafted, but who am I to question five out of eight of the Supremes?

I saw this lovely article on Slashdot. The upshot is that the ACLU is upset because the U.S. is using, or may be using, a new type of technology that gives a real time picture of the brain as a lie detector on prisoners in the War on Terror. I suppose it works this way; the interrogator asks questions, shows pictures or just talks to the subject while an analysis team looks for clues about the subjects truthfulness in the changes inside his brain.

The ACLU is worried that this technology is untested and the reactions of the brain are poorly understood at best and may result in people being accused of crimes they did not commit because of errors or misinterpretations of the data. Well, you know me. I think that, as a general rule of thumb, we are safe doing everything the ACLU is opposed to, and this is no exception.

We are at war. Untested, cutting edge technologies are always rolled out in wartime in an attempt to get an edge over the enemy. Radar at the start of WWII was extremely crude, but it gave the British the edge they needed to win the battle of Britian. Airplanes were little more than wooden kites at the start of WWI but they were deployed as the waring nations sought every advantage possible. Why would the War on Terrorism be any different.

The individuals subject to these kinds of interrogations are combatants. This is a part of a legitimate effort to gain intelligence in the prosecution of the war, what does the ACLU prefer, torture? This is not a law enforcement operation. I would have problems if law enforcement agencies in the U.S. were using this technology on U.S. citizens or if people were having to pass these sorts of tests to get or keep a job.

But that’s not what’s happening. My favorite quote from the article: “What we don’t want is to open our newspapers and find that another innocent person has been thrown into Guantánamo because interrogators have jumped to conclusions based on a technology no one understands very well. ” No problem. Since there are no innocents in Guantánamo now, we don’t have to worry about another going there. Please.