You have to wonder just what level of moral and ethical depravity you have to reach to be a Fox News talker these days.
Col. Ralph Peters -- who doesn't exactly have a track record for probity to begin with -- went on Neil Cavuto and offered a solution to dealing with terrorists at Guantanamo Bay -- just kill them all:
Peters: Neil, I've gotta tell you where I'm coming from. I come from Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, the anthracite coal fields. We don't screw around with terrorists.
[Oh, yeah -- that Schuylkill County: Where redneck juries let minority-bashing thugs off scot-free. In other, they don't screw around with white terrorists -- they just let 'em go. OK, good to know.]
Peters: First of all, I am not concerned about the human and legal rights of terrorists. Because as far as I am concerned, when a human being chooses to commit an act of terror against innocent human beings, he puts himself outside of humanity. And this obsession with the legal -- supposed legal and human rights of terrorists -- a small number -- condemns billions of human beings, billions, to live in fear.
And again, Neil, once you commit an act of terror, in my book, you are outside, you are anathema, and you should be killed.
Now, I'm not talking about killing every living thing in the barnyard. But for example, when we attack an Al Qaeda compound, and the people defending the Al Qaeda compound can -- and they're shooting at us, that's probably a pretty good indicator that they are terrorists. So I see no reason to bring them to the United States, no reason to bring them to Guantanamo. There are a small number of senior terrorists who have intelligence value. Them we should take prisoner, but we should do the interrogations in foreign countries -- and why set ourselves up for legal problems?
Now Neil, I know it's not politically correct. I don't care. I care about the security and well-being of my fellow Americans. I care about the human rights of innocent people around the world. And as far as I'm concerned, terrorists should die.
And a good thing that's happening now -- as soon as you had this movement to close Guantanamo, et cetera et cetera, the word I'm getting from the field is our special operators and our soldiers and Marines on the front lines are taking fewer prisoners.
Cavuto: All right, so in other words, they're killing them.
Peters: Yep.
...
Peters: We're dealing with people who aren't human anymore. They're monsters. And just like in the movies, monsters deserve to die. And we agonize over this.
Cavuto: I see your point about what we agonize over. But what if all the 200 or so Gitmo detainees are not monsters -- some were just caught up in a roundup where they weren't doing anything wrong. Now, I don't have the details or the who's who on who might fill that equation here, but you know what I mean, that, that -- then you would be wiping them all out.
Peters: Well, there will be miscarriages of justice in a brutal war like this. But I don't think too many. We're pretty good at figuring out who's right and who's wrong.
Yeah, right. Sure we are:
An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.
McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.
This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.
These right-wing yakkers got all uptight about the potential release of those detainee-abuse photos, because they would anger Arabs, recruit more terrorists, and . Maybe they should worry more about the release of their own words.