Uh...bad comparison

In determining whether a former Guantanamo detainee was a Jihadist or Victim, a former military interrogator put it this way:

"We compared him to somebody who went off to Spain during the civil war — more of a romantic than some sort of ideologically steeled fighter."

What an odd way to compare an accused-Jihadist i.e. with people who went to help the Republican loyalists fight Franco's Fascists. I don't know if the people who went off to fight the Fascists in Spain were particularly naive. In fact, they obviously weren't and they knew that Franco and his Nazi backers were a danger to civilization. They were the correct ones and had taken an accurate measure (as if it took a great deal of intelligence) of the impending danger.

Comments

[JRoth]

This is a good point, David, but I think you've missed this guy's frame of reference. Which is that the Lincoln Brigade, et al, were ComSymps, and thus wrong. The fact that they were fighting fascism is irrelevant - nothing was worse than being a ComSymp. However, bless their hearts, Patriotic Americans decided not to prosecute (or perhaps persecute) the Lincoln Brigadeers because they were just harmless "romantics."

FWIW, I think that the guy's distinction is a worthwhile one. We need to choose our battles, so to speak, when it comes to detaining/punishing those we capture (setting aside the shamefully huge number of truly innocent men at Guantanamo). Just as a smart mayor or police captain knows that you don't need to toss every rock thrower in jail after a riot (only the leaders), so should we recognize that a lot of the people who have opposed us in the Middle East only pose a threat in the presence of already-dangerous situations. The goal is to calm the situation, at which point such "romantics" will happily return to quotidian life.