Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Understanding the enemy

Oliver North:

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These enemies are utterly ruthless, and indescribably brutal. Though the leaders do all they can to avoid death or capture, their "foot soldiers" are not only willing to die for their cause — they want to die. And unlike our adversaries of the past, this enemy is not motivated by goals that inspired armies of old: land, treasure, strategic waterways, or natural resources. Today's enemy is instead goaded by a twisted belief it has a holy mission to advance its religion and drive Western influence — meaning Judeo-Christian values — from any Islamic territory.
The president and his team understand this enemy. Some Democrats, like Sens. Zell Miller of Georgia and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, do as well. Unfortunately, others who manage to command much more media attention, apparently believe President Bush and his generals are the enemy. And their attacks on the president over these past few weeks have proved Sun Tzu's admonition, that if you don't know who your enemy really is, "for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat."
The brutal beheading of American Paul Johnson is a tragic, sanguinary example of such a defeat. In the original statement issued by Paul Johnson's captors, they referred to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and said Johnson would be treated the same way that prisoners there were treated. The prison issue has inflamed the Arab world because too many of our political and media elites have treated the shameful actions of a few soldiers in an Iraqi prison as though it was the modern equivalent of the My Lai massacre. The blood of Paul Johnson is on their hands.
Last week President George W. Bush met with Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy in the Oval Office. Hours earlier, a 33-year-old South Korean, Kim Sun-il, an Arabic translator working in Iraq, was brutally beheaded by terrorists. The terrorists took this man hostage and threatened to kill him in an effort to influence the South Korean government to withdraw its troops from Iraq. The brutal beheading came just days after the beheading of Paul Johnson and just six weeks after the beheading of Nick Berg.
Surely the sophisticated scribes of the vaunted White House press corps would want to know the president's reaction to the brutal beheading of Kim Sun-il and ask what more he can do to win this war and protect American citizens at home and abroad.
But when the opportunity arose to ask about the most recent atrocity, the first question from an American reporter was to ask about the "perception" that torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was authorized by the Bush administration. This inquiring whiz also wanted to know if the president thought it would be wise to have an independent commission look into the matter.
The media want to know, because Democrat leaders on Capitol Hill are calling for exactly that. This week House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, and her brethren held a news conference to demand a Select Committee of the Congress be established to investigate abuses, not just at Abu Ghraib prison, but at any prison in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
They are convinced the men and women of America's military are the bad guys. Sen. Ted Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, an expert in scandals and water torture, routinely refers to abuses at Abu Ghraib as "torture" and "sadistic abuses."