The Hindustan Times reports a Pakistani legislature from Chitral (the northernmost district in the North-West Frontier Province) protesting his province’s innocence in exactly the manner which arouses the most suspicion.

US intelligence agencies’ reports suggesting that Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden was present in Chitral are “unauthentic and unjustified”, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) legislator Maulana Abdul Akbar Chitrali has said.

“Neither have we sheltered anybody nor will we tolerate foreign interference in the area,” the Daily Times quoted Chitrali as saying.

Raising a point of order in the National Assembly on Friday, Chitrali said that the mountainous Chitral area shared a border with five countries, but “was completely peaceful”.

He said that the CIA and FBI had set up offices in Chitral, but had left the area after locals protested their presence.

A couple of days ago, a US official had said that Laden was living comfortably in a house, possibly with a family and no more than two bodyguards.

And here’s the US anonymous source rumor.

Victor David Hanson thinks Bush is doing the right thing, but faces some very serious problems in keeping the American public’s support while trying to fight a less-than-total war.

Only a reincarnated Chamberlain or Daladier could think that there is no Islamist commonality between the recent hostage-taking of Western telejournalists on the West Bank, Iranian threats to extinguish Israel and end the American presence in the Gulf, terrorist attacks on soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, plans of killing thousands in Britain and Germany, or plots to blow up American airliners in London — as if Japanese fascists, Italian fascists, and German fascists could not have made war in unison against the liberal democracies given their differing agendas and sects, and lack of coordination.

And even when the Islamists do not succeed, their threats and rhetoric cripple the West: when Mr. Ahmadinejihad rants about wiping Israel off the face of the map or sending gunboats into the Gulf, he garners a few billion extra in annual petrodollars due to the frenzy of oil speculators. A few foiled terrorists in London still managed to force millions of people into humiliating searches of their carry-on luggage, and cost the West untold millions in lost flights, delays, and inconvenience.

In fact, the current strategy of having removed the two most odious dictatorships — the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s — and fostering democracies in their places remains the only sensible course. Far from winning this war for the future of the Middle East, Syria, and Iran are increasingly isolated, desperate to thwart democratization that surrounds their borders in Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and Lebanon, and facing world sanctions for their roguery. For all its messiness, the promotion of democratic reform infuriates the Islamists and paid-off Arab journalists and intellectual toadies alike, and ultimately works in our favor.

But right now the real problem has been the necessity of reversing the order of traditional postwar democratization. The old calculus was first the proverbial horse of defeating and vanquishing utterly the enemy; then the cart of showing magnanimity in rebuilding the country of a contrite loser. Only in that order would the Americans be willing to give millions to the former supporters of once murderous Nazis, Italian fascists, or imperial Japanese who had killed and maimed their sons.

In the Middle East, we reversed the sequence, on the idealistic — and I think correct — premise that the Afghan and Iraqi people were captive to their dictators, and that we wished to avoid an all-encompassing conflict along the lines of World War II. In other words, we trusted that the Taliban and Saddam Hussein explained the recent savagery of the Afghans and Iraqis, rather than the innate savagery of the Afghans and Iraqis themselves explaining the creation of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. The result of this confidence, despite the carnage of war, was that democracy was ushered in, the rogues were to be kept out, and peace was supposed to follow from a grateful, liberated people.

But why should it, when the hard hand of American war was not first completely felt — nor the jihadists utterly vanquished and discredited and any who supported them? Unless there is some element of fear, or at least the suggestion of consequences to come for recalcitrance, why should an Iraqi cease his easy support of Hezbollah, his anti-Semitism, or his cheap support for Islamist terrorists around the block? It would be as if we expected to end slavery outright in the Confederacy around 1862, or rid Germany of Nazis around 1943, or persuade the Japanese fascists to vote in 1944 — before such ideologies have been utterly defeated and the steep price for those who tolerated them paid in full.

So what Mr. Bush is faced with is this nearly impossible paradox of half war/half peace: at a time when most are getting fed up with abhorrent Middle Eastern jihadists who blow up, hijack, and behead in the name of their religion, he is attempting to convince the same American public and the Western world at large to spend their blood and treasure to help Muslim Afghans, Iraqis, and now Lebanese, who heretofore — whether out of shared anti-Americanism or psychological satisfaction in seeing the overdog take a hit — have not been much eager to separate themselves from the rhetoric of radical Islam.

In any case, the administration’s problem is not really its (sound) strategy, nor its increasingly improved implementation that we see in Baghdad, but simply an American public that so far understandably cannot easily differentiate millions of brave Iraqis and Afghans, who risk their lives daily to hunt terrorists and ensure reform, from the Islamists of the Muslim Street who broadcast their primordial hatred for Israel and the United States incessantly.

Remember the surreal Middle East: we freed Shiites from Saddam; so Shiite Iran in response tries to destroy Shiite democrats in Iraq, who, being constantly attacked by terrorists and militias, in turn sympathize with anti-democratic Hezbollah terrorists and militias in Lebanon. And at one point last month, the Lebanese, between slurs against America, were expecting the United States to send it cash, retrieve expatriates immediately, restrain Israel, do something about Hezbollah, and praise Lebanese critics — and all at once.

So how can one expect Americans to witness the barbarism of the jihadists, the creepy rhetoric of the imams and mullahs, the triangulation of Arab governments, and the puerility of the Muslim Street, pause, take a deep breath, and sigh, “Ah, they are frustrated because they are unfree and poor, and so in error blame us for their own autocracies’ failures. Therefore, we must be generous in our sacrifices to allow them the same opportunities for freedom that we enjoy.”

That contemplation and forbearance are both too complex and too much to ask of a post-September 11 public, and so end up as a piñata for political opportunists on both sides to smack to shreds.

On the Right the politicking works out with cynicism and disgust: “These ungrateful and hateful people aren’t worth the life of another American soldier or American dollar.”

Yet the Bush idealism wins no points from the Left either. Both for partisan purposes, and due to the wages of multiculturalism that oppose any Western effort to bring to the other the good life that they themselves so eagerly embrace, Leftists still harp about no blood for oil and assorted conspiracies in lieu of legitimate analysis and criticism.

What, then, is needed — aside from crushing the jihadists and securing Afghanistan and Iraq — is more articulation and explanation. The word “liberal” — as in promoting liberal values abroad, and reminding the world of the traditions of liberal tolerance — needs to be employed more often.

Some tough language is also helpful on occasion: any time the free democracies of Iraq or Afghanistan wish to vote to send American troops home, of course we will comply. Likewise, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon are under no compulsion to accept hated American aid or military help. And just as the American public needs reminding that millions of Middle Easterners are currently fighting jihadist terror in Afghanistan and Iraq — we wish we could say the same about our “allies” in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — so too the Iraqi and Afghan governments should convey to the American people that their support is appreciated, and its continuance deemed vital.

How odd that the president must explain the pathologies of the Middle East to such a degree as to warn Americans of our mortal danger, but not to the point of excess so that we feel that there is no hope for such people. He must somehow suggest that jihadism could not imperil us were it not for the “moderates” who tolerate and appease it — while this is the very same group that we feel duty-bound to offer an alternative other than theocracy or dictatorship. And he must offer a postwar plan of reconstruction to the citizens of the Middle East at a time when many of them do not feel that their romantic jihadists have ever really been defeated at all.

Even the eloquence of a Lincoln or Churchill would find all that difficult.

MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute offers some interesting reading, providing plenty of food for thought.

On August 4, 2006, the Al-Hesbah website published instructions on “How to Kill a Crusader in the Arabian Peninsula.” The document was signed by Amer Al-Najdi, and dated June 15, 2006.

Al-Najdi instructs his readers in some possible ways to kill a Westerner, from choosing the victim through following him through the stage of the actual killing.

Hat tip to Dr. Sanity.

Agence France Presse quotes a US general at a Pentagon press conference telling us what we already know perfectly well.

A senior US military official said there is “clear evidence” that Iran is funding, training and arming Shiite extremists to destabilize Iraq.

“I think it is irrefutable that Iran is responsible for training, funding and equipping some of these Shia extremist groups, and also providing advanced IED technology,” said Brigadier General Michael Barbero, using the acronym for “improvised explosive devices.”

“And there is clear evidence of that,” he added at a Pentagon press conference.

His comments came the same day that Iran turned aside demands by the international community that it halt uranium enrichment as required by a UN Security Council resolution, offering “serious negotiations” instead.

We are unfortunately not characterizing Iran’s activities as the acts of war they are, and responding with invasion and regime change, but –at least– Coalition forces are evidently starting to do something serious about interrupting the flow of supplies.

The Telegraph reported today:

The soldiers of the Queen’s Royal Hussars will today board a fleet of stripped-down Land Rovers, festooned with weapons and equipment, bound for the depths of the Iraqi desert.

Their mission is to adopt tactics pioneered by the Long Range Desert Group, the forerunners of the SAS, more than six decades ago in the campaign against Rommel in North Africa. They will leave Camp Abu Naji, the only permanent base in Maysan province near the local capital of Amarah, and head into the remote region near the border with Iran.

Rather than staying in a fixed spot well known to enemy fighters in the most violent of all the Iraqi provinces under British control, they will live, camp and fight on the move. Roaming through the sparsely populated areas of Maysan, an area as large as Northern Ireland, they will travel without heavy armour that would become bogged down in the sand dunes and sleep under the stars.

Resupply will come from air drops or transport aircraft landing on temporary runways. Lt Col David Labouchere, the regiment’s commander, said that when they needed to act they would “surge” from the wilderness…

The adoption of tactics from an older era of British desert warfare would allow proper control of the border area for the first time, he said. America has frequently alleged that weapons and volunteers are being brought in by Iran. One of the first tasks of the Queen’s Royal Hussars will be to discover whether this is true.

How much force does it take to intimidate the American left into screaming for withdrawal and surrender?

General John Abizaid tells Hugh Hewitt the strength of the forces in Iraq confronting 133,000 American, 17,000 Coalition (source: Global Security, and (as General Abazid notes) an additional 275,000 lraqi troops amounts to “less than 20,000 active, and the Shiia militias that are actively confronting the coalition forces are less than about 5,000.”

That’s right, folks. Our side’s 425,000 cannot possibly hope to defeat under 25,000 insurgents, the liberals conclude fearfully. It’s hopeless. Better withdraw.

Hell, that’s 17 to 1. Even General Bernard Law Montgomery would have been willing to fight with 17 to 1 odds in his favor.

Michael Barone discusses the reflexive treason of the American intellectual clerisy.

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington’s) transnationalism.

At the center of their thinking is a notion of moral relativism. No idea is morally superior to another. Hitler had his way, we have ours — who’s to say who is right? No ideas should be “privileged,” especially those that have been the guiding forces in the development and improvement of Western civilization. Rich white men have imposed their ideas because of their wealth and through the use of force. Rich white nations imposed their rule on benighted people of color around the world. For this sin of imperialism they must forever be regarded as morally stained and presumptively wrong. Our covert enemies go quickly from the notion that all societies are morally equal to the notion that all societies are morally equal except ours, which is worse.

These are the ideas that have been transmitted over a long generation by the elites who run our universities and our schools, and who dominate our mainstream media. They teach an American history with the good parts left out and the bad parts emphasized. We are taught that some of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders — and are left ignorant of their proclamations of universal liberties and human rights. We are taught that Japanese-Americans were interned in World War II — and not that American military forces liberated millions from tyranny. To be sure, the great mass of Americans tend to resist these teachings. By the millions they buy and read serious biographies of the Founders and accounts of the Greatest Generation. But the teachings of our covert enemies have their effect.

Of course, this distorts history. We are taught that American slavery was the most evil institution in human history. But every society in history has had slavery. Only one society set out to and did abolish it. The movement to abolish first the slave trade and then slavery was not started by the reason-guided philosophies of 18th century France. It was started, as Adam Hochschild documents in his admirable book “Bury the Chains,” by Quakers and Evangelical Christians in Britain, followed in time by similar men and women in America. The slave trade was ended not by Africans, but by the Royal Navy, with aid from the U.S. Navy even before the Civil War.

Nevertheless, the default assumption of our covert enemies is that in any conflict between the West and the Rest, the West is wrong. That assumption can be rebutted by overwhelming fact: Few argued for the Taliban after Sept. 11. But in our continuing struggles, our covert enemies portray our work in Iraq through the lens of Abu Ghraib and consider Israel’s self-defense against Hezbollah as the oppression of virtuous victims by evil men. In World War II, our elites understood that we were the forces of good and that victory was essential. Today, many of our elites subject our military and intelligence actions to fine-tooth-comb analysis and find that they are morally repugnant.

We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don’t want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

Barry Dauphin understands them perfectly.

Why do they hate us?” is a question that undergoes a subtle transformation in the minds of many anti-American, anti-West folks. It becomes: well nobody could really hate me, because I’m wonderful, so they must really hate you (Bushmacchimphitler & Halliburton & anyone else I don’t agree with and didn’t vote for. Since anyone who disagrees with me must hate me, I am within my rights to hate them…and that means you). Since I hate you and the Islamists hate you, they must be onto something, so I’ll give them some more time to calm down a bit, so they don’t accidentally hurt me. Accidentally, because they aren’t responsible for this, you know.

Ben Stein compares the behavior of American society’s privileged elites in the relatively recent past with their behavior in the present day, and is naturally dismayed.

My dear old father was a friend of his father, the venerable Sidney J. Weinberg, who ran Goldman Sachs from 1930 to 1969. My dad wangled a job interview for me with John Weinberg, an unprepossessing figure but obviously a smart guy. After some talk, he offered me a job. I would start by spending two years sitting at a desk until late at night going over spreadsheets. “Really?” I asked. That did not seem to be so glamorous. “Yes, really,” he said. “That’s how we all start.”

I turned it down and became a poverty lawyer instead. But what I did not know about John Weinberg was that even though he was rich and well connected, as a young man he joined the Marines to fight the Japanese in the Pacific, then fought again in Korea. That was America’s ruling class then. The scions of the rich went off to fight.

My longtime pal and idol, Peter M. Flanigan — a former high honcho of Dillon, Read; a high aide to my ex-boss, Richard M. Nixon; and heir to a large brewing fortune — was once a naval aviator. My father left a comfortable job in Washington to join the Navy. The father of my pal Phil DeMuth left a successful career to be an Army Air Corps pilot, flying death-defying missions over Burma. Congressmen resigned to serve. Senators resigned to serve. Professional athletes resigned to serve in the uniform.

Now, who’s fighting for us in the fight of our lives? Brave, idealistic Southerners. Hispanics from New Mexico. Rural men and women from upstate New York. Small-town boys and girls from the Midwest. Do the children of the powers on Wall Street resign to go off and fight? Fight for the system that made them rich? Fight for the way of life that made them princes? Surely, you jest.

And that’s the essence. The other side considers it a privilege to fight and die for its beliefs. Those on the other side cannot wait to line up to blow themselves up for their vision of heaven. On our side, it’s: “Let the other poor sap do it. I’ve got to make money.” How can we fight this fight with the brightest and best educated rushing off and working night and day to do private equity deals and derivatives trading? How can we fight this fight with the ruling class absent by its own sweet leave?

I keep thinking, again, that if Israel, with its back to the sea, cannot muster the will to fight in a big way, then the fat, faraway U.S.A. will never be able to do it. I keep saying this and it terrifies me.

We’re in a war with people who want to kill us all and wreck our civilization. They’re taking it very seriously. We, on the other hand, are worrying about leveraged buyouts and special dividends and how much junk debt the newly formed private entity can support before we sell it to the ultimate sucker, the public shareholder.

We’re worrying whether Hollywood will forgive Mel Gibson and what the next move is for big homes in East Hampton. We’re rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The terrorists are the iceberg.

What stands between us and the iceberg are the miraculously brave men and women of the armed forces. They’re heroes and saints as far as I’m concerned. But can they do it without the rest of us? Can they do it while we’re all working on our tans and trying to have our taxes lowered again? How can we leave them out there all alone to die for us when we treat the war to save civilization as something we can just wish away?

If we don’t win this war against the terrorists, there’s not going to be business as usual ever again. If the terrorists get to their goal, there’s not going to be a stock exchange or hedge funds or Bain Capital or the Carlyle Group or even Goldman Sachs. If the terrorists get their way — and so far, they’re getting their way — there’s not going to be business, period.

Everyone with the really big money at stake is — again — bidding for the best deck chairs as the iceberg looms, not so far, any longer, under the surface, and very large and very cold and very solid.

Not too long ago, I was ranting myself about our disloyal and irresponsible elites, and I said rhetoricaly to a friend from college: “Has there ever been any society in which the people at the summit of society, enjoying the greatest material well-being and the most privileges, despised their own country and their own people and felt not the slightest sense of personal identification with either?”

“Sure,” he replied. “France in 1789, and Russia in 1917.”

Orin Kerr, at the Volokh Conspiracy, responds to the left’s most dishonest blogger‘s rantings over criticisms of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor’s NSA opinion by the Washington Post (and others), observing:

the Administration is giving the program only a very partial defense in its public documents, so there is a lot more that we don’t know. (For example, I teach and write in the area of the Fourth Amendment, and my view is that I don’t know enough of the facts to know if the program violates the Fourth Amendment.

Professor Kerr has identified the most interesting feature of the NSA flap. The December 16, 2005 New York Times leaked NSA story accused the Bush administration of “monitoring,” a term subsequently rhetorically upgraded to “spying,” and ultimately to “eavesdropping,” on international phone calls and email messages “within the United States” without warrants.

The Bush Administration’s accusers knew that they were taking a very serious step by divulging the existence of one or more top secret National Security programs, and they not surprisingly chose merely to apply partisan and inflammatory characterizations without ever specifically describing what it was that they were pointing to with feigned outrage.

Since all this is secret, no one outside certain intelligence agencies and the upper reaches of the US Government really knows who is doing what, when, or to whom. It is really as if all it required was for Messrs. Risen and Lichtblau to write a story saying “the Bush Administration is secretly violating the law,” some unidentified persons said “by doing bad things,” and the left faithfully falls into zombified lockstep, and begins shouting cries of pain and outrage in chorus.

A key problem is no one has ever been identified anyone who has ever experienced a known wrong, or a perceived consequence of any kind, from whatever it is that NSA might, or might not, be doing.

Can the Constitution really be violated, or the law be broken, by persons unknown secretly peforming unknown acts devoid of discernible effect?

The left obviously thinks that George W. Bush is just intrinsically unconstitutional, and that he breaks the law just by being in office, and their grasp of so much of the MSM allows them to create an echo-chamber alternative reality in which the liberal articles of faith -which everybody knows- seem very real, however tenuous their relationship to mere diurnal reality.

Michael Smerconish describes how political correctness jeopardizes airline safety:

For years I have been advocating that the United States use… street smarts in the war against radical Islam. I did not begin with any particular knowledge of the subject. To the contrary, whatever understanding I’ve obtained sprang from a common occurrence in connection with a routine flight.

In March 2004, my family of six was heading to Florida for spring break. At a ticket counter in the Atlantic City airport, my 8-year-old son was singled out for “secondary” or random screening.

I knew it was absurd, but I didn’t complain, figuring it was the small price we all have to pay post 9/11. Common sense told me it was a terrible waste of precious resources.

Soon after my son’s screening, Dr. Condoleezza Rice testified in front of the 9/11 Commission. Commissioner John Lehman floored me when he asked Dr. Rice this:

“Were you aware that it was the policy, and I believe it remains the policy today, to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that is discriminatory?”

And makes the case for airport profiling.

Profiling is street smarts by any other name. It’s the common-sensical recognition that while America is not threatened by an entire community, she is under siege by a certain element of an identifiable group, and law enforcement needs to target its resources accordingly.

The failure to profile is a dereliction of duty on the part of an administration that has otherwise been willing to incur the wrath of civil libertarians as it aggressively fights the war on terror.

Only last week, in the aftermath of the thwarted attack emanating from the U.K., did the president appear to take a step in the direction of profiling when at last, he acknowledged with specificity those who threaten our survival:

“This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom.”

Hopefully now there will be a long overdue confrontation of the Emperor Has No Clothes charade whereby law enforcement is mandated to ignore the naked barbarism of radical Islam. The arrest of two dozen in connection with the latest, failed plan should change that. After all, they are the same-old, same-old. I refer to Messrs. Ali, Ali, Ali, Hussain, Hussain, Hussain, Islam, Kayani, Khan, Khan, Kha-tib, Patel, Rauf, Saddique, Sarwar, Savant, Tariq, Uddin and Zaman. To a person they are Muslim men…

They are not Americans. They are not urban blacks. They are not suburban whites. They are not Jews. They are not Hispanics. They are not members of the U.S. military, women, senior citizens or young kids. At a minimum, it is time to profile by exclusion.

Hat tip to Tom Seus.

Oh, sure.

The ACLU, a little jurisdiction shopping, and a Jimmy Carter-appointed ultra-liberal ideologue judge with a record of partisan political judicial conduct, a cooperative MSM, and voila! you have headlines shouting U.S. Judge Finds Wiretapping Plan Violates the Law.

In reality, Anna Diggs Taylor’s ruling will simply go on to the Circuit Court of Appeals and on to the Supreme Court, where the arguments will be evaluated by more serious and responsible judges.

———————
MaggieCarta on Free Republic provides the song of the hour.

My Law School Told Me You Better Shop Around.
(Tune: My Momma Told Me You Better Shop Around)

Just because you’ve briefed a big case now
There’s still some things that you must understand now
Before you step into court with demands now
Make your choice nonrandom as you can now
My law school taught me:
You better shop around

There’s some knowledge I want to bestow now
Know which way that the wind’s gonna blow now
Judgments come and judgments are gonna go now
The more you look, you’ll find one apropos, now
My law school taught me:
You better shop around

You must use your all best jargon, son
Don’t stay stuck with the very first one
Hard working judges come a dime a dozen
Try to find you one with a verdict you’re lovin’
Presume you got no standing to sue, now
Find one who’s in bed with ACLU now
My law school taught me:
You better shop around

The Guardian writes (with big salty tears running down its editorial cheek):

“Why are the liberals always on the other side?” asks the fictional French military commander Colonel Mathieu when he is challenged, in The Battle for Algiers, for using torture to fight terror. The film suggests that torture works as a tool of immediate necessity, even if the consequences are a blurring of morality and so final defeat. Four decades on, Mathieu’s charge against liberal scruples is still being raised, implicit in the defence of the means being used in a modern battle against Islamic terror…

Reports from Pakistan suggest that much of the intelligence that led to the raids came from that country and that some of it may have been obtained in ways entirely unacceptable here. In particular Rashid Rauf, a British citizen said to be a prime source of information leading to last week’s arrests, has been held without access to full consular or legal assistance. Disturbing reports in Pakistani papers that he had “broken” under interrogation have been echoed by local human rights bodies. The Guardian has quoted one, Asma Jehangir, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who has no doubt about the meaning of broken. “I don’t deduce, I know – torture,” she said. “There is simply no doubt about that, no doubt at all.” If this is shown to be the case, the prospect of securing convictions in this country on his evidence will be complicated.

Rational adults would suppose that a terrorist, apprehended outside British jurisdiction, might have to take his chances with the local legal system, and the sort of unsympathetic treatment traditionally meted out to hostes humani generis [the common enemies of mankind], who have by their own actions placed themselves outside both the laws of ordinary society and the laws of war.

Faced wih a choice of, say, 3000 innocent lives versus Mr. Rauf’s supposed privileges and comfort, any responsible person charged, like Colonel Mathieu in the Pontecorvo film, would inevitably be forced to do what was necessary to protect the innocent.

Only imbeciles and sentimental poseurs would agree with the Guardian.