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The truth about the war on terror

August 31, 2006 | By Nathaniel Ward

James Carafano inspects the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facilities to see what the situation there is really like.

James Carafano inspects the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facilities to see what the situation there is really like.

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Five years into the war on terrorism, liberals in the media and on Capitol Hill just don’t seem to understand that we’re at war. Sometimes, one has to wonder about their priorities. For example, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted in a speech Tuesday, America’s newspapers have given substantially greater coverage to soldiers’ abuses than to stories about the heroes of the ongoing conflict.

With all these distortions, it’s important that Heritage experts see for themselves what’s going on. That’s why Heritage national security expert James Carafano is visiting the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facilities today, at the invitation of the Defense Department.

Carafano tells MyHeritage.org that the trip will allow him to “to see for myself the conditions on the ground” and to inspect “how prisoners are treated.” He will also examine “what’s being done to repatriate prisoners that no longer need to be detained.”

Carafano’s one-day trip follows his testimony last month to the Senate Armed Services Committee about the Supreme Court’s June ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the military cannot use special tribunals to try captured terrorists.

“What is needed is a process that does not treat unlawful combatants as regular criminals or traditional prisoners of war,” Carafano told the Senators. “Congress can satisfy its legal and national security obligations explicitly by authorizing the proposed military commission process.”

The cost of bad immigration ‘reform’

Heritage immigration expert Robert Rector has been traveling the country speaking before Congressional “field hearings” about the heavy costs associated with the Senate’s amnesty legislation.

The Denver Post reports on Rector’s testimony yesterday in Aurora, CO:

Robert Rector of the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation told [Sen. Wayne] Allard that the Senate bill, which provides a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in the U.S., will cost the federal government around $16 billion in added benefits once the 9 million to 10 million illegal immigrants become citizens. Under the law, those who qualify for legal status would be able to become citizens in 11 years.

He said the overall cost over 35 years could reach $50 billion. He attributed those costs to additional government services and more people immigrating to join their families in the U.S.

Rector generated a tremendous buzz in the media and in Congress earlier this year with his analysis of the impact of the Senate’s immigration “reform” bill. He found that the legislation would allow 60 million new legal immigrants over the next two decades and dramatically increase the burden on America’s social programs.

Why big labor supports big government

Labor unions once represented a broad cross-section of American industrial workers. Today, though, unions are increasingly irrelevant as the economy evolves. Almost half of union members are now government employees, Heritage labor analysts Tim Kane and James Sherk explain, and this has led big labor to turn increasingly to big government.

Today 48 percent of all union members work for the government. The typical union member nowadays is a local government worker lobbying city hall to raise taxes so the city can pay him more. Rather than striking to redress difficult working conditions, modern unions fight for more government because they are the government, drifting ever farther from labor’s initial goal of improving the life of working Americans.

Unions today are fighting not for working Americans but for their own narrow self-interest. Their irrelevance is hard to deny: Between 1981 and today, union membership overall declined from 21.4 percent of the workforce to just 12.5 percent, and private sector unionization declined further still.

Though they remain politically powerful, write Kane, director of Heritage’s Center for International Trade and Economics, and Sherk, “unions are almost totally irrelevant economically in the 21st century workplace of individualization and technology. There simply isn’t any debate over whether unions are facing extinction, because the numbers speak for themselves.”

Welfare’s long-term impact

Welfare was intended as short-term help for needy individual families, but its impact is substantially more far-reaching. A new finding released by Heritage’s FamilyFacts.org reveals that women whose parents received welfare benefits are three times as likely to receive welfare benefits within three years of having their first child as those whose families received no welfare benefits.

Similar trends also exist for men, another finding shows. Men who grow up in families that received welfare benefits are less likely to marry the mother of their out-of-wedlock child than men whose families received no such benefit.

In other news

  • President Bush told the American Legion national convention today that “the war we fight today is more than a military conflict,” adding that “it is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.”
  • California has implemented harsh new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to prevent global warming. Although Heritage strongly objects to burdensome environmental regulations, this is how federalism is supposed to work: states can implement their own policies, for better or worse, without the need for one-size-fits all federal mandates.
  • Military intelligence estimates that Iran will have a functioning nuclear weapon within five years.
  • A tasteless British television drama will include a staged assassination of President Bush, The Evening Standard reports. “When you watch it you realize what a sophisticated piece of work it is,” a representative of the TV network said. “I hope people will see that the intention behind it is good.” What in the world could be the “good intentions” of a video about assassinating the leader of the free world?

Coming up at Heritage

To attend these or any other Heritage Foundation events, RSVP at Heritage’s events website. Or you can watch these events live online at Heritage.org. All times are Eastern.

Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.