NEW YORK -- There should be no "rules" constraining the US military in warfare. That’s the position of a man who wants to be America's next commander-in-chief.
On Monday, likely 2016 presidential candidate Ben Carson said the main threat to US military success against the Islamic State is soldiers fearing prosecution upon their return to the US homeland. To defeat the enemy, Carson told Fox News, "rules" should be eliminated in the name of victory.
The former neurosurgeon, who once called Obamacare (the provision of healthcare to those that can least afford it) the worst thing since slavery, added: "Our military needs to know that they’re not going be prosecuted when they come back, because somebody has said, ‘You did something that was politically incorrect’."
He went on: "There is no such thing as a politically correct war. We need to grow up, we need to mature. If you’re going to have rules for war, you should just have a rule that says no war. Other than that, we have to win. Our life depends on it."
Apropos of nothing, here are some pictures of the My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib and the CIA torture programme.
The My Lai Massacre, the mass murder of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), almost entirely civilians and the majority of them women and children, perpetrated by US Army forces on March 16 1968
Pfc. Lynndie England holding a leash attached to a detainee in late 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq
A detainee from Afghanistan is carried on a stretcher before being interrogated by military officials at Camp X-Ray at the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in 2003