The last brother
Walter Pincus of Washington Post describes the counterterrorism masterclasses conducted by Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed stood before U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called “terrorist tutorials.” … “KSM, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete,” according to newly unclassified portions of a 2004 report by the CIA’s then-inspector general released Monday by the Justice Department. … The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general’s report and other documents released this week indicate.
When a man “breaks” under interrogation, he does more than blurt out secrets. The process truly breaks something inside him; changes something forever. The mystery is what. It isn’t morals: Mohammed’s transition from the man who boasted of decapitating Daniel Pearl to a hunter of his former associates still leaves a man who deals in violence and death. Breaking didn’t turn KSM into Gandhi; it didn’t convert him into a man you’d like to invite to dinner. Like others who have switched sides — double agents or police informers — betrayal is a lateral move within the same business.
The real key to breaking someone is to make him do something that will forever estrange him from his former life; to put him beyond the pale of forgiveness; to create such a change in attitude that he can never go back to his fold. It wasn’t the duress that broke KSM, it was what he did and said and thought under duress that brought him to the other side. He crossed some line which made him realize he could never come back into the Brotherhood. And he knows that he crossed it himself. Where did it leave him? In the night, facing some other way. Among the damned, betrayal is another pathway in the dark. But that’s where the damned like to live; amid things that are already broken. Real psychological conversion is something beyond the power of waterboarding to achieve, but interrogators are not in the business of offering salvation. They are in the profession of allowing vile men to reinvent themselves, to live for just a moment more on Raskolnikov’s ledge. “Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once!” If intelligence agencies had a pill that would turn a fanatical monster into Mother Teresa, they would be foolish to use it. Duress isn’t meant to shatter a man; it’s sole purpose is to leave all the fanatic’s vile cunning intact, only to break that thing which keeps him working for the other side. The fictional George Smiley’s ambivalence toward turning Karla as crossed over to the West arises because Smiley is aware of the sordidness of the moment.
Don’t come, thought Smiley. Shoot, Smiley thought, talking to Karla’s people, not to his own. There was suddenly something terrible in his foreknowledge that this tiny creature was about to cut himself off from the black castle behind him … an unholy vertigo seized him as the very evil he had fought against seemed to reach out and posses him and claim him despite his striving, calling him a traitor also; mocking him, yet at the same time applauding his betrayal. On Karla had descended the curse of Smiley’s compassion; on Smiley the curse of Karla’s fanaticism. I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other’s frontiers, we are the no-men of this no-man’s-land.
Smiley hated that square yard as much as Karla did. But was Smiley’s compassion simply the salve of superiority an aging civil servant of a tottering empire could use to console himself behind an American wall or did he want to take that risk and fly away? Out on Raskolnikov’s ledge it is always just ‘one minute more’, ‘one last thing’; and forever is a long time.
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The heart is deceitful above all things, and unsearchable, who can know it?
The behavior of men, and especially those like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, are truly a mystery, how deeply do we really want to understand them?
Wretchard wrote If intelligence agencies had a pill that would turn a fanatical monster into Mother Teresa, they would be foolish to use it.
I guess so…. but to me, it brings up an even more interesting question: Would it be moral to use it on Khalid Sheik Mohammed?
Assuming we had such a pill, should Congress allow it to be used? …
And apart from Congress, as citizens, would we consider it moral to use such a pill?
Yet another question, lol, would you want to take such a pill for yourself?
Lol, last question, and should we as scientists try to create such a pill?
Once a pig always a pig.
Amit, #1
And yet is a Mother Teresa with all her fanaticism and her absolutism all that different from Khalid Sheik Mohammed?
To quote Heinrich Himmler, “Some of our best recruits are former communists.”
Alan Kellogg,
“And yet is a Mother Teresa with all her fanaticism and her absolutism all that different from Khalid Sheik Mohammed?”
YES, there is a basic difference between good and evil.
For all his intellectual efforts, Richard Fernandez knows that difference. Intellect used for good is different from intellect used for evil. GWB was mocked for using the term “Axis of Evil” and the word “axis” was not the genesis of those spurious comments.
If you don’t know that difference, study and pray that you will change in that knowledge and belief. If not then you, not Mother Theresa, are more like Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
“betrayal is a lateral move within the same business.”
Kinda like what the current administration is doing to the CIA of the last administration.
Amit,
Kennedy’s father lobotomized his own daughter. To the power mad we are all objects to be arranged, used and disposed of. Real education is part of societies balancing act. We need to raise people who are empathic and other directed while at the same time secure in their own individuality and creative. People who are not easily manipulated but who decline to manipulate while remaining engaged. We need people who do not simply live in a herd but who explore the path, without going out onto that ledge. How is this balancing act achieved? Through the family and religion and education.
Broken families or abusive ones spread dysfunction like a virus and yet millions do survive and rewire a path around the damage. The brain can compensate for a defect on the retina and still allow the eye to see a normal picture, until the damage is to great to work around and the failure in the neurology becomes catastrophic.
While partisans might argue for the purity of their religion there is a commonality among most but not all creeds. It is clear to me that in principle how a religion describes the nature of God and of man does affect the ability of someone to walk the line without viewing members of their own community as sheep or those of other communities as cattle. Did the callous hypocrisy of the Kennedy’s stem from some defect in 20th century Boston Catholicism or were they a force of nature that the diocese could not control? Perhaps the Vatican will seek to repair any damage the infection they brought caused. Was the malevolence of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed caused by the Wahabi creed or is it general to Islam? If either can it be contained or cured?
Can education serve a moral purpose? In 1987 John Mearsheimer gave the “Aims of Education” address to the incoming class of 2001 at The University of Chicago. http://tinyurl.com/nc7t3y If you search using the terms “John Mearsheimer on moral education” you get an interesting set of responses.
My fear is that those who seek to rule believe that there is a blue pill that will “turn a fanatical monster into Mother Teresa” and they want to use it. Sixty years ago little old ladies in tennis shoes got excited about the fluoridation of water because they thought that it represented an effort to slip the blue pill into our system. All they did was set themselves up for Alinskyite ridicule as caricatured by Stanley Kubrick in Dr Strangelove. There the little old ladies morphed into the lunatic General Jack Ripper. My worry is that those who want to hand out the pills to others are at heart themselves Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47wZkFmSGVw
“The pill” issue is essentially that raised by Anthony Burgess (and later, again by Stanley Kubrick) in A Clockwork Orange, re: the government-forced transformation of Alex.
Alan Kellogg – To quote Heinrich Himmler, “Some of our best recruits are former communists.”
Why should this surprise anyone? They were both socialists, aren’t they?
Just another example of a “lateral move”.
Amit opined KSM is a mystery. He really is not so much a mystery but a look into the abyss, a glimpse into the unfathomable depths of evil. He and his nephew, Ramzi Yousef , while striking monstrous blows for Islam didn’t really practice it themselves but indulged in the vices of the hated West. What could have motivated them but hatred and nihilism.
In that they are so unlike Mother Teresa. She lost her life in service for Christ’s sake. The Islamic fascists destroy others in service to their father the devil.
I immediately thought of John McCain’s acceptance speech at the GOP convention last year when he admitted that he had been “broken” while he was held as a captive of the North Vietnamese. It was a powerful moment in the speech, but it was alarming to me. Why would a man who has been “broken” believe that he could be the President of the US? Somewhere, in some country there are people who know the specifics and his weakness. Isn’t that a piece of information that would make that leadership vulnerable in ways that other leadership would not be?
Mad in Madtown,
Everybody breaks. That is the lesson of SERE school. Every military pilot and every CIA Clandestine Service officer goes through it. Once you know where your line is you are stronger. It is the fear of the unknown that weakens you. I did not have to go through it, others I knew did.
He is no more broken than you or me.
KSM is a base human. He makes all of his decisions through the prism of his needs and desires. He is the ultimate unbeliever. For him there is nothing worth dieing for.
KSM—such a strange man. Consider some details of his life, via Wiki:
“He attended Chowan College, a small Baptist school in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, for a semester (beginning in 1983) before transferring to the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and completing a degree in mechanical engineering in 1986.[11][12] The following year he went to Afghanistan, where he and his brothers (Zahed, Abed, and Aref) fought against the Soviet Union during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (Some sources claim that Khalid was fighting in Afghanistan before he moved to the United States.) There, he was introduced to Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, head of the Islamic Union Party. The 9/11 Commission Report notes on page 149 that “Sayyaf was close to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance”.
“The 9/11 Commission Report also notes that, “By his own account, KSM’s animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.”[13]
“However, according to a US intelligence summary reported on August 29, 2009 by the Washington Post, his time in the U.S did lead him to become a terrorist. “KSM’s limited and negative experience in the United States — which included a brief jail stay because of unpaid bills — almost certainly helped propel him on his path to becoming a terrorist,” according to this intelligence summary. “He stated that his contact with Americans, while minimal, confirmed his view that the United States was a debauched and racist country.”[14]
Maybe KSM’s psychology comes down to a few pertinent motivations. Like getting back at the debt collectors. Now there’s an experience that has the potential to motivate some serious resentment for a while. Maybe that episode was a motivation for his wanting bring down the world’s financial center. Unlike most people done in by debt, he happened to know how to hit the money guys hard. KSM sure thought big in his revenge planning.
And maybe afterwards he cooperated with the U.S. because, now that he thought about it, with the help of the waterboarding, he also had a few scores to settle with the Brotherhood.
At this point, KSM sounds like a good candidate for the head of CIA, or at least head of covert operations. He certainly has some creative ideas about how to devastate enemies at their most vulnerable points. I’m not sure he’d take the job, though, since it sounds like he’s already figured out that the CIA guys aren’t very attentive learners.
Weird. We need some commentary from the BC Staff Psychiatrists.
#10 Mad in Madtown… I don’t think “broken” necessarily equates a Manchurian Candidate with specific psychological triggers that might be exploited by our enemies. My sense of McCain (admittedly more positive than many here) is that he was trying to temper the essential pagan/warrior ethos of his biography with an appeal to a sort of Christian existentialism…the reconstruction of soul/psyche after the naked ground of the Hanoi Hilton.
You touch on, though, on what is for me the most disconcerting aspect of the whole Obama debacle: that the overwhelming majority of young voters rejected McCain’s appeal to virtue (virtu’?) because it was simply a different language they no longer spoke. Say what you will about McCain, but he (and his story) would have resonated with Tacitus and Tecumseh (and in his physical “brokenness” would be what an old man **looked** like). For me, the inflection point we’ve been struggling to define lo these many months has been the rather decisive turning away from any sort of “virtue” as recognized by the West (either pagan, or in Palin’s case, Christian) in favor of the New Man’s mewling self-regard.
But this breaking, you see, isn’t it immoral?
Even if all we did is offer him a latte, if we made him turn on his former associates, are WE not the evil?
/democrat
Barry0351: I don’t believe anyone could refer to the CIA as “belonging” to the last administration. I believe, in fact, that some employees of that agency exceeded their authority by a large measure in order to damage Bush. This surprises me in part because his father had a good reputation at the agency and in part because most of the CIA employees I knew tended more toward the conservative than the liberal side of the political spectrum. Most of them have also been rather apolitical as regards partisan politics, all of which makes me even more surprised by the efforts some CIA employees put out to damage a sitting president. It now looks like that is all coming back to bite them. What goes around comes around? F
Alan Kellogg: Mother Theresa was zealously nonviolent and zealously caring for those suffering ones that nobody cared about. She was the polar opposite of a terrorist. She was far more distant from a terrorist than your average American. She certainly was far more distant from a terrorist than Alan Kellogg: she would never have made such a vile and vicious comment on him.
The bad are driven by hate, the good by love and the great mediocre majority by indifference. The mediocre identify the good with the bad to make themselves superior to both. But lack of moral zeal is far more cruel and violent than the saintly zeal of Mother Theresa.
f 16, it is interesting of 1) the leaks starting to boomerang and 2) WaPo actually writing something indirectly supporting the prior administration and cautioning against prosecution of CIA types. Maybe a crack in the MSM door starting to open? Yeah, I’m an optimist.
Richard,
I am very interested in knowing what you think about this as a Catholic. I am also a Catholic and I’ve run the torture thing through the theological question box MANY times over the last few years.
That there is something horribly wrong with some of the things called torture at least under some conditions seems obvious. But what and where still leaves me puzzling and disturbed no matter where I find myself at the moment.
I’ve often wondered what line John McCain crossed when he was broken by the North Vietnamese. If his simpering wiffle-waffleness as a Presidential candidate was the result of his having been broken as a younger man, or if it was merely the result of age and on-coming dotage.
In either case, however, he’s still three times the man that The Ursurper could ever hope to be. And Palin is 4 times the man that either McCain or Obama is.
(Can you imagine how Obama would react to torture?)
The “broken” part of McCain’s acceptance speech was good. It gave a context to his POW experience that went beyond the Kerryesque “I served” meme and added an “I learned” element to the story. He learned about failure and redemption and about how precious liberty really was. He told a story of a cocky, reckless young kid turning into a responsible adult. The contrast with, and warning about, Obama was obvious. That perhaps highlights one of the differences between the US and the culture KSD came out of – second chances and redemption are part of our way of life (even moreso than other westerners in Europe. Being broken, or going broke, and rising again.).
The problem with McCain’s acceptance speech was that there was no follow-through on how he wrapped it up. “Stand up and Fight!” he said. That was the closing refrain, repeated several times for emphasis. It was the most powerful part of the speech. Standing up and fighting against all the things that had been dragging down our society for so long was what we needed.
But he never did that. He didn’t fight. He tip-toed through the rest of the campaign, pulling his punches and insisting the rest of the GOP pull theirs.
PS: Wretchard’s been doing some great misdirects with the post titles lately. Raise your hand if you thought “The Last Brother” was Teddy, and if you thought “Amatuer Hour” was about the Obama admin. My hand is up.
One of the things that surprised me about the treatment that KSM recieved was that he wasn’t waterboarded once or twice. He was waterboarded over a hundred times. I can easily imagine a man, or a soldier, standing with a gun pointed at his head saying “I’ll never talk, you can’t make me.” But being waterboarded 100 times? How could anyone put up with that?
I think it was Ramzi bin AlShib that said after his being broken that Mohammed came to him in his cell and told him to talk. I can understand that too.
If KSM were to be set free what would he do? Return to a muslim country? Tour the US giving anti-terrorism lectures or write a book? Somehow I see his being broken as different than McCain’s being broken. In the case of KSM the CIA wanted valid intelligence from him. In the case of McCain his captors just wanted him to serve as an anti-US mouthpiece. In some sense the goal of KSM’s captors was just and that of McCain’s wasn’t, although maybe that’s only from a western point of view.
I don’t know what KSM would do if he were set free.
Another point that can be derived from this piece is the source of the outrage of the Democrats and others of TWANLOC in and out of the government.
Any sense of outrage amongst our domestic enemies over the acts of KSM was extremely well muted; to the point of being not only hard to detect, but well masked by excuses that amounted to support. The trigger for their outrage was two part. First, the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ [ah, the joy of bureaucratese] worked and yielded information that helped prevent attacks on the United States; but also second it appears, it made KSM an active asset used against his fellow terrorists.
For two political generations plus [18 years; time from birth, through education, to the ability to vote]the Democrats in general and their fellows who grew to become the vast percentage of the country I now refer to as TWANLOC have reflexively opposed every action or reaction of the the United States inside and outside of its borders. Only when hurricane force winds of political expediency force them to make pro-American gestures do they do so [the image of the Democrats in Congress gathering on the steps of the Capital singing "God Bless America" surely contains enough cognitive dissonance as to slop over into Dali-esque surrealism]; and they repudiate their actions pretending that their own votes did not happen as soon as it is no longer a danger to do so. Their hearts and minds are on the other side and have been so since the mid 1960′s. Their outrage at the ‘EIT’ used on KSM comes not from any moral qualms [When was the last time a main-stream Democrat raged against the death machines and gulags of the Left or in the Third World? Not since the 1970's, and those few who did so then would be persona non grata in the party today. To a Democrat, those are the norm to which they aspire for the world, assuming that they will never occupy the inside of the cells but rather be management.]. Their ire draws from the same well that the forces of the Continental Line drew upon for their feelings about a former hero named Benedict Arnold. To them, the evil American government made KSM betray their shared side.
To TWANLOC, there is no moral difference between ourselves and those who torture, kill and enslave others in the service of a political or religious totalitarian state. In fact, if there is a difference in the balance, they resolve it against us reflexively. You can know them by their history, their words, and their acts. Their denials, and the cover given them by their media colleagues are of the same stuff as the patter of a street swindler drawing in the marks in a game of Three-card Monte.
Hmm. Back to the kevlar shorts. I’m sure there are some ACORN/OFA trolls out there who will take exception to this characterization.
Subotai Bahadur
Just for the record, I’ve just read on another site that the “183 times” was basically 183 squirts of water over something like 5 sessions. Which makes a bit more sense, I’ve always wondered where anyone found the *time* to waterboard someone 183 times, like once a day for six months, and now it turns out it was never anything like that. For what it’s worth.
Lawrence of Arabia was “broken” after that he got caught by the Ottoman troops
I KNOW I am not normal…
I KNOW I am petty….
I KNOW I am immature…
with that said?
KSM should be abused and KEPT alive for decades… Everything he holds dear should be destroyed, defamed and humiliated…
the Being on High can and may forgive him of his trespasses, but to ME?
I do not forgive him..
I wish him severe torment and pain..
Every second of every moment until he passes…
One reason I am in favor of “torture” in the interrogation of terrorists is that they refuse to play by the rules but expect to be protected by them. Given that, the so inclined may decide “Why not be a terrorist? It really does not matter to our enemy does it?” They have nothing to lose and have the ACLU to gain.
We need to give them something to lose. Like fingers, for example. Or other easily removable parts of their anatomy. And most of all, sever their dignity.
I think what broke KSM is the recognition that the USA had a special set of rules for such as he. He was not going to remain the noble savage, spurning bourgeois values but still taking advantage of them. He was going to be treated as what he was. He broke himself.
It is easy to call your adversaries weak, spineless, and able to be defeated by your much greater will when they are obsessing of the possibility of a few drops of urine being spilled onto a copy of the Koran. But we have met that attitude before and dealt with it. And it is far, far harder to dismiss your enemies as puny foes when they fly over your cities in the thousands and burn them to the ground, not least of which because they in so doing they prove themselves as ruthless as you.
If we are going to have hissie fits over publishing some Mohammed cartoons them we need to torture people like KSM, and make that fact known.
If intelligence agencies had a pill that would turn a fanatical monster into Mother Teresa, they would be foolish to use it.
I think certain commentators have missed the implication of our host’s musing. I read him to mean the idea is to turn the monster our way, not to turn him into a moral wuss of no operational value.
Has it ever occurred to you all that the reason the left has such a horror over torture is that the horror is really directed at the notion that there can exist in the universe a force that would oblige them to tell the truth?
I’m with Josh @15:
Just about anything we do makes us evil, except to pledge allegiance to The One.
PBUH
Serotorius: I would suggest that the ridge of that inflection point may be the character formed by individual struggle for valid individual goals, and here I intend that the individual encompasses the family . To struggle hard and rough for the economic and political liberty of one’s self and one’s own imparts a rather different character than “struggling to get a ‘hip’ job” in the employ of someone else. One relies more on innate character, the other credentials, image and posturing. In one case success is of one’s own estimation and in the other case it rests with another’s assessment.
It may be that for all manner of reasons the closing of the frontier and the movement off of private land has pushed us further from the notions of individual virtue. Those that must struggle and survive by dint of their own labor and wit against forces beyond their control may value virtue in others more than those who have not, particularity in youth. When we lost the common sense and the work-a-day, dusty wisdom of the self-employed yeoman farmer or small town, small business owner as the most common expression of the settled citizen, I believe we lost great deal. Perhaps we had a generation or so after that who could still carry on, inculcated by those values and norms as children, fueled as it were by the fumes of those past generations. The fumes may have evoprated finally.
One sees reflections of this: I often meditate how in the 40′s and 50′s one of most dominant genres on TV and film entertainment was the Western. It is telling to me that this fell by the wayside somewhere in the ’60′s, and if it remained after this, it remained as a celebration of the anti-hero and as a revisionist, cautionary tale suggesting a immoral and hypocrital past. But Westerns, irrespective of the history of the Wild West, were perforce morality tales and of a most American sort: Ruminations on particularly American notions of virtue and honor in uniquely American settings. Something indeed change in our national character.
When advancement comes through political power and patronage, it is certain that virtue will be less valued. In fact, virtue impedes advancement. I do not think that it was a case of the young actually weighing the matter and consciously rejecting virtue, in the case of McCain. Rather it was more a matter of fashion and generational self-selection. I doubt that virtue entered into their cogitations much, or if it did, it never rose much beyond the level of bromide, platitude and marking tag line. Perhaps this amount to the same thing, and it certainly led to the same result, but the distinction is meaningful if subtle.
On McCain’s failure, we really have to ask ourselves if the financial “crisis” was really the force that took the day, and not callow and gullible youth. Would McCain have won had not this occurred? Quite possibly. I, for one, am deeply suspicious of event surounding this “Crisis”. Seems like an well planned Oct. surpise to me.
Perhaps President Palin can get to the root of this matter.
One thing is certain: For all his faults, If McCain as POTUS would have encountered the strong jection by the American of a Health program of his, he would have done the decent thing and relented. I think that this is the key difference bewtten him and Obama: McCain is at heart and American. He can be no other. Obama is fundamentally foreign, whatever country of origin is stamped on his birth certificate.
no mo uro: It could just be a deflection of the pain of having to listen to, and feign admiration of, the likes of Oprah and such.
Well, just a thought…
the REASON that the sounds of drills and gunshots WORK on KSM is because they KNOW that’s what will happen to any of US that has been captured by them.
It’s called projection…
If any typical american was arrested by the USA army and the used a drill near our heads, if would be beyond our comprehension that they would ACTUALLY use it on us…
KSM bragged about beheading Daniel Pearl…
Re: #1 Amit – “The behavior of men, and especially those like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, are truly a mystery, how deeply do we really want to understand them’?”
“He both loves and hates the ring, as he both loves and hates himself!” Gandolf
The mystery of evil.
Each man carries within himself the seeds of his own destruction.
Some flee from those thoughts, others embrace them.
I think it is primarily a question of motivation – given the right circumstances, most (99%) will yield to their inner demon. Very few will not.
Mongoose at #31. Yes, something good went out of us and was lost when we left the small farms and small towns.
One of the things that surprised me about the treatment that KSM recieved was that he wasn’t waterboarded once or twice. He was waterboarded over a hundred times. I can easily imagine a man, or a soldier, standing with a gun pointed at his head saying “I’ll never talk, you can’t make me.” But being waterboarded 100 times? How could anyone put up with that?
183 times = 183 pours, not 183 sessions.
The shaken head, the sad roué
The frown that says don’t do it
To waterboard means we are they
And we will live to rue it
So spake the left, those gentle souls
Who shake with firm conviction
That he who with the devil bowls
Is living life as fiction
No matter that the goodly sheikh
Was harmed not by the ‘boarding
The torture road will only make
His words not worth recording
With wroth filled eyes they shake their fists
And scream with indignation
And set about compiling lists
Of those who serve the nation
With boundless rage the lefty crowd
Sets out to hurt the good guys
They plan to leave no one uncowed
It doesn’t matter who dies
#23–TWANLOC? How about writing things out the first time for those of us who can’t figure it out? Or, if you did, refer back to that posting.
27 RWE and 33 what is occupation: bingo.
until they not just believe, but KNOW, that they will suffer untold horrors at our hands, I suspect we will fare poorly in this conflict.
Those Who Are No Longer Our Countrymen
DocJim, #4
You are focused on what they did, my focus is on why they did it.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed had his beliefs challenged. Mother Theresa did not. Not as Khalid did. Nor, from all appearances, did she let her early doubts challenge her beliefs.
We like to think that good comes from different motivations than evil does, but when you look into the matter you see that often they arise from the same motivations. The difference is the result. It is not enough to intend to do good, you need to ask yourself will it do good.
Think not that Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s motivations weren’t good, that his intentions were not to the benefit of others. It’s what he did to bring his goals about that’s the evil. It’s the consequences of his aims that are wrong.
@Sara and @Josh, Um what’s your point in diminishing the significance of 183 times? The basis of this blog post is that KSM broke because of harsh interrogations, including waterboarding. I think we can safely assume that he didn’t break because he got 183 squirts of water on his head.
Are you saying that what happened to him was “not that bad?” If so, why did he break? IMO, what happened to him was harsh. Whatever the 183 number means precisely, it didn’t happen in one day. It took a month to break him. He was trained in resisting interrogations. It took a while to break down his defenses.
“It isn’t the agency of conversion – whether torture or a pill – that is anathema to the Left; it is that there’s anything at all for KSM to convert *to* that they hate.”
That’s my summary of one of the major themes of this thread.
It hit me with unusual force this morning that what the “Left” really cannot tolerate are any convictions that express any kind of emotional fidelity to the West, religious or secular.
Torture is an emotionally charged word, especially when it is used to further one’s political ends. One person’s torture is another person’s useful tool.
What we are talking about is how far we are willing to go and with what tools available in our kit are we willing to use on hard cases to obtain vital information for our survival. Therefore, the end result is intelligence of reliable quality to act upon. Tools used in a battlefield situation will be different than tools used to obtain intelligence of a strategic value.
It has been shown that use of sadistic torture, like pulling nails, electric shock, and other means of causing pain is counterproductive and will produce information that may be useless. The subject will say anything to get the pain to stop.
So the interrogator is going to have to to get inside the head of the subject and take the subject on a psychological journey that will strip away the subject’s defenses. How deep one has to go depends on the subject and the value placed on the intelligence. The islamic hardcases, by nature of their beliefs and their training, can be very tough nuts to crack. So the interrogator has to look into his toolkit and see what would be an APPROPRIATE method to use, and put it to work.
The stakes are high. Our survival as a nation and civilization are what’s on the line. We are at war, and we need the intelligence. People who use interrogation techniques and the T word to beat govt agencies on the head are not talking about humane behavior. They are playing politics. War is settling disputes when everything else has failed. War is about breaking things and killing people. And the gathering of intelligence by interrogation, using appropriate techniques, is part of war.
Those who choose to terrorise in a no-rules fashion should expect no rules to gallop over the horizon to rescue them. That this does happen can be seen as either (a) a manifestation of our ethical standards, or (b) a product of politically correct obfuscation, since those rules that exist were framed (quite some time ago)for the regulation of state-sponsored armies, not stateless actors. It depends on your point of view. In my opinion, once confronted by terrorism of the Al-quaeda variety, all bets are off and you do what has to be done, with extreme prejudice.
There is a titanic distinction to be made between torture as practiced by the terrorists and
torture…NO: COERCION – as practiced by the interrogators charged with the SAFETY of the U.S.That is simply that the terrorists use torture primarily as an expression of their hatred, contempt, and desire to humiliate the unbeliever; the victim; the object of their hatred. What we have seen is pure Xenophobic sadism played out with the justification of religious dogma. It is the same impulse as the Iranian government’s hired Basij sniper’s murder of a young girl standing at the sidelines of a clearly peaceful protest. (The Basij-e Mostaz’afin enforcer-thugs are described by the Iranian protesters as almost exclusively foreign fanatics imported and employed by the Iranian Mullahs to suppress dissent.)
Without pretending that our side is completely above those feelings, the point of our coercive techniques is to obtain information despite the resistance of the subject being coerced, so as to protect innocents from harm.
The Left in this culture pretend this is no distinction, just as they perversely equate any inconvenience or discomfort whatsoever with the terrorists’ murders, maiming, beheading, incineration, dismemberment, stoning, et cetera.
Used as a tactic of dialectical argument, that sort of intentional destruction and gutting of logic is diagnostic of a criminal, outlaw mentality.
When it appears in a whiny liberal poop-head’s claim that using coercive interrogation proves “we are no better than the terrorists,” it is diagnostic of either utter stupidity or willful self-delusion.
All of those argue that the Left need to be disbarred from any position of responsibility for the lives of other beings.
I do not see why folks here are letting the left control the narrative.
In answer to them,we should say:
1) That it is not torture, and it certainly is not sadism or retribution.
2) It would not matter if it were as vile as you say. They deserve it.
3) No act that we do “puts us on their level”. That would include nuking mecca. To think otherwise is to not understand history and is a betrayal of all of us and our history.
4) It is good and true that we must protect our civilization at any cost.
Then we should turn to them and ask
1) Just who’s side are you on? Is America your true enemy? Why do you have such contempt for us? Why do you wish our death and destruction? Why are you standing with evil people? Why do you support, enable and succor them?
2) Why do you confuse the matter with this slippery rhetoric? Why do you refuse sober and rational discussion?
3) Just what are you up too ?Are you using this as a means to create a Marxist, totalitarian state?
4) Do you agree that we are not or can never be “the same as they are”, or not?
5) Do you agree that we must save this civilization even if it would entail destroying another?
6) If you support your country’s enemies against us, why should we tolerate you?
it is as simple as that.
This nonsense about “torture” would not have been tolerated at any other point in our history. If someone had tried this in WW2 there would have been large mobs after them, all over the country. It the government tried this it would have been toppled. If anything vengeance would have to had been restrained.
That we are even having this national “discussion” shows what command the hard left has control of far too much of the national discussion. Let us stop aiding it and discuss the real issue: The treason of the Left enabled by the Democrat Party.
What great comments people, and especially the one that spawned all the nodes in this tree, Wretchard.
In my own mind, as I see it, the ultimate motivations behind any humans behavior are totally divorced from any thoughts of rationality or intelligence. Intelligence, perseverance, and strength are just tools which allow us to seek to obtain our ultimate goals. Like a moth before a flame, we are drawn to It, whatever It may be.
And usually we do not see in the behavior of others the difference between strategy and tactics. Perhaps X becoming say, a Senator, is not the goal, it is a means to achieve social status, which is really, at the core of his soul, the One True Thing he desires. Becoming a Senator is merely a tactic to obtaining the ultimate objective. If it fails, try another approach.
But what happens when you are broken and have betrayed that which your soul had always sought? What happens when you know, beyond doubt, that getting to that goal is now impossible because of your own actions? It could be anything, the woman you always desired and loved, your religion, or your politics. But you have betrayed them. And the light is now denied to you, forever.
What are you now but a ghost–haunting ruins of What Could Have Been in the darkness of midnight?
U.P., just trying to establish some facts.
183 squirts, at even 10 seconds each, is about half an hour. Spread out over five sessions over several months.
The number “183″ says nothing to me. Even “water boarding” says very little to me. Half an hour says at least something to me.
Regarding KSM I’m sure I could not care less, but again, let’s at least have some facts to talk about, not just exchange moral outrage, real or faux.
Oh, and there is nothing mysterious about KSM. He is a sociopathic, cowardly, rabid and evil Islamofacist SOB.
He deserves to die in a ditch just like any lackey of Hitler, Stalin or Mao.
The CIA “turned him” by using is own rage, cowardice and narcissism against him.
What is the mystery?
An Oldie But Goodie
The Secret to the Suicidal Liberal Mind
What do Harvard president Larry Summers, Taliban John Walker, Delta Airlines officials and the editors of the New York Times have in common with Yanomamo tribeswomen in the Amazon jungle?
Jeff,
I am very interested in knowing what you think about this as a Catholic.
I believe torture has a moral cost, but that not using it has its costs as well. We all know from the lives of saints that it doesn’t come for free. Do you want to be like Maximilian Kolbe and be a saint? It’s a worthwhile endeavor, but it’s going to cost you. In fact, in Catholic tradition we know it very often costs your life.
Now people will pay people to tell them lies. Celebrities have sycophants to tell them how handsome they are, how perfect they are. We don’t want to be told the price of things. If we left the writing of the lives of saints to the politically correct they’d tell us you could be saint for free. With no effort or your money back. We resolutely don’t want to be told the price of things. That’s why we call death panels “end of life care”; because it helps us deceive ourselves. Politicians like to promise us something for nothing. We can’t have it, but we like to believe it’s true.
Now with respect to torture, I would personally not practice it, but I would make this decision knowing it would cost me. If I really believed in not torturing someone then I would avoid tormenting someone to reveal the location of my son’s life when it was in danger. If I can forswear torture in those circumstances, then that’s principled refusal. It’s not principled refusal to forswear it simply when somebody else’s bacon is on the line. That’s for the personal.
As a society, the public should be told what the tradeoffs are so they can decide whether the tactical benefit is worth the moral degradation. And the public might, surprisingly, set the bar very, very high; they might full willing accept a great risk in order to maintain what they believe is right. During World War 2, poison gas was considered for Iwo Jima and rejected. More than 6,000 Marines died on that island. During the Cold War, it was implicitly accepted that the US would not engage in a First Strike on the Soviet Union, even if we could gain advantages thereby. But we knew it and accepted it. Right now we have people spouting drivel like “torture never told us anything” or “you should wage war without collateral damage”. It’s the old politician’s lie of something for nothing, of sainthood without martyrdom. But a lie is nice to hear, so the flacks beguile us with them.
“Strait is the gate” to righteousness. It’s sad to hear, but that’s the way it has always been.
Admiral James Stockdale was a navy pilot and prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. He endured true, cruel cruel torture; while he was probably broken he never told any of several important secrets he knew. I think one suicide attempt was from his fear that he would talk. He says (from Wikipedia):
‘In a business book by James C. Collins called Good to Great, Collins writes about a conversation he had with Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during his period in the Vietnamese POW camp.[3]
“I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”[4]
When Collins asked who didn’t make it out, Stockdale replied:
“Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”[4]
Stockdale then added:
“This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”[4]‘
Another POW then, Captain Jeremiah Denton, is probably most famous for blinking the word “torture” in Morse code during a propaganda presentation. His words on returning from captivity are some of my favorite…”We are honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances….”
Wretchard has talked about the resistance fighter in the Philippines being cut to pieces, bit by bit, to reveal the name of one of the leaders…who was in fact standing next to him as he was slowly hacked to death, without revealing anything.
And then there is KSM, that murdering savage bastard. I can’t help associating in my mind with KSM that scumbag Bill Ayers (maybe just my wishes for them both), or his murderer partner wife Dorhn (dig it). They would be singing 2 + 2 = 5 in no time, and probably believing it, too.
Oh, and by the way, there are probably many many who consider waterboarding “good training.” Harsh – yes; torture? Compare it with what John McCain, Bud Day, James Stockdale, Jeremiah Denton and a bunch others went through.
We are talking about national security here.
Winning is the only thing!
How you play the game is meaningless if you lose!
Wretchard, I can assure you the there is no “moral degradation” in defending Western Civilization, particularly at the moment of the deepest existential peril, and to do so at any cost. It is “moral degradation” not to do so. It is betrayal of the highest order.
This is an odd opinion for a Catholic. Our enemy is ancient to us, and we know his designs on the West. Remember Famagusta? He would sack the St. Peter’s and turn it into a mosque. He would burn the Louve. He would shoot a Pope. He would nuke Rome itself.
Once Catholics where not so fainthearted. Popes stood and called for Crusades for heaven’s sake. Dynasties were anointed by the church for standing up to Islam at the periphery of Christendom. This is why the West prevailed and advanced.
#31 Mongoose… It’s strange isn’t it how the essential American myth–the frontier as a “testing ground” par excellence–is upended in ObamaLand? The kids I talk to are dimly aware of their need to seek their limits, and some positively long for a crucible that will separate essence from rhetoric, but for almost all, it’s too much to sustain. Instead, they’re tourists now in their own land.
As luck would have it, I live 60 miles from the Cumberland Gap, and it’s hard not to contrast “then and now.” Soros and Axlerod et al are no doubt working on some new, rough beast as we speak that will drain what’s left of our IRA’s and irradiate the neighborhoods we used to know, but it’s what they’ve done to a generation’s sense of possibility that will be their crowning achievement.
As to torture, my opinion is that mercy should be reserved for those who practice it, and at the level they practice it unto others. If the guilt of the criminal is not in doubt, do unto them as they have done unto their victims.
Perhaps that’s the key. When you have someone like KSM, just tell them that the water boarding can stop at any time–just give us the word and we will do to you what you did to Daniel Pearl–we have the knife to cut off your head here with us right now …
serotorius: Indeed. One would think that some “loose cannon” of a patriot over Langley way would send a wet team yonder to have a (very) brief chat with Dr Evil.
Bounties should be set and nooses knotted.
Once this would have a happened, and not so long ago either. What a disappointment the Boomers are.
And the Gap is just what I am talking about. Imagine that taming that one. Hard work indeed. Put some technocrat’s cost/benefit analysis on that one. Can;t be done.
reconsidered. gonna try a re-write.
There once was a terrorist prof
who taught bad guys to lie, resist and scoff
We were desperate for truth
used force, little ruth
Though providing, by law, fancy canape and quaff.
A most interesting and stimulating discussion. I can’t help but wonder, though, about the following scenario:
Let’s just say that our intelligence people picked up a rumor from a reliable source, and had it verified by another reliable source, that there was a terrorist attack (whether by Osama bin Laden or Timothy McVeigh or Bill Ayers or whoever) planned that would be aimed specifically at the city that YOU or YOUR family lives in. Let’s further say that they had a person or two under surveillance or in their possession who were identified as very possibly being a part of that plot. Because of the short time period to respond, they can only evacuate half of the people in that area.
Who among us would then say “It is immoral and criminal to waterboard (or Worse) to get what information they could from them?”
What we are prepared to do from moment to moment is a function of our judgment, itself informed by our calculation of the costs and benefits. And those include the moral costs and benefits. People speak of “torture” and “war” and “assassination” as if they were separate things. In reality they live in the same house. As a practical matter, people decide how they want to “make war” — and that includes how you treat captives and all that other related stuff. They decide to limit themselves or not to limit themselves for reasons they think are right or righteous. They have done so throughout history.
Today is no different. We face all the hard questions that men ever did. What distinguishes the politically correct I think, is that they want to answer the questions in willful ignorance because there is the belief, which I think springs from the desire to avoid the unpleasant, that if you don’t know you can avoid guilt. Therefore by averting your eyes when you squeeze the trigger the bullet somehow hurts less where it hits. The reality is that it only increases the likelihood you will hit the wrong target.
What is revolution? Historically it has been the process of more or less killing the wrong people in the hope that you might accidentally kill the right ones. Purges, show trials, the liquidation of informers, re-education camps: that’s what a revolution is. What is war? Until recently it consisted of beating down the enemy nation until you inflicted so much pain they gave up. What is the war on terror? We don’t even want to answer the question because we know what we must say. So we say, heck, there is no war on terror. Why was rendition developed by Clinton? Was it because the Egyptians were somehow gentler than Americans? No. It was because Clinton could then wash his hands of everything. Did the prisoner feel any less pain? Wrong question. Did we hide the truth well enough? Ah, the right question to which rendition is the answer.
Frankly I don’t care which way society answers the question of duress so long as it knows what it’s doing and takes real responsibility for it. The acceptance of payback, damnation and criminal liability can only happen when you call things by their names. Anything else is dodging the issue and that will get you into a mess. Only when things are recognized for what they are does anyone, including the prisoner, have a chance. Otherwise it’s irrational.
Have you ever met a woman who was abused by her boyfriend? “Why don’t you leave him?” you’ll ask. “But I still love him,” is the answer. “Ok,” you say, “then stay with him.” “But he’s mean to me,” is the reply. Back and forth you go, round and round in some mental revolving door. In the social context our problem is this. “Why don’t we fight the terrorists”, you’ll say. “But we’ll hurt them,” comes the answer. “Ok,” you say, “if you don’t want to hurt them then don’t fight them.” “But they’ll hurt us,” is the comeback. And we’re back in the same revolving door.
It’s like those guys who go into terrorist dens to “promote peace” and get kidnapped and have to be exchanged for 100 convicted killers to secure their release. They don’t know what they want. Or maybe they do, but they just can’t work up the nerve to say it.
When it appears in a whiny liberal poop-head’s claim that using coercive interrogation proves “we are no better than the terrorists,” it is diagnostic of either utter stupidity or willful self-delusion.
Usually, utter stupidity and willful self-delusion are just two different sides of the same coin. The “or” is an illusion.
Stupidity is not reserved just to those of feeble intellect. The category also belongs to those who will not use their minds if doing so leads to a conclusion that, for them, is inconvenient or threatens any beliefs that they hold dear. The results are the same.
Always look to functionality. Forget about credentials without known and proven results. Usually they are a myth, and a forged one at that.
Mongoose #31
“One sees reflections of this: I often meditate how in the 40’s and 50’s one of most dominant genres on TV and film entertainment was the Western. It is telling to me that this fell by the wayside somewhere in the ’60’s, and if it remained after this, it remained as a celebration of the anti-hero and as a revisionist, cautionary tale suggesting a immoral and hypocrital past. But Westerns, irrespective of the history of the Wild West, were perforce morality tales and of a most American sort: Ruminations on particularly American notions of virtue and honor in uniquely American settings. Something indeed change in our national character.”
Mongoose, I think you’ll find this Wiki entry most enlightening.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_purge
One sees reflections of this: I often meditate how in the 40’s and 50’s one of most dominant genres on TV and film entertainment was the Western. It is telling to me that this fell by the wayside somewhere in the ’60’s, and if it remained after this, it remained as a celebration of the anti-hero and as a revisionist, cautionary tale suggesting a immoral and hypocrital past. But Westerns, irrespective of the history of the Wild West, were perforce morality tales and of a most American sort: Ruminations on particularly American notions of virtue and honor in uniquely American settings. Something indeed change in our national character.
Well, Mongoose, I think the two phenomena you observe are related — the locale shift of the broad population off the farms & small towns and into the cities, and the fading of the Western as a common & popular entertainment genre. When people have little to no connection to the land, but are instead urbanites, their imagination’s frame of reference is not “great outdoors” but “city.”
Hence the ubiquity of the urban crime drama. Cops & gangsters.
As I have written in previous threads, at heart the Western is about the Frontier vs. Civilization, and the competing values of the two. When thoughtfully done, the urban crime drama is about the same tension — lawbreaking vs. law enforcement. The not-unimportant issues of racism and tribal vendetta violence that you find in Westerns like “The Searchers” are also very much present in urban crime dramas, because we are *still* dealing with ethnic conflict and territorialism lo these many generations later.
I do see, however, at least two things the Westerns have that you don’t get from urban crime dramas, and that is (1) a sense of history (the lesson that human violence goe way back, and that civilization itself was built by the often bloody enforcement of laws – see “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” “High Noon” etc.), and (2) the natural landscape.
So even though the urban crime drama functions very similarly to the Western, the two are not synonymous. The Western is, as you point out, a distinctively American genre (and, as movies, the distinctively American art form). Whereas cities, and the crime stories that go with them, are international.
Also, as I’ve written in other threads, that “celebration of the anti-hero” that you note as taking place during the 1960s is one of the marks of the modern Western (vs. the classic Western). Civilization is rejected, the outlaw (“one man’s bank robber is another man’s freedom fighter” perhaps?) becomes the embodiment of independence & non-conformity, and the frontier, for all its dangers, is preferred over the settlement (farm, town, city).
The modern Western can be very seductive. Look at “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Who doesn’t prefer Newman & Redford to the faceless superposse? And who doesn’t at first want to laugh when Newman says, of Mr. E.H. Harriman of the Union Pacific RR, “If he’d just pay me the money that he’s spendin’ to get me to stop robbin’ him, I’d stop robbin’ him!” Except that this statement is an expression of naked extortion, and if you put it in the mouth of, ohhhh, say, Edward G. Robinson, somehow it’s not so charming anymore.
“Butch & Sundance” is a great movie but an expression of virtue (the kind you would want to teach your kids) it ain’t.
Likewise, “The Godfather.” Which I consider to be the “Butch & Sundance” of crime dramas. It romanticized the outlaw and did so beautifully. And it is also a great movie (two great movies). But again, not an expression of virtue.
The challenge for the audience is not to get seduced by the aesthetics of these movies.
BTW, Scorsese ends “Goodfellas” with a shot of Joe Pesci shooting a gun directly at the audience. That’s a direct reference to the ending shot of “The Great Train Robbery.” I’m neither the first nor the only person to view urban crime dramas as Westerns in modern guise.
From the Wikipedia entry The Rural Purge:
It may simply be coincidental that modern environmentalism rises at more or less the same time TV kills every show “with a tree in it”. The modern Green ideology is built on a fantasy representation of nature, one in which Third World citizens live happily in peaceful villages, where the wild is everywhere in balance and man is an intruder upon planet earth. To become a real modern environmentalist you must first of all be ignorant of nature as it is and only believe in nature as it depicted in the Greenpeace poster. Until then you are miseducated. Armed with this invincible ignorance, you can proceed to invent absolutely bogus phenomena, the like of which would boggle the mind of a real child of nature, impending disasters like Erlich’s Population Bomb and when the population actually begins to fall in Europe contrary to Erlich, be ready with Global Warming, which since it didn’t work has now become Climate Change. In any case you can fall back on the precautionary principle which holds you should be ready to believe in anything because it might be true, yet unready to believe in the possibility that you are being swindled might be true because that would be too cynical to maintain.
You can watch on TV as someone begins to speak of stopping the rise of the oceans and refer to moments when the Earth began to heal while preparing to fly around in a personal 747. None of it jars because you are only seeing what you expect. There’s a scene in a Herge comic book where an Indian princeling seeks an English detective and isn’t satisfied until he finds one with a norfolk jacket, deerstalker hat and meerschaum pipe. That was reality for the comic book character. We may laugh now, because we know better, things that are true are real because you “saw them on teevee” and for many, that’s the way it should be. Just ask the offices which have twitter free and blog-free zones. Very toney places with lots of TV sets and dentist waiting room magazines.
And so it is with the war terror. Such an impolite word. One day someone will release the memo regarding the year in which CBS killed every show about the war on terror with a terrorist in it. I be surprised if it hasn’t happened already.
22. Utopia Parkway
“I don’t know what KSM would do if he were set free.”
I don’t think he can be set free. But then, what do we do with him?
Pre-modern China and Japan had a practice regarding recidivist criminals who had been broken. They were turned into servants of the constabulary.
What we would call the chief of police or the chief detective would always remain a scholar-official. Someone who could be relied upon to remain moral and upright. A proven defender of society.
And this man would often possess a coterie of turned ex-cons to follow his orders. It takes a thief to catch a thief, you know. Of course, the scholar-official had to keep a tight leash on his dangerous servants. But they knew that their master could send them back to the bad place where he first sent them.
You can see a similar example of this approach in the film, “Catch Me If You Can”.
I don’t know if modern western society can accept such arrangements. Sometimes, earlier society seemed more capable of accepting the reality of a situation, and coming to a practical solution. Or maybe the modern need for bureaucracy and standard processes prevents the kind of flexibility and moral judgment calls necessary for this approach.
Having been through an “intro to torture” at SERE school, I am quite sure that it would work on me, and am quite sure that anyone who claims torture doesn’t work is being deliberately clueless on the subject.
#69 exhelodrvr
anyone who claims torture doesn’t work is being deliberately clueless on the subject.
One wonders. Could it be that some of the powers that be that are so against torture because it might just produce evidence that would implicate them in crimes or embarrass them? I mean, how many times have Congress-critters intervened to allow X, Y, and Z to get visas to come into this country? And who asked them to? It might get inconvenient for Very Important People if anybody starts connecting the dots.
Its just a paranoid thought…
I break down and blubber if I run out of sweetener for the coffee.
My dogs would turn me over to Torquemada for a crumb of cheese.
Find out who Big Brother is…
Find out what Big Brother wants…
and Knuckle Under!
Ann Althouse comments on the same article WaPo vindicates Cheney:
Hat tip: Torture and Corporate Social Responsibility
I think the most interesting quote from the Washington Post article is this:
He scolded a listener for poor note-taking !??
This speaks to much more than “Breaking didn’t turn KSM into Gandhi; it didn’t convert him into a man you’d like to invite to dinner.” … it seems to have converted him to an enthusiastic teacher !??
The behavior of men, and especially those like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, are truly a mystery, how deeply do we really want to understand them?
Greek Philosphy? “He’d even use a chalkboard at times.” !??
Back to the same Washington post article:
Lol, I suggest he find where it says “The heart is deceitful above all things, and unsearchable, who can know it?”
The decisions we make, make all the difference. As with the garbage spread in print as with “Fear Up Harsh”, the garbage about what constitutes torture is a treacherous path to navigate. I had not, until a couple of years ago, been of the impression that water boarding as practiced in the SERE schools, was the water torture intended for damnation by the Geneva conventions. I am mistaken it appears. I think that definition of discomfort, which included many of the EIT, go too far.
That said, the temptation to rush unchecked into areas where the Author of Fear Up Harsh, admits to venturing is real, especially in an environment where looking the other way is treated as cooperation. I don’t care about the ruminant danger scenario, I don’t care about the rights of illegal combatants, or terrorist and their supporters. The quicker that more meet their makers at our hands, the fewer to meet their maker taking others by their own hand. Any information that can be culled from such stuff, even if demonstrably false is indicative of something in the individual’s position and potential for verifying other info.
It seems to me, though I am no expert, that while every one breaks, some folks will break more completely than others. Maybe it is dumb luck that the NVA didn’t get around to asking those questions of Admiral Stockdale, maybe our guys asked the right questions of KSM.
While I do not believe that is an accidental outcome in favor of our intel guys, I do believe the decision to survive plays a crucial role in the ability of people to overcome long term mental trouble. I could not believe a man like KSM has not been affected in a way that is positive for us, by a treatment which leaves him a weaker. I can find no indication that John McCain, despite the physical and mental anguish endured, has not emerged stronger from the trials of his POW experiences.
The difference between their reactions under duress is stark.
Even if you add in the misguided (and in some cases made believe) abuses of prisoners by a morally weak few, we did not inflict near the ferocity of abuse that the NVA and I am certain Al Quada, unleashed on American POWs on a daily basis. It does not excuse the abuse, but it does not excuse the failure to utilize rational and reasonable measures also.
Water boarding is not water torture in my opinion. During the one month during which KSM underwent EIT the number of sessions would have to have been no fewer than six a day for thirty days and would still fall short of the total by three sessions. It is possible, but not probable.
Remember Tommy Tucker and his fellow soldier. A statue in honor of their sacrifice was erected in a small Oregon Community a couple of weeks ago. There is no comparison. There is no need for comparison.
exhelodrvr,
Thank you for confirming my thoughts on SERE school.
wretchard,
And so it is with the war (on) terror. Such an impolite word
The designation WoT always suffered for being an elision. If it had to be broad enough to threaten the NorKs as well as Islamofascists then we should have considered calling it the “War to make the world safe for Democracy.”
Bogoe wheel,
Stanley Kubrick disliked The Ox-bow Incident (which was shown to me in Junior High under the title “Due Process Denied”) because it condemned the lynching of an innocent man. He made a point of rubbing in how guilty Alex was in A Clockwork Orange because he wanted to drive home his objection to any State control of an individual, even a guilty one. Kubrick was talking through his hat. He knew photography and filmaking but nothing of the subjects he instructed on. Born in 1928 he was an adolescent in NYC during WW-II and somehow he managed to avoid Korea.
wretchard,
the process of more or less killing the wrong people
You mistake the purpose of revolutionary terror. People are not killed to effect justice. Their guilt or innocence is incidental to their fate. They are killed to instill fear in the audience who are thereby stripped bare of all defenses and made receptive to the messages of the revolutionary vanguard. Terror is a heuristic tool. When the Black Marias come for you what happens once you are off stage is a mere administrative or technical problem. The import moment is when you are taken with your neighbors leaning on their doors listening.
Mongoose,
May I propose a campaign theme for 2010?
You don’t have a damn thing to apologize for.
You don’t own anybody anything.
It should read “Eminent danger scenario” not “ruminant”. That sounds like a rheumatoid threat, and that is as strange as it is, well, wrong.
Serotorius @ 57:
Ouch! And how true. The serfs do not know that they are.
So now we kill these men with drones instead of capturing them.
That’s the effect of all the anti-torture legalisms. Instead of living, they die, sometimes with their families.
Is this better? Does it help us win the war more than captures would?
LotM –try to catch (if you haven’t) Barry Lyndon sometime. not one of Kubrick’s hits (it’s equivalent in ambition and popular obscurity to the equally luminous Coen Bros’ Barton Fink). “Barry Lyndon” is adapted from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair warm-up The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Great movie –many of the interiors are filmed in a sort of real-time –long unbroken takes which treat the viewer to that wholly different 18th century pace. And the battle scenes –Britain & Prussia vs the French –are as they must’ve looked. Kubrick took the time and did it right.
I second Luddy’s endorsement of Barry Lyndon.
When it was released, it was savaged by the critics, and now it is recognized as a truly spectacular movie, along the lines of the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns.
A great story and one of the most visually stunning movies ever made. Just make sure you have three hours set aside to watch.
Wretchard wrote:
“In any case you can fall back on the precautionary principle which holds you should be ready to believe in anything because it might be true, yet unready to believe in the possibility that you are being swindled might be true because that would be too cynical to maintain.”
Put simply, unresolved, or incorrectly resolved, cognitive dissonance.
The narrative must be maintained, because the alternative – having to admit error and rethink your values and worldview from the ground up – is too daunting.
Wadeusa: And here I thought you were talking about Coww tipping. Or something.
luddy barsen,
Agreed about Barry Lyndon, Good movies are a collection of good photographs and Kubrick was a great photographer. He was also a perfectionist about details. His unmade movie about Napoleon would have interested me. What he did not understand were the underlaying issues behind war (and peace) and crime (and punishment). He did have the right attitude about drugs though. One of the rare directors who knew how to use color.
Just wondering what your thoughts on John McCain are. He claims he broke, and he is altered, but was he unable to rejoin the US cause.
#38 Walt:
Thanks, Walt. I have to marvel at how you can do that on such short notice.
I thought the photography of Barry Lyndon was stunning but the story telling was opaque. In part, because Kubrick would not have even vaguely understood 18th century nation state politics and religion. But mostly because his story was not character driven.
I thought that what I was looking at was iconography. Each set piece demonstrated ideas.
I stopped liking Kubrick entirely after he did Full Metal Jacket. The characters in it were only barely recognizable as Americans. The man just seemed entirely too alienated and nihilistic. You like alienation and nihilism? Ok. But it wasn’t even American alienation. Or American nihilism. And too, once again the story is not character driven. But rather a long demonstration of a set of static ideas.
Just read a NY Times piece on the CIA prosecutions. You would have thought they would have been baying for blood. But no. They agree with Cheney.
The C.I.A. in Double Jeopardy
Whatever Mr. Holder’s motive for reopening these cases — whether a well-intentioned desire to provide the American people with the “reckoning” for the “abusive and unlawful practices in the ‘war on terror’ ” that he demanded last year, or a more cynical political calculation — the consequences will be grievous.
Charles/87; –imho you’re right on Kubrick’s politics & it’s good to re-examine that part of him –but those leftwing artist politics are so axiomatic that i guess what i do with them is just suspend that whole question in favor of the artwork’s stand-alone merits. That may not be such a good thing to do –you’re right and thanks for the heads up. I mean, not that enjoying the work of lefty artists will harm anyone aware of the embeds, but sending the artist your ticket money surely is a vote for his worldview.
OTOH, a working artist who is ‘lefty’ can’t have really examined the individualist entrepreneurial gamble his/her career actually is –the lefty politics at bottom must amount to an appeal for more emotion in life –thus to automatically villainize the ‘system’.
…and then that flips once again when you realize that there’s nothing more controlling than a movie –the director has totally controlled you for that two hours. movies are artifacts of fascist subversivion, in that way –regardless of the content on the screen.
Charles: In this case with the CIA, the NYT is just covering for staff. They probably can’t afford the severance. And stuff.
I can’t say I care for Kubrick. I was just rewatching “Citizen Kane” this weekend as a preparation for class (we will be discussing it next week), and was reminded that I don’t care for Welles either. And for the same reason I don’t care for Kubrick. Those two, plus George Lucas after the first “Star Wars” trilogy, are too completely in love with their own filmmaking to care about the characters. And so I never give a damn about their characters either. Cold egotists, the lot of them. Brilliant, yes, but like they say … icewater in the veins.
Give me “The Wizard of Oz” or Frank Capra or Billy Wilder any day.
And re: Kubrick’s stance on the state vs. the individual, I’d be interested to see what turning a brigade of Alexes loose in his neighborhood would have on his attitudes. It’s easy to champeen the criminals when they are rampaging on the other side of the tracks.
Incidentally, the guy who mugged me at gunpoint three years ago? The judge just let him walk last week. Once again, a person making a decision that they will never have to bear the consequences of. Someone, at some point, is going to be shot by this dirtbag. It won’t be me (I moved out of that neighborhood) and it won’t be the judge, but it will be someone.
Mongoose, re: Cow tipping, I can see where you might be confused!
There are so many ways to take the arguments made here, and so many threads to pull, and to follow. Some are bound to unravel my thinking on something. I have to admit, to tipping on my thinking about the nature of a convention on war making that outlaws much of one set of behaviors, that can be controlled, while failing to address the behaviors of those who will not be held accountable.
In another thread a question of whether or not the self evident rights of man are immutable by other men, a fact that cannot be altered, and whether or no this notion prevents our ability to abrogate another’s right to life or liberty. When an individual uses his immutable rights to attempt to end, destroy or otherwise bring harm to another right to life and liberty it is the right and with consent of the governed, the duty of the threatened to defend themselves.
When acts of war involve illegal combatants I submit that there is no convention that must need be applied. Application of conventions to illegal combatants, and pirates is detrimental to the achieving the goals for which the conventions were written.
I believe the application of the conventions to illegal combatants will only result in continued actions of belligerents who do not identify themselves and do not have any incentive to follow any of the conventions’ rules at all.
Thus it is fairly easy to ascertain why today, on a battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan that the guy with the Saudi accent, speaking Farsi is considered a highly educated son, and native to the area. The group of herdsmen wearing Nike’s are not only native but probably the peaceful benefactors of some loving Islamic aide society.
Under the current lack of detail, the Palestinian fellow with the gold watch, driving his Mercedes to the Piece of Israel Now rally is considered a refugee while the Iraqi family scraping and begging for food from Syrian benefactors because they are not allowed to perform work in Syria, and can’t pay the bribes to return to Iraq, are expatriates.
My major concern wrt water boarding of criminal combatants, is the effect on our guys.
“……and then that flips once again when you realize that there’s nothing more controlling than a movie –the director has totally controlled you for that two hours, movies are artifacts of fascist subversivion, in that way –regardless of the content on the screen.”
In a movie house you are the willing recipient of the content and you’ve even paid to submit to the director. If you are unhappy with the result the best argument you’ve got to recoup the ticket price is… false advertising.
John Lynch @77
“So now we kill these men with drones instead of capturing them.
That’s the effect of all the anti-torture legalisms. Instead of living, they die, sometimes with their families.
Is this better? Does it help us win the war more than captures would?”
In a word, Yes. Killing more of them leaving fewer of our dead military and civilians always works for me.
I don’t know that I have seen western literature that chronicles the shift from swordplay to guns.
I’ve seen some Kurasawi movies from decades past where its clear that guns are distasteful to the director–and likely too to samuri– for not being as up close and personal as knightly swordplay.
charles/95; Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Muketeers –?