Such obsessive self-righteousness (“the United States doesn’t torture”) seems pathetic and lame, given Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Mumbai, especially the people in the Jewish center, and so many instances of wanton and despicable slaughter perpetrated by Islamists.

Got that ? ISLAMISTS

Spread a rumor that a Quran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there’ll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there’ll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Mumbai in the name of Allah, and that’s just business as usual.

Must read Mark Steyn

You ask for specifics regarding the complicity of the mass media in promoting terrorism. Think carefully about the NYTimes. Their ability to withhold information is abetting criminal terrorism.

Let me give one recent example. The al Durra death in Israel was reported by France II television as being the result of Israeli soldiers killing the innocent child in the father’s arms. Phillpe Karsenty, a French Jew took the television station to court and finally won on appeal. The court ruled that the television station was not able to sue him for liable, since the material presented in court did not show Karsenty to be a liar. This was a highly significant decision by the French court because it essentially exonerated the Israeli Army and removed the ostensible reason for the start of the Intifada in which many hundreds of Jews died. The Times reported on the al Durra case, but would not report on the French court reversal, thus leaving the impression that everything was just fine in the Land of Journalism. No, it was not fine. France II lied through their teeth, brought no internal charges against its reporters, and has now gone on the French Supreme Court to challenge the Appellate Court’s ruling. Failure of the NYTimes to mention this matter has allowed poor journalism to disregard “truth” because their is no “truth” in their understanding of the world – only advocacy.

Of course, there is the famous, though completely forgotten, CNN admission that they skewed the news from Israel to keep their reporters safe and to retain access to their sources in Gaza. The same admission has come in a less dramatic way from the BBC, which bent over so far backwards to get their reporter, Johnson, back that they were able to lick their own arses.

These cases are no longer part of the news, but you can see their reverberations of their historical admissions in the CNN motto, “The news you can trust.”

Here’s some of that non-existant WMD that got shipped to Canada for safe storage just last year:

http://tinyurl.com/6s2qur

jeez, pov –imagine that, right here on roger’s little blog –how did you know?

you should write a book and counter those dozen or so top industrialized nation’s national intelligence services ( not to mention saddam’s own general staff ) which thought otherwise.

Using torture to save lives? Sounds like much the same fear-driven, twisted, crap-as-justification spouted by those you claim to be opposed to. I guess that cliche about gradually becoming like the people one hates has some validity.

“Do you really think the incompetent fool Lyndie England was trying to “elicit information” by walking a prisoner about on a leash? This is not to say that a force of Englands are fighting on our behalf, or to compare England to the likes of the India murderers, although some will doubtless twist my words to claim that’s what I wrote.”

Well OK if you insist. But honestly I don’t have to “twist” anything. Here goes – in the next sentence, you wrote:

“The point is that England behaved in a way that was universally condemned in the military as both immoral and strategically ineffective, and the first Americans who blew the whistle on this were not ACLU types, but career military; they knew what a joke England was.”

Just so we’re clear – She was “a joke” right? You do not consider her to be representative of military intelligence. OK so far? Now in the very next sentence we have:

“For those so certain that torture of our enemies works, why not be honest about the methods, or are you afraid that these psychopaths will somehow hate us more if we reveal them?”

Exactly whose “methods” are you talking about, if not Lynddie England’s, the unrepresentative joke you nevertheless saw fit to cite as your only example of military intelligence?