So I'm jumping up here because even Doonesbury is getting preachy about interrogations and it is annoying me.
I guess it peaked while Keith Olberman gleefully watched some weak conservative talk radio host (I guess weak loudmouth should be a given there) get "waterboarded."
First, since it was on one of the TV's in the JOC, a lot of us paused to watch and critiqued the technique (and not from having been the waterboard-er). Waterboarding is a broad term and what that talk-show host chose to subject himself to appears to have been much more similar to what the Japanese did to prisoners than what was done to some detainees a few years ago--actually forcing water into the nose/mouth vs pouring water over a cloth that covers the nose/mouth.
Next time you are in the shower, if you are really curious, open your mouth into the stream of water and try breathing. See how that works for you. Then try putting a wet washcloth over your mouth and try breathing through that instead. Neither is particularly pleasant, but you will notice some differences.
Or go to a combat diver course: tie your hands behind your back, tie your feed together and then dive into the deep end to recover your goggles with your teeth. But people volunteer for that and know what is coming going in to it. The psychology of expectations and control, or some such thing, plays a role here. I add that to explain that the hullabaloo over releasing memos and pictures actually is deeper than covering the butts of a few shoddy lawyers.
Sometimes during the past few years classification was actually used for security purposes rather than to keep bad ideas from the harsh sunlight. Or here, a bit of both.
This isn't meant to justify anything, it is merely to ask for some integrity in reporting. Not bombast. Not all semi-informed (at best) commentary all the time. Just a tad bit of integrity.
So I propose that if you choose to be a vocal supporter of enhanced interrogation methods, that you experience them first (Rush, Ms. Coulter, etc.). If you are a vocal supporter of subjecting its supporters to those methods (Olberman, Dana Milbank, I'm looking at you), then you should experience them first as well.
I'm pretty sure both groups would be surprised by the results. It would be harsher than some claim and much less bad than some others claim. Really, the effectiveness of the methods are more proportional to your training to resist them than their direct impacts.
If you've taken a principled stand from the outset against anything but gentle rapport-building methodologies, then good for you. You can talk all you want under my system. I hope you do the homework to understand that there tricks in that too and like espionage it is about getting someone to betray their peers in many ways.
The Great Oz has spoken.
///WX GUESSER SENDS
Saturday, May 23, 2009
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1 comment:
Why limit it to the media? Why not extend it (retroactively) to its most prominent proponents - those in the Executive Branch and Congress (and former members of Congress) and their weeny legal counsel, most of whom never served in active combat?
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