The Torture Dissidents' Tale

I find it interesting that the very people who approved and at best stood by and allowed torture were mostly those who have never served. They have sat back in their fat cat chairs and looked down on the great unwashed of american as their property. Cheney and the Bush Administration are a disgrace as well as Pelosi. I also think Obama is beginning to care about his career a bit more than the people also. He gave us such hope. Most of the things is doing now is small stuff-not the big important changes needed. I'll believe healthcare improvement when I see it-he is disappionting me.

Most of us would be reluctant to say that killing another human being is, flatly, wrong. Most of us would need some context. For example, the killing might legitimately in be self-defense or the defense of others. Thus, in response to the question of whether killing is wrong, we might say that it depends on the circumstances, or that more often than not it is wrong, or that, without more, we cannot answer the question at all. However, when it comes to "coercive" interrogation -- a far cry from killing -- are so many people ready to make moral or ethical judgments in the abstract? Is it one of those few things that are always wrong (say, for instance, rape), or might one need context to make the moral/ethical judgment?

Assuming context is important, shouldn't we consider whether the interrogation is done in self-defense (when innocent lives are in jeopardy) or whether the subject belongs to an organization that is not a signatory to war-time conventions or treaties and shuns them in his or her own behavior (including by hiding among civilians or even killing civilians)? As the brilliant first post in this thread opined, there are likely some circumstances under which coercive interrogation becomes the far lesser of two evils -- and were the use of it (with appropriate controls to prevent bodily harm) might well be palatable in the face of a grave threat to thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocents.

Barack Obama politicized this issue during the campaign, and he is politicizing it again. He even went so far as to cleanse documents of the observations of his own advisors that coercive interrogation had saved lives. So much for giving us context. Will he tell the American people that he is making a judgment that may well cost us countless lives lost for the sake of a black and white moral/ethical judgment? How well would that go over? It would be the same as him telling us that all killing would be made illegal, irrespective of the context. Tell that to the daring men and women to defend their own lives and the lives of their families in the face of murderous attackers.

Who among you can claim to have first-hand knowledge of torture, either as a provider or recipient?
The answer: None. Not a single one, of you knows the first thing about it, which may be the reason you're so willing to share your ignorance with one and all.
Going further, none of you, on either side of the argument, sound as though you even know anyone who actually has been subjected to the humiliation and angish of torture.
Try it before deciding if you like it.

How quick your forget - If Zelikow's mouth is MOVING -that means he is LYING!

from the website RENSE

Phillip D. Zelikow...
911 Myth Maker
By Andrew
10-12-7

When you ask people to revisit the events of 9/11 and reconsider what really happened, you enter the twilight zone of public mythology where people don't want to rethink unhappy events and where you challenge their personal egos. Did you know that for the same reason that 2/3 of the women raped never report it, 2/3 of the victims of fraud never seek redress either? They find themselves at odds with their own egos; they simply don't want to admit that they have been so violated or duped. I believe that the story of Philip Zelikow is important to help people beyond their own egos and see how America is being raped.

Most people have never heard of Philip D. Zelikow, but he is best known as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. He basically wrote the 9/11 Commission Report. Immediately prior to Bush appointing him to head the 9/11 Commission, Zelikow was the executive director of the little known Aspen Strategy Group whose members include Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rica, and Paul Wolfowitz. Although most people don't know anything about Zelikow, they recognize Cheney, Rice and Wolfowitz as the Neoconservatives most responsible for stampeding America into the current unfortunate conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Strategy_Group#Group_Members

Zelikow's record gets really interesting when we consider that he went on to write the 9/11 Commission Report. He earned a law degree from the University of Houston Law School and a Ph. D. from Tufts University. He wrote books too. He wrote a book on The Kennedy Tapes, and another on Why People Don't Trust Government. One of his areas of expertise is PUBLIC MYTHOLOGY. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_D._Zelikow

While at Harvard he actually wrote about the use, and misuse, of history in policymaking. As he noted in his own words, "contemporary" history is "defined functionally by those critical people and events that go into forming the public's presumptions about its immediate past. The idea of 'public presumption'," he explained, "is akin to [the] notion of 'public myth' but without the negative implication sometimes invoked by the word 'myth.' Such presumptions are beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community." So Zelikow, the guy who wrote The 9/11 Commission Report, was an expert in how to misuse public trust and create PUBLIC MYTHS.

If 9/11 was nothing but a huge HOAX, you would naturally expect that the event itself would have to be perfectly scripted.

In 1998, Zelikow actually wrote Catastrophic Terrorism about imagining "the transformative event" three years before 9/11. Here are Zelikow's 1998 words; Readers should imagine the possibilities for themselves, because the most serious constraint on current policy [nonaggression] is lack of imagination. An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America's history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans' fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. Constitutional liberties would be challenged as the United States sought to protect itself from further attacks by pressing against allowable limits in surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and the use of deadly force. More violence would follow, either as other terrorists seek to imitate this great "success" or as the United States strikes out at those considered responsible. Like Pearl Harbor, such an event would divide our past and future into a "before" and "after." The effort and resources we devote to averting or containing this threat now, in the "before" period, will seem woeful, even pathetic, when compared to what will happen "after." Our leaders will be judged negligent for not addressing catastrophic terrorism more urgently.
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/visions/publication/terrorism.htm

If we can get people to see that the guy who wrote The 9/11 Commission Report got his Ph.D. in PUBLIC MYTHS and actually had his hand in scripting the 9/11 event itself in 1998, they might be more receptive to the idea that the official story of 9/11 should be revisited.

The other problem is getting them to look again at an unhappy event. Don't show them the unhappy pictures or the long videos of planes crashing into the WTC Towers or of the Towers collapsing. Instead show them short videos of what the first reporters said immediately after the explosions at the Pentagon and at Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

(1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C02dE5VKeck and

(2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZekosYOmXc&mode=related&search

On September 11, 2001, the immediate reports on the ground told the truth. I think most people can see that it was later that the myth-makers retold the myth the way Zelikow scripted it to be remembered. This may be 2007, but when we consider the power of mythology the psychology of the average man hasn't changed in 4000 years. And when everyone in the political community believes the same myth, it becomes a parallel reality. With TV reinforcing the 9/11 myth every single day, it has become stronger than any belief system that I can remember, but we must explore ways to challenge it.

Those who claim that torture, for instance water-boarding, is "necessary" don't seem to take the point that torture produces unreliable information, that someone being water-boarded will say whatever he or she thinks the torturer wants to hear.

But let's say that what the torturer wanted to hear was about links between Sadam and 9/11. The method would be sure to deliver, whereas more reliable methods would not, as there was nothing TO deliver.

Torture is about anger, hierarchy and revenge. The torturer 'breaks' the suspect. But it is also about the torturer crafting the 'confession' of the suspect. There can be no other explanation for abandoning relatively reliable methods of interrogation for ones which enable the torturer to force the suspect to say certain things.

Think about it.

Those who think that American patriots should be prosecuted for protecting the homeland should take a clue from Ogabe. He knows that any move to prosecute his predecessors will only (and rightly) result in retribution against him and his cabal when the inevitable cycle of elections results in a Republican administration.

Why do leftists hate America so???