On torture - again

The tide of bull-shit about how torture helped to send OBL belatedly to hell has risen to the nostril level. I have expressed the view from the other end of the electrodes previously, and also questioned its practical usefulness, but both bear repeating.

Matthew Alexander, a former senior military interrogator who conducted or supervised more than 1,300 interrogations in Iraq, writes eloquently on how unnecessary and even counter-productive it is in Foreign Policy. As he says, the US oath of allegiance says "Liberty and justice for all", not "liberty and security for all".

Actually, since well before the twin towers went down, the operative concept has been "such liberty as shall be judged compatible with security for all", which is of course no liberty at all.

I was myself tortured once, happily by a sadist who only wanted to hear me scream and who quit after he felt I was sufficiently humiliated.  But while I was hooked up to the "talking machine" I would have told him anything he wanted to stop him turning that damned hand-crank.

He made a serious error in letting me go, as I was working for some very powerful people and not long afterwards learned that he had suffered a fatal accident. I am in no doubt that prompt revenge spared me the worst aspects of PTSD and I empathize fully with the celebrations of those who lost friends and family on 9/11 upon learning that OBL had been erased.

Revenge is good. It's healthy. Condign punishment helps victims heal and, frankly, who gives a shit about the predators. If they can't do the time then they should not have done the crime.

But real torture (as in causing physical agony - not the mental coercion that limp lefties seem to think is equivalent) corrupts the torturers and the system that employs it.

Bin Laden: How not to flush a turd

Sigh. That's not how it's done, guys. Beautiful op, as one would expect from ST 6, although I imagine the pilot who stalled the Blackhawk must wish he had died.

But, dear God. Did you learn nothing from your Argentine chums back in the late 70s and early 80s when they dismantled the most serious insurgency in Latin America in their own country, and then came up to Central America at your invitation for an encore?

You DISAPPEAR the mother-fucker. Whether he's killed or captured alive, you leave his followers to panic that you've got him and are introducing him to the old telephone hand-crank and the wet or dry submarine. 

Everybody scurries to new hide-outs, tested comms procedures are abandoned, people shed good false identities and scramble to create new cover. And you watch them run, record their conversations and follow the ones you can.

That way you not only maximise the disruption to the terrorist organization, but you can scoop up a whole bunch more people for meaningful chats and seize a lot of electronic and written documentation because people running and looking over their shoulders for helicopters coming for them tend not to cover their tracks too well.

But hey - what's all that compared to getting thousands of yahoos to chant YOU ESS AY and wave the good ol' stars and stripes? 

Maybe the US administration figured they could not possibly keep it a secret for long, but they should at least have tried to maximise the operational as opposed to PR value of the coup.

Why was 9/11 so special?

Because it affected the constituents of New York Congressman Peter King, previously a fervent supporter, apologist and enabler of terrorism, who spent decades squeezing himself with delight whenever the explosives and weapons he put in the hands of the IRA killed and maimed people in Ireland.

He is the new Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. I don't do this often, but I am going to quote the New York Times:

Long before he became an outspoken voice in Congress about the threat from terrorism, he was a fervent supporter of a terrorist group, the Irish Republican Army. "We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry,” Mr. King told a pro-IRA rally on Long Island, where he was serving as Nassau County comptroller, in 1982. Three years later he declared, “If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the IRA for it".

Nor do I often watch, let alone cite, the supposedly amusing American TV commentator Jon Stewart (odd - I actively despise every person I know who spells his name "Jon"). Yet I am going to link to this video from his "Crooks and Liars" series, as it does the requisite number on the Irish-American scum-bag.

Ireland: electing to fail

Richard Waghorne expresses my view better than I can in Critical Reaction. For all the convivial charm of its inhabitants, when it comes to politics Ireland is a nasty little place - and always has been.

RTE’s Irish-language political editor emailed the family of the IRA victim Jean McConville to say ‘please do not send my anymore of this obnoxious crap’ after they issued a press release during the campaign highlighting the widely believed involvement of Gerry Adams in her murder. The political editor in question is himself a former member of the IRA, something not deemed a relevant consideration for his fitness to be in the job in the first place. There is no suggestion that he will be disciplined, let alone summarily dismissed, as would occur in any country with a minimally adequate culture of standards in public life.

Jean McConville was tortured and murdered and the location of her body concealed by the IRA when it was being run by Adams and McGuinness, to whom the British state has grovelled for the last 17 years. "A minimally adequate culture of standards in public life" is pretty hard to define when until recently Germany had an unrepentant ex-terrorist and KGB agent as foreign minister. In politics scum floats to the top - get used to it.

Intrigued by Waghorne's conclusion: "The soul-searching and intellectual probity required after the fourth profound failure of the Irish state in ninety years of existence did not begin with this election just past. A new administration cannot but prove largely beside the point until that starts to happen".

Fourth? The first would be De Valera precipitating the civil war and having Collins murdered; but what d'you suppose Waghorne thinks the other two were?

Cutting the crap about Northern Ireland

A rare example of simple truth-telling, stripped of moralising cant, on Think Defence. Congratulations to Imogen Baxter and Robert Crowcroft. Contrast it with the baseless assumptions that coloured the BBC's coverage of the conflict in Northern Ireland, as they do their coverage of the Palestinians and Israel today.

One of the worst fallacies in contemporary public life is the plea that if only people were more "reasonable", problems could be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. The academic Professor Mary Kaldor, in a major book on modern war, actually contends that "No solution is workable based on the political goals of the warring parties . . . Once the values of inclusion, tolerance, and mutual respect are established, the territorial solutions will easily follow." The unstated assumption in this view of the world is that if we approach a problem in a spirit of conciliation and willingness to see the other side’s point of view, a successful compromise can be found.

In 2000 Yasser Arafat rejected a peace settlement that threatened to undermine the whole rationale for the PLO: resistance, resistance, resistance. It is an illustration of the cold realities of this type of war that much of the violence in Northern Ireland stemmed from deliberate political encouragement to perpetuate the conflict. This was achieved through the use of fiery rhetoric to incite the masses, the purpose being to better politicians’ leverage when the negotiation of a settlement on acceptable terms finally became plausible.

What quickly became the norm in Ulster was that extremism was not only "reasonable", but was positively encouraged by everyone concerned as it was "necessary" in order to manufacture a more favourable final settlement. Contrary to what we all wish, there is often no such thing as a "moderate centre ground". There certainly wasn’t in Northern Ireland. This means that appeals to rationality and reasonableness will not get us very far. The objectives of the participants in these wars – politicians, paramilitaries, and communities alike – are to defend their own interests. If anything, it is perhaps more "unreasonable" for us to expect otherwise.

The only thing I would add is that continued "resistance" was extremely profitable for the IRA until the FBI started to lean on their fundraisers in the USA. Likewise the PLO leaders stole much of the money donated to the Palestinian cause, and the challenge to their authority by Hamas was entirely financed by Iran on condition that they should exacerbate the conflict with Israel.

The police observe the sound principle of following the money - so should political analysts.