Brits to interrogators; don’t be mean

Richard sends us a link to the UK’s Telegraph which reports that the release of the US Senate’s fictitious report on interrogation has created a measure of fall out on the British military; they can’t yell at their subjects or bang their fists on tables startling the jihadists;

Col Tim Collins, who made a celebrated eve-of-battle speech during the Iraq war and now runs a private security company with expertise in intelligence gathering, said: “Since I was serving, the rules on interrogations have been tightened up because of the lawyers. We [the military] are no longer able to carry out tactical questioning.

“The effect of the ambulance-chasing lawyers and the play-it-safe judges is that we have got to the point where we have lost our operational capability to do tactical questioning. That in itself brings risks to the lives of the people we deploy.

“These insurgents are not nice people. These are criminals. They behead people; they keep sex slaves. They are not normal people.”

It’s all a part of that “we’re better than them” mentality. Yes, we are better than them, but the interrogation room isn’t the place to prove that point. War is an ugly thing, it brings out the worst in even the most civilized and urbane people usually in response to our enemies. So, we’ve limited ourselves in this war to yelling at prisoners, playing crappy 80’s Hair Band music very loud, keeping them awake and washing their face with a damp wash cloth. And that’s called torture. I guess I was tortured when my room mate in Germany played Rick James’ “She’s a Brickhouse” over and over every night while I was trying to sleep.

NPR wrote that the entertainment business has convinced us that torture works and we fell for it;

From Kiefer Sutherland as hard-nosed government agent Jack Bauer on Fox’s 24, growling this threat to a bad guy: “You probably don’t think that I can force this towel down your throat. Trust me, I can.”

To Liam Neeson’s ex-CIA operative Bryan Mills, shocking a man for information in the movie Taken: “You either give me what I need, or this switch stays on until they turn the power off for lack of payment on the bill.”

Of course, NPR is fond of telling us what Hollywood thinks of this country and passing it off as valid opinions – until it’s inconvenient.

Personally, I’m not convinced that making a jihadist feel uncomfortable while he is being kept in better living conditions than he lived in during his entire childhood is really torture. I’m not advocating blasting kneecaps with a puny 9mm handgun, but what the liberals and lawyers are calling torture really isn’t torture at all. It’s the same thing that we military veterans endured during our initial military training. It’s the same thing my privates experienced at Zero-Five-Hundred every morning when they were a little slow getting out of their racks.

By the way, I watched stank-ass hippies waterboard each other in front of the White House (while I called loudly for them to behead their subjects) – do you really think it’s torture when stank-ass hippies do it to each other? Well, other than the part where they get their faces clean for a change. If it was really torture, the Park Police who were standing around probably would have stopped them for their own safety – but they didn’t.

Category: Terror War