A real bellwether? Reminds me of the great fried chicken and brownies ending of White Noise somehow.
(From Daily Kos)
There you'll also find some discussion of Marine Major Sherwood F. Moran, who put the lie to the reprehensible supporters of torture by doing exactly the opposite of what all the chest-thumpers wanted to do to prisoners and therefore extracting information (correct information) from a slew of Japanese prisoners, even during the battle for Guadalcanal in World War II.
This stuff isn't rocket science–it's more like ju-jitsu. And it's worth noting that the man, Marine or no, was a peace-loving minister and missionary. It's the sort of thing that needs to be heard when draft-dodging chickenhawks like Dick Cheney keep spouting things they know not of.
From a 2005 Atlantic article:
Part of why Sherwood Moran became such a legendary figure among military interrogators was his cool disregard for what he termed the standard "hard-boiled" military attitude. The brutality of the fighting in the Pacific and the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese had created a general assumption that only the sternest measures would get Japanese prisoners to divulge anything. Moran countered that in his and others' experience, strong-arm tactics simply did not work. Stripping a prisoner of his dignity, treating him as a still-dangerous threat, forcing him to stand at attention and flanking him with guards throughout his interrogation—in other words, emphasizing that "we are his to-be-respected and august enemies and conquerors"—invariably backfired. It made the prisoner "so conscious of his present position and that he was a captured soldier vs. enemy intelligence" that it "played right into [the] hands" of those who were determined not to give away anything of military importance.
Moran's writings also include this:
I can simply tell you what my attitude is; I often tell a prisoner right at the start what my attitude is! I consider a prisoner (i.e. a man who has been captured and disarmed and in a perfectly safe place) as out of the war, out of the picture, and thus, in a way, not an enemy. (This is doubly so, psychologically and physically speaking, if he is wounded or starving.) Some self-appointed critics, self-styled "hard-boiled" people, will sneer that this is a sentimental attitude, and say, "Don't you know he will try to escape at first opportunity?" I reply, "Of course I do; wouldn't you?" But that is not the point. Notice that in the first part of this paragraph I used the word "safe". That is the point; get the prisoner to a safe place, where even he knows there is no hope of escape, that it is all over. Then forget, as it were, the "enemy" stuff, and the "prisoner" stuff. I tell them to forget it, telling them I am talking as a human being to a human being, (ningen to shite). And they respond to this.
When it comes to the wounded, the sick, the tired, the sleepy, the starving, I consider that since they are out of the combat for good, they are simply needy human beings, needing our help, physical and spiritual. This is the standpoint of one human being thinking of another human being. But in addition, it is hard business common sense, and yields rich dividends from the Intelligence standpoint.
Get that last bit? It's not all about loving thy neighbor, it also happens to work. Who are we going to believe? Interrogators like Moran (or more recent practitioners like this, addressing the same issues in the current conflict with our current enemies), who say torture doesn't work, or Dick Cheney, who is trying to avoid prosecution for authorizing torture?
My favorite current comment on the irrelevant debate Cheney wants to have (irrelevant because torture is illegal and morally reprehensible even if it works now and then, which the preponderance of evidence argues against in any case) comes from wrestler, former SEAL and former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, talking to Larry King:
King: You were a Navy SEAL.
Ventura: That’s right. I was water boarded, so I know — at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence — every one of us was water boarded. It is torture.
King: What was it like?
Ventura: It’s drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you —I’ll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney, and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.
Could we prosecute him for that, then?
