A National Milgram Experiment

 

A National Milgram Experiment

Have you heard about the rules for eating in public places in California?  You are supposed to wear a mask even after sitting at the table, removing it enough to take a bite and then putting it back on.  Who would have thought that anyone would propose such a ridiculous idea, or that people would follow these orders? 

The media feasts on the fear they spread like a disease.  The result is a cowed nation following orders that make little or no sense.  Healthy people shut themselves in their homes for months and avoid meeting with family and friends.  In Virginia, most of the people I see in stores and offices are wearing masks.  A fair number of people alone in their cars are wearing are masks, and a few people walking or jogging for exercise are wearing masks.  In California, forget about dining out anywhere until January 4^th, 2021.

What’s interesting is that isolation and mask-wearing don’t seem to be helping.  According to the CDC, during the last 7 days California (the purple line) is off-the-charts for new Covid-19 cases compared to all other states.

Note that states like Florida (the green line) is open for businesses.  This brings into question whether the restrictions that have been placed on people in various states are either reasonable or scientifically valid. 

I suggest that any public official that issues unreasonably restrictive or medically questionable orders should be ridiculed and defied.

The rules we are living under resemble Communist societies.  State legislators have not passed these rules that we live under.  We are ruled by decree.  Legal penalties including fines and jail time are being imposed for non-compliance.  Pressures via social media are incredible.  People not wearing masks are literally accused of murder.  This is totalitarian.

 It reminds me of the Milgram experiment.  Here is a brief synopsis.

Why is it so many people obey when they feel coerced? Social psychologist Stanley Milgram researched the effect of authority on obedience. He concluded people obey either out of fear or out of a desire to appear cooperative--even when acting against their own better judgment and desires. Milgram’s classic yet controversial experiment illustrates people's reluctance to confront those who abuse power.

Milgram recruited subjects for his experiments from various walks of life. Respondents were told the experiment would study the effects of punishment on learning ability. Respondents thought they had an equal chance of playing the role of a student or of a teacher, but the process was rigged so all respondents ended up playing the teacher. The "learner" was an actor Milgram hired.

"Teachers" were asked to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to the "learner" when questions were answered incorrectly. Shock levels were labeled from mild, to painful, to deadly.

The "learner" (the actor) appeared to react to shocks depending on the supposed severity.  The experimenter would pressure the “teachers” to give increasing levels of shock for each wrong answer.   The actor would pretend to show increasing levels of pain, to the point of screaming.

Milgram was shocked to find those who questioned authority were in the minority. Sixty-five percent (65%) of the teachers were willing to progress to the maximum voltage level, which could have killed the “learner.” 

Milgram showed that many of us are willing to literally torture people when told to by an authority.   

Recall that at the Nuremberg trials the common excuse for Nazi atrocities was that “I was only following orders.”   

In many states, jobs and businesses are destroyed by Governors and mayors issuing fatuous, ill-considered orders with no concern for the damage caused to the people affected.  It is a disgrace.  We are being ruled by petty political hacks acting like medieval Barons ruling by decree.  They are using the Wuhan flu as an excuse to rule as dictators. 

There is a movement in California to recall Governor Gavin Newsome, evidence that there are a fair number of people there who are appalled enough to sign a petition, if not rise up and take to the streets.  Elon Musk is moving his entire organization from California to Texas, and others are doing the same.  

 Governor Cuomo and Mayor De Blasio are struggling to see which one can do more to drive the people out of New York faster.

The original Milgram experiment ended when Milgram explained to his subjects that they were being hoaxed.   The end of this experiment will end when we, the subjects, see through the hoax, refuse to take part and rebel.

Bringing crucifixion back

From Easter services to cablecasts of Bill O’Reilly’s bestseller Killing Jesus, Christians are focused on the crucifixion of their Savior. American believers and non-believers consider this a historical event.

But in the Middle East, crucifixion is a current affair. ISIS has resurrected crucifixion. In doing so, these Islamofascist scum have built a bridge to the fourth decade a.d. The only way to top this would be to feed Christians to lions this evening at Rome’s Colosseum.

 

Torture? Racism? Genocide? When It Means Everything, It Means Nothing

Dan Miller discusses the way words are used as weapons in the culture wars and the more immediately deadly ones.

... many quite broad spectrum words and their underlying concepts have fallen prey to conflation: racism, poverty, genocide, promiscuity, and torture, for example. We can learn here, as in many other left-oriented articles, just how widespread “racism” is: all opposition to President Obama’s policies and initiatives is “racist.” “Poverty” is no less widespread; the word is used as applicable to both the United States and Haiti and all places in between. In Haiti, 40.6 percent of the workforce of 4.81 million are unemployed and eighty percent of the population exist below the “poverty line” (2003 estimate — it is likely worse now). Not having a color television and an automobile seems, in the United States, to be associated with poverty. Not so in many other countries. Genocide is a term often applied to Israel’s activities in trying to keep Palestinians from sending missiles and terrorists into Israel to kill Jews and anyone else in their way as well as to the activities at German death camps during World War II’s Holocaust. Promiscuity suggests flagrant sexual conduct, but that means many different things to many different people, particularly when it is done to mock religion. That’s true of many activities. Even threatening to burn a Koran is viewed by some as terribly bad because it sets off massacres among Islamists, but burning a Bible or soaking one in urine is hardly even newsworthy because Christians and Jews aren’t likely to go on killing sprees on account of it.

The core of his essay is on the issue of "torture."  Perhaps we would have more moral clarity and less moral preening if the effects of people’s pronouncements were visited on them. For every soldier killed because of lack of intelligence perhaps we could kill a random member of the faculty of a law school. The outcry for waterboarding teams to accompany every platoon would be overwhelming along with the demand that the rack should be part of every well-equipped brigade.

Steyn: Pelosi's tortured press performance

Question: What does Nancy Pelosi think of waterboarding?

No, I mean really. Away from the cameras, away from the Capitol, in the deepest recesses of her (if she'll forgive my naïveté) soul. Sitting on a mountaintop, contemplating the distant horizon, chewing thoughtfully on a cranberry-almond granola bar, what does she truly believe about waterboarding?

Does she support it? Well, according to the CIA, she did way back when, over six years ago.

Does she oppose it? According to Speaker Pelosi, yes. In her varying accounts, she's (a) accused the CIA of consciously "misleading the Congress of the United States" as to what they were doing; (b) admitted to having been briefed that waterboarding was in the playbook but that "we were not – I repeat – were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used"; (c) belatedly conceded that she'd known back in February 2003 that waterboarding was being used but had been apprised of the fact by "a member of my staff". As she said on Thursday, instead of doing anything about it, she decided to focus on getting more Democrats elected to the House.

It's worth noting that, by most if not all of her multiple accounts, Nancy Pelosi is as guilty of torture as anybody else. That's not an airy rhetorical flourish but a statement of law.

And on plagiarist Mo Dowd:

Over at The New York Times, the elderly schoolgirl Maureen Dowd riffed off Cheney's defense of waterboarding and argued that, no matter when the next terrorist attack comes, the former vice-president would be the one primarily responsible. He is, she said, "a force multiplier for Muslims who hate America".

Really? Last week, while Speaker Pelosi was preoccupied with her what-did-I-know-and-when-did-I-know-that-I-knew-it routine,The Daily Telegraph in London reported what is believed to be the second mass poisoning of Afghan schoolgirls, this time at Ura Jalili High School for Girls in Charikar. Fifty students had to be hospitalized after a mysterious "poison gas" infected the classrooms. As you may recall, under the Taliban it was illegal for girls to attend school, and Afghan insurgents have made a sustained effort to make the price of female education too high. So, in an effort to identify the poison, blood samples have been taken to Bagram air base to be analyzed by the U.S. military, taking time off its hectic schedule of mass torture.

Does waterboarding so outrage the Muslim world that it drives millions of young men into the dark embrace of al-Qaida? No. But the media fetishization of U.S. "torture" is certainly "a force multiplier" for Muslims who don't so much "hate" as despise America, not least for its self-loathing.

One of the few U.S. commentators to pick up on the Afghan schoolgirls story was Phyllis Chesler, who wrote about it under the headline "The High Cost Of Western Idealism." America and its few real allies fight under the most constrained and self-imposed rules of engagement ever devised, and against an enemy that rejects every basic element of the Geneva Conventions. Perhaps we are so rich, so smart, so advanced that we can fight with one arm and both legs tied behind out back and still win – eventually. Along the way many innocents will suffer. But better that than that a Gitmo detainee with a fear of insects should have a caterpillar put in his cell.

Read the whole thing.

Is the threat over?

The LA Times picks up on an a widely-unremarked statement by Barack Obama at his press conference when he admitted that "it may be harder" to get information:

Reporting from Washington -- In a strikingly defensive explanation of his stance on Bush-era anti-terrorism tactics, President Obama on Wednesday acknowledged for the first time that the harsh interrogation techniques he has banned might have yielded useful information, but that he was nonetheless willing to rule them out on moral grounds.



...He conceded that "it may be harder" to get information, but what "makes us, I think, still a beacon to the world is that we are willing to hold true to our ideals, even when it's hard, not just when it's easy."

Tom Maguire asks..."how much harder?"

What did Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it?

Minority Leader John Boehner is asking the Obama administration to release the CIA’s notes briefing Nancy Pelosi. Whether the Obama team does so or not seems irrelevant. It is enough for the public now to know that Pelosi and others were briefed and that no meaningful objections and steps to halt the CIA (e.g. cutting off funding) were ever raised. The GOP, with moves like this and in interviews such as the one Sen. Kit Bond gave today, is trying to make Pelosi the story now. To the extent that “Pelosi Plays Defense on Torture” is the top story on Politico (for a good part of the day) they are succeeding. And what does that do?

Well, it might slow the witch hunt down a bit. But more importantly it reminds the voters that until it became politically expedient there was bipartisan consensus for enhanced interrogation techniques. The existence of those briefings (and the notes which will document them) suggest that everyone — the lawyers, Congress, and the CIA — were operating in good faith, as best they could, to prevent the unimaginable, namely another attack on America. That, it seems, goes to the heart of the “defense” of Bush officials who may be dragooned before a Truth Commission.

The Obama Plan On Torture - Define it Away

Obama, Democrats and the Left in general have been busy during the Bush administration defining torture as pretty much anything that terrorists don’t like.

Now that Bush is no longer in office and Obama is in line to be blamed for any attacks on the country, the same people who defined waterboarding as torture (how many people have been permanently scarred by waterboarding?) are now busy re-defining torture again.

These same people are now saying that nothing that the Obama administration allows in interrogation is torture, by definition.

How convenient.


Via Glenn Reynolds: ACTUALLY, I THINK THAT’S PRETTY MUCH THE POLICY: “Is he also going to end torture, except where it might yield useful information?”


The MSM leads with the headline (from Knowxnews)

Sources: Obama ready to end harsh interrogations

Except for

Still under debate is whether to include a loophole that would allow exceptions in extraordinary cases.

Oh, did the AP writers think that harsh interrogations were the first thing that the Bush administration did? The writers for the paper are such dicks. In their imagination, Dick Cheney gave instructions to the CIA “Before you question them, don’t ask if they know anything; tear out their nails and teeth first.”

And how about this for the anti-"harsh interrogation" crowd?

The proposed loophole, which could come in the form of a classified annex to the manual, is designed to satisfy intelligence experts who fear that an outright ban of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques would limit the government in obtaining threat information that could save American lives. It would also preserve Obama's flexibility to authorize any interrogation tactics he might deem necessary for national security.

But the Obama administration is adamant. No torture. Nothing we do is torture. No way, no how.

Waterboarding

Dana Milbank gives us an historical overview of 'waterboarding" from the Inquisition through Pol Pot's Cambodia to the CIA today.

And it's all historically interesting. But like anything, the use of terms changes over time.

At one time, a "Liberal" was a person who wanted small, non-intrusive government. Today, the opposite is true.

At one time, Fascist and Communist governments were allies, and invaded Poland together. Today we are told they were polar opposites. What is the truth?

One example of waterboarding given by Milbank:

a prostrate man having his nose pinched and water poured down his throat. Nearby, a woodcut showed an executioner from the Spanish Inquisition spraying a hose into an inverted woman's mouth. Across the room: another painting of a torture scene and a photo of the torture implements.

So is that what we are doing?

Or how about this:

Another water-torture survivor, Henri Alleg, called in from France. Alleg has written a book about being tortured by the French in Algeria describing how a wooden wedge was put in his mouth and water poured in. He lost consciousness and one of his interrogators "was hitting my stomach with his fist to make me throw out the water I had swallowed."

"They went on with electricity, burning with torches of paper, and so on,"

If Milbank is to be believed, this is what the CIA has been doing ... using

a weapon perfected by Torquemada

What is Dan Milbank saying? While the article is probably a fair summary of the meeting he attended, I don't believe that the groups sponsoring this event planned to give an evenhanded account of interrogation techniques. The references to the Inquisition are simply an appeal to emotion.

Milbanks states:

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

But then goes out of his way to suggest that is exactly what is happening. It's dishonest and repulsive, and par for the course.

In defense of waterboarding

Here's a radical idea: people should not be killed by terrorists, even people who don't believe terrorism is a problem and want to prevent us from uncovering terrorist plots.

When captured in Pakistan in 2002, Zubaydah was one of the world's most notorious terrorists. The 31-year-old Saudi had compiled in his young life 37 different aliases and was under a sentence of death in Jordan for a failed plot to blow up two hotels jammed with American and Israeli tourists. The evidence was not hearsay: Zubaydah was overheard on the phone planning the attacks, which were then thwarted. He was a key planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, was thought to be field commander of the attack that killed 17 U.S. sailors on the USS Cole, and was involved in planning a score of other terror attacks, successful and unsuccessful. He was considered to be a primary recruiter and manager of al-Qaeda training camps.

He was, in short, a highly successful, fully engaged, career mass murderer. Think back to those pictures of workers crouched in windows high up in the burning World Trade Center towers, choosing whether to jump to their death or be burned alive. This was in part Abu Zubaydah's handiwork.

At the time of his capture in 2002, just six months after the Sept. 11 attacks, there was strong reason to believe Zubaydah knew virtually the entire organizational structure and agenda of al-Qaeda around the world. He was supervising ongoing plots to kill hundreds if not thousands of people. He was, for obvious reasons, disinclined to share this knowledge. Subjected briefly to waterboarding - less than a minute, according to published reports - he became cooperative and provided information that, according to the government, resulted in preventing planned attacks and capturing other key al-Qaeda leaders.

In the six years that have passed since the Manhattan towers collapsed, we have gained (partly through the interrogation of men like Zubaydah) a much clearer understanding of al-Qaeda and the threat it poses. While the chance of further murderous attacks is always with us, it is fair to say few of us feel the same measure of alarm we did then. The diminishment of this threat is at least in part due to the heroic efforts of the CIA, the military, and allies around the world in targeting terrorist cells.

In the process, the menace of Zubaydah himself has deflated. Today, he is just another little man in a orange jumpsuit at Guantánamo. Our national concern has shifted from stopping him to figuring out what to do with him.

And to second-guessing what was done to him. Waterboarding is a process by which a detainee is strapped down and forced to ingest and inhale water until he experiences the terror of drowning. It is not torture in the traditional sense of inflicting pain; it inflicts fear, intense, visceral fear, without doing physical harm. It is a method calculated to straddle the definitions of coercion and torture, and as such merely proves that both methods inhabit the same slippery continuum. There is a difference between gouging out a man's eyes and keeping him awake, and waterboarding falls somewhere in between.

No, waterboarding does not fall somewhere in between. Unlike being shot with a Tazer or tear-gassed, there is no record of anyone being injured by waterboarding. Ever.

"Torture" inflicts pain, it leaves scars, in many cases it results in permanent disabilities and - frequently - death. Just as the Left has managed to capture the meaning of Fascism, they have now re-defined torture as anything that causes terrorist to talk.

Al-Qaeda Torture Center Discovered

It could be that AQI has taught Iraqis a hard lesson in violence and depravity. Iraqis tipped the US to the torture center, where the terrorists indulged their every cruel whim in the name of radical Islam. They provide an extreme example of what happens with extended insurgencies, and the Iraqis want stability and quiet. They want the torture rooms closed -- and now they know who to call to accomplish that.

Via Captain Ed.

The CIA briefed four Congressional leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, on the controversial practice of waterboarding over five years ago.

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

It doesn't get any better than this. Thank you internet for being our memory when the drive-by-media tries to help the Democrats rewrite the past.

You Don't Get to Rewrite History, Not with the Internet, Not Any More.

Instapunk on Stephen King and "torture."

That's why there's such a disconnect between the pyrotechnical outrage over waterboarding and the comparatively blase treatment of real torture. King's deliberate mixing of the subjects of torture and voyeurism forcibly invoked the memory of a photo so awful, and yet so sickeningly relevant, that I'm posting it only as a link. But I demand that you go look at it, especially if you're one of the ones who rant about waterboarding as torture and believe that our media are more disposed to flaunt sexuality than cover "substantive" matters like egregious human rights violations.

Here's the link. Here's the story that documents the facts:

“At first, they kept Ms. Wang in isolation. Two collaborators monitored her. She was denied sleep and forced to stand still in the corner of the room. The next day, she had to sit on a chair with her hands tied behind her back to the back of the chair. At night, they had her wear a motorcycle helmet.

“The guards kept chopsticks and a basin of cold water ready to use, and whenever Ms. Wang closed her eyes, they poured water over her and hit the helmet hard with the chopsticks.

Sound a bit like waterboarding? Unspeakable. Where's Amnesty International? Where's the New York Times? Somebody should do something. Somebody did. Her guards.

“Two guards from Benxi, holding electric batons, shouted, “We will see who is tougher!” The two men tore Ms. Wang’s shirt open and shocked her breasts with two electric batons for 30 minutes.

“Afterwards, they made her stand still for the entire night. The next morning, guard Guo Tieying asked Ms. Wang nastily whom she would follow. Ms. Wang replied, “I will follow the teachings of Falun Gong.”

“Guo Tieying immediately brought in two guards and several collaborators to torture her. They tore a bed sheet into strips and tied her legs in a cross-legged position (with legs double-crossed, as in the ‘full lotus’ position). Next they handcuffed her arms behind her back and tied her upper body to her legs, making Ms. Wang look like a ball. Then they suspended her in the air by the handcuffs, with her hands still behind her back.

“She suffered excruciating pain from this torture for seven hours.

“Afterwards, Ms. Wang could no longer walk with her back straight, but was bent over, nor could she sit straight. Her breasts were disfigured by the intense shocks, and eventually developed serious infections.”

So, all you hyper-moral pacifist purists, if you could learn Ms. Wang's location and save her by waterboarding a captured guard, would you do it? Or is her permanent crippling and disfigurement a satisfactory consequence of your own personal interpretation of right and wrong? That's what you seem to be saying by your absolute opposition to any form of physical coercion, even if it doesn't maim or kill.

But if that's really your position, then you've entered the paradox zone. You have to explain -- to your own satisfaction -- why it is less moral to commit a lesser crime in order to prevent a larger crime than it is to enable a larger crime by refusing to commit a lesser crime. You can't allow the SWAT sniper to shoot the kidnapper who's holding a knife to your spouse's throat. You can't acquit the woman who kills her rapist in an act of self defense. You can't acquit the father who kills a child-molester in the act of sodomizing his infant daughter. In all these examples the killers are guilty of the same order of crime you're too moral to commit.
...
What's really odd is that the reputedly moral stance against any form of torture is so often adopted by the so-called progressives who are so busily insisting on atheism as a superior philosophical stance for the national culture. The anti-waterboarding lobby probably has more members in common with Richard Dawkins's anti-God army than with the backward Christian soldiers who are willing to torture a terrorist to save a city. But it's the Christians who are risking irrational damnation. The rationalists are defying their own devotion to mathematics as the ruling principle by refusing to take personal responsibility for a reprehensible act by one unit on behalf of millions of other units of their own species. Ironically, such sacrifices make more empirical sense in a godless universe than in a divinely judged universe in which death is not the final, fatal end of accountability.

The thing is, in reality, all of these philosophical paradoxes are beside the point. It's all so much simpler than that if we're a nation of brainless, characterless, spread-legged cows like Britney, Lindsey, and Paris. All the harping on waterboarding is undertaken in the certainty that most of us know we couldn't withstand even as mild a form of torture as this. In fact, waterboarding is about as far as our individual imaginations can take us. We're better able to envision not being able to breathe for a few seconds than to comprehend unanesthetized castration with a dull knife or public limb-by-limb amputation followed by disembowelment or -- well, something truly impossible -- like being beheaded live (!) on videotape by a religious fanatic with a rusty pruning saw.

If we can't imagine surviving it or doing it ourselves, that's supposed to be the end of the discussion. In the progressive egalitarian model, all people are basically the same. Regardless of our origins and cultures, we're no better and no worse than anyone else. If we couldn't commit acts of deliberate premeditated cruelty, neither could anyone else. Unless the evil handful of real oppressors in the world provoked us beyond endurance. So if ordinary people are committing acts of savage violence, it must be because of that handful of real oppressors, who are objectively evil -- because their crimes, even if they are nominally lesser, are codified and cold-blooded rather than spontaneous and passionate. The waterboarding of the oppressors is worse than the beheadings and mutilations of the universal everyman. There's no basis for comparison at all. Thus, no comparisons will be drawn.

But there's a hole in the egalitarian facade that is perfectly exemplified by Stephen King. Here's a man who has no problem at all with imagining in vivid detail the very worst things that can be done to a human being. Yet he still pretends that waterboarding is worse than any crime committed by the devotedly savage among us. His outrage about waterboarding has to be a pose. His suggestion that Jenna Bush be waterboarded for the purpose of humiliating his political nemeses is both hypocrtical and voyeuristic. And Time Magazine's willingness to give him print space without interrogating his lifelong penchant for sadism is evidence of the phony moralism of those who presume to be our philosophical mentors.

So: How do you pussies feel about all the MSM's Britney-Lindsey-Paris crotch shots (still NSFW) now that you know you're really leering at a portrait of what you've become? Don't know what to say? I'm sure America's Dickens would be happy to explain it to you better than I can.

Stephen King.

I wish I had said that.

Waterboarding: Two Other Perspectives

What is torture and is waterboarding torture?

Little has been writeen on this subject that is either hyperbole or moral preening.

The Suicidal Pursuit of Perfection Revisited

What does a psychologically damaged feminist and Frank Rich have in common?

Mugabe: a tyrant from the start

It's possible the the new owner of the LA Times is having an effect. This is the most incredible article to appear in a Liberal media organ in a long time.

The characterization of Mugabe as a good man gone wrong extends to popular culture as well. ...

But this popular conception of Mugabe -- propagated by the liberals who championed him in the 1970s and 1980s -- is absolutely wrong. From the beginning of his political career, Mugabe was not just a Marxist but one who repeatedly made clear his intention to run Zimbabwe as an authoritarian, one-party state. Characteristic of this historical revisionism is former Newsweek southern Africa correspondent Joshua Hammer, writing recently in the liberal Washington Monthly that "more than a quarter-century after leading his guerrilla army to victory over the racist regime of Ian Smith in white-minority-ruled Rhodesia, President Robert Mugabe has morphed into a caricature of the African Big Man."

But Mugabe did not "morph" into "a caricature of the African Big Man." He has been one since he took power in 1980 -- and he displayed unmistakable authoritarian traits well before that. Those who were watching at the time should have known what kind of man Mugabe was, and the fact that so many today persist in the contention that Mugabe was a once-benign ruler speaks much about liberal illusions of African nationalism....

All the participants in the Rhodesian war used vicious tactics. But Mugabe displayed a particular ruthlessness that ought to have indicated what sort of ruler he might one day become. In 1978, four black moderates announced that they had reached an "internal settlement" with the white regime, paving the way for democratic elections. One of these leaders, Ndabaningi Sithole, dispatched 39 envoys to meet representatives of Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, another guerrilla leader. The envoys were captured, murdered and, according to Time magazine, "their bodies were then laid out by the guerrillas in a grisly line at the side of the road as a warning to local tribespeople."

The following year, in protest of the election that then-Premier Ian Smith had organized with black leaders willing to lay down their arms, Mugabe's organization released a death list naming 50 "Zimbabwean black bourgeoisie, traitors, fellow-travelers and puppets of the Ian Smith regime, opportunistic running-dogs and other capitalist vultures." During those elections, Mugabe and Nkomo's forces killed 10 black civilians attempting to vote. Mugabe's men also blew up a Woolworth's store and massacred Catholic missionaries.

And of course the NYT Times, careful to maintain it's record of being the mouthpiece of every Marxist dictator in the planet had this to say:

"Mr. Mugabe has quickly established himself as an African statesman of the first rank."

The media already had its villain -- Rhodesia's intractable whites -- and portraying Mugabe as just another African strongman bent on turning his country into a one-party dictatorship would have complicated the story of good versus evil.

Torture

I have just seen the first part of Ken Burns’ series on World War 2.

I never want to hear again from the moral cretins who refer to what the US has done during the Iraq war as “torture.”

Rereading Vietnam

From the Atlantic.com. I doubt if the Virginian Pilot would understand.

In December 1967, a prisoner was dumped in Day's cell on the outskirts of Hanoi, known as the Plantation. This prisoner's legs were atrophied and he weighed under 100 pounds. Day helped scrub his face and nurse him back from the brink of death. The fellow American was Navy Lieutenant Commander John Sidney McCain III of the Panama Canal Zone. As his health improved, McCain's rants against his captors were sometimes as ferocious as Day's. The North Vietnamese tried and failed, through torture, to get McCain to accept a release for their own propaganda purposes: The lieutenant commander was the son of Admiral John McCain Jr., the commander of all American forces in the Pacific. "Character," writes the younger McCain, quoting the 19th century evangelist Dwight Moody, "is what you are in the dark," when nobody's looking and you silently make decisions about how you will act the next day.

In early 1973, during a visit to Hanoi, North Vietnamese officials told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that they would be willing to free McCain into his custody. Kissinger refused, aware that there were prisoners held longer than McCain, ahead of him in the line for release. McCain suffered awhile longer in confinement, then, once freed, thanked Kissinger for "preserving my honor." The two have been good friends since. McCain blurbs with gusto Bud Day's memoir. The senator writes: "I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the dimensions of human greatness."
[...]
There is little sense here that the war was lost. While historians cite 1968 as a turning point because of the home front's reaction to the Tet offensive, the My Lai massacre, and the protests at the Democratic party convention in Chicago, on the ground in Vietnam, 1968 marked a different trend: William Westmoreland was replaced by Creighton Abrams, population security rather than enemy body counts became the measure of merit, "clear and hold" territory replaced the dictum of "search and destroy," and building up the South Vietnamese Army became the top priority. "There came a time when the war was won," even if the "fighting wasn't over," writes Lewis Sorley, a West Point graduate and career Army officer, in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (1999). By the end of 1972, Sorley goes on, one could travel almost anywhere in South Vietnam in relative security, even as American ground forces were almost gone. Retirees I know in the armed forces affirm how much more benign an environment South Vietnam was during this period than the Iraq of today. Still, as one veteran told me: Everyone has different memories of Vietnam, depending upon where they served, and what time they were there.

Sorley's book was reviewed prominently by the major liberal newspapers and foreign policy journals. They gave it generally respectful write-ups, a sign of a reassessment of Vietnam based less on ideology than on paying more attention to the second half of a war: a period to which, as Sorley notes, Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History (1983) devotes only 103 out of 670 pages, and Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bright Shining Lie (1988) devotes 65 out of 790 pages. Sorley told me he isn't sure what would have happened had Congress not cut off aid to South Vietnam at about the time the ground situation was at its most hopeful. He felt that a respectable case might be made that it would have survived. His book has seen a rise in sales among military officers eager to know how the ground situation in Iraq might be improved to the level it had been in Vietnam, thanks to Gen. Abrams's change of strategy.

A similar thesis emerges in The Battle of An Loc (2005) by retired Army Lt. Col. James H. Willbanks, who describes a 60-day siege in mid-1972, in which heavily outnumbered South Vietnamese troops and their American advisors (including himself) rebuffed several North Vietnamese divisions. This gave Nixon the fig leaf he needed for a final withdrawal. Optimism then might not have been warranted, but it wasn't altogether blind. Lt. Col. Willbanks said he wrote his book, published by Indiana University Press, for the same reason Sorley did: to give more attention to the second half of the war.

By all means, let's not have another debate on Viet Nam, right? The MSM has its story and is sticking to it. [sarcasm]

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson in NR Online:

In all the hysteria over the Bush Vietnam evocation, people are losing their sanity. Now those in Vietnam are being dragged out and quoted by the mainstream media to prove Bush’s lunacy. But what are subjects of a police state supposed to say — “I wish our present Communist dictatorship had lost”? Do we think Cubans routinely give widely publicized interviews criticizing their Castroites — and live?

What is a Hate Crime? The Christian - Newsom Murders.

The Chicago Tribune’s Howard Witt writes a fair article about the Christian/Newsom abduction, rape and murders. But there is a weak ending. Referencing the statistics he notes that

Blacks are also the overwhelming majority of victims of attacks recorded by the FBI as hate crimes. In 2005, blacks were the victims in 68 percent of nearly 5,000 hate-crime incidents nationwide, while whites were the victims in 20 percent of the cases. Whites accounted for 60 percent of known hate-crime offenders, while blacks accounted for 20 percent.

But earlier in the article he notes that the police in Knoxville insist that the Christian/Newsom murders were not hate crimes because:

We know from our investigation that the people charged in this case were friends with white people, socialized with white people, dated white people. So not only is there no evidence of any racial animus, there's evidence to the contrary

This “some of my best friends are white” excuse does not pass the laugh test. There is virtually no police department in the country that is willing to face the prospect of inflaming racial tensions by claiming a black-on-white crime is racially motivated. In fact, I am surprised that the “official” percentage of white victims of hate crimes is as high as 20%.

Mary Newsom disagrees with the police

"If this wasn't a hate crime, then I don't know how you would define a hate crime," said Mary Newsom, Christopher's mother. "It may have started out as a carjacking, but what it developed into was blacks hating whites. To do the things they did, they would have to hate them to do that."

Here's another statistic from the article:

In 2005, there were more than 645,000 victims of cross-racial violent crimes between blacks and whites in the U.S. In 90 percent of those crimes, black offenders attacked white victims.

At its core, the creation of a special category of “hate crimes” is pernicious because it sets up the criminal justice system not just a determiner of facts but as mind readers. Once we have determined that "A" killed "B," and did so in a particularly brutal manner, that should be the end of the mind reading exercise. Yes, the degree of culpability can be determined: was the act pre-meditated or committed in a moment of passion? Those are facts that can be determined. But introducing the issue of the race of the murderer and his victim is, at its root, racist and has no place in a society whose goal is to become color blind. This should be especially important to the black community because it has a 90% chance (see above statistic) of being accused of a hate crime once the fear of inflaming racial tensions wears off.

That said, I agree with Mary Newsom. No one does what was done to Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom unless a deep hatred is involved. And the only thing the criminals knew about this couple was the color of their skin. Justice must be served.

Comparative Torture 101

At Human Events Mac Johnson discusses the strange torture of "torture."

...the definition of torture seems to have undergone a remarkable and elastic expansion in the hands of a crusading press (not that the press would approve of being called “crusading,” which might be deemed offensive to non-Christians). Human rights are apparently quite precious indeed when defending them offers a chance to criticize the United States. And more than one observer has claimed that the United States use of “torture” has robbed her of any moral authority she had when the “so-called” War on Terror began. Allegedly, America is now little better than Al Qaeda.

Strange then, that the recent discovery in Iraq (which has no relationship to the so-called War on Terror), of a graphic how-to guide to torture, published by Al Qaeda for the training of its operatives, has received so little coverage by the usually human-rights obsessed mainstream media. The guide, done in comic book form for the benefit of illiterate dungeon masters, was found in an actual torture facility -- a dank, filthy hole of a basement, complete with chains hanging from the ceiling and a variety of whips, pliers, blowtorches, power drills, hammers, meat cleavers, vices and electrocution devices laid out nearby.

[...]
Recommended Al Qaeda Torture Technique #1: “Eye Removal”

Alleged American “Torture” Technique #1: Majid Khan, a Pakistani associate of Khalid Sheik Mohammed being held at Guantanamo Bay, has made a “Statement of Torture” to a military tribunal (reported by the BBC) that he was “psychologically tortured” by the United States by being given new eyeglasses with the wrong prescription. The unfortunate Mr. Khan also “produced a list of further examples of psychological torture, which included the provision of ‘cheap, branded, unscented soap’, the prison newsletter, noisy fans and half-inflated balls in the recreation room that ‘hardly bounce’.” This torture was so intolerable that Khan twice attempted to commit suicide by chewing through one of his arteries. Clearly, we are the ones that are unbalanced.

A Video Report on the Murders of Christopher Newsome and Channon Christian

Via Michelle Malkin.