Is that a suggestion?

Try and be kind to Jbecton, although he's demonstrated his true colors / colours, especially in his last couple of posting. He was traumatized by 'Nam, as were hundreds of thousands of US conscripts were, indeed, probable millions. Unfortunately, he is unable to vent his hostilely in the right direction, not at the North Vietnamese, or VC, who were defending their country, but at his government who sent him there ("our fathers lied, and we died"). Here it is, decades later, and all he is able to see is a "dog eat dog world", poor fellow. However, having said that, he does have to accept some responsibility though. His last statement that "he doesn't like it", well psychology 101, people love their sin.

Forgive me if I am wrong but I always was under the impression that the British counter- insurgency in Malaysia was considered one of the few cases where a guerilla movement was defeated.

Thanks lateralus (certainly not a Tool though),
I'm familiar with this chestnut.
Dig a little deeper;

http://againstwot.com/2006/04/what-actu ... aysia.html

Re. JBeckton "...there can be no question that more useful information woud be gathered by force than by following rules."

In fact that statement is incorrect on the facts. Go here:

www.mcitta.org

Marine Corps Interrogator Translator Teams Association.

Read and read until your eyes hurt: they are in complete agreement about the fact that torture does not work, and that skillful questioning combined with humane treatment is what does work.

These are/were highly trained individuals who could and did extract actionable intel from hardened hostiles in the midst of combat. They include WW2 vets, whose work helped win the war.

The starting point for our interrogation problems in Iraq was the use of individuals without sufficient training, and the use of locals (i.e. potential spies) as translators.

As for the use of locals, try this on for size (and I don't think this example is classified). Locals working on base in Iraq were found taking GPS readings at various locations on the base.

Now why do you think an Iraqi who works as a hired contractor on a US military base would need to take GPS readings? So he can find his way back to his bunk at the end of his shift...?

You put someone like that in a translating job and you have just handed him the keys to the kingdom. You couldn't do worse unless you sat him down at a Prophet console (mobile SIGINT intercept platform) with headphones on and said "tell us what they're saying on the phone..."

In the early days of the war, sixteen US military translators-in-training, ten or twelve of whom were specializing in Middle Eastern languages, were fired because it was discovered that they were gay.

Priorities, priorities!

Meanwhile, the rest of us do what we can to support the war by going shopping.

The generation that saved the world in WW2 must be spinning in their graves.

After the first catastrophic wave of European diseases killed untold millions of Native Americans, the survivors were defeated by the U.S. Army. The Indian Wars lasted most of the nineteenth century.

Disease greatly decreased the Indians' numbers early on, but they were finally beaten by the Army. All the tribes, except for the Seminoles of Florida, formally surrendered.

Thanks for the link RdSnt, I enjoyed the article. A few points popped out at me.



I do see Malyasia circa 1948-1960 being a model for Iraq 2003- in the minds of certain military thinkers, with of course Kurds to be "liberated" from Syria, Iran, perhaps even Turkey. Plus Sunni and Shia to keep apart.

Divide and Rule has always been a mainstay of Imperial powers.

One question that gets tossed around a lot is this one: Is America an Empire? This article made me ask myself that again and I'm still unsure, a different kind of Imperial power I think.

One last point. The article did not flatly state that Britain was defeated or wasn't defeated, but it sure made me think more about what the definition of "success" is. Perhaps it's in the eye of the beholder.

Again, thanks for the read, I may just read more on this Malaysian war just to become a little more acquainted with another fine chapter of homo erectus history.

Do you disagree?

Have you ever picked up a history book? What leads you to a different conclusion? Do you toast to "world peace"? Welcome back to reality.

By the way I never set foot in Vietnam.

Did you really expect a government site not to condone torture? Great detective work.



Surely you aren't under the impression that we did not commit all the same war crimes in WWII, CNN just wasn't there to cover the story.

Would that be the same generation that practiced racism, built the suburbs and the oil hungry infastructure that threatens us today?

Yeah, they would be very disapointed in us.

Yo, Jbeckton, that site was a .org, not a .gov or a .mil.

If you want to try to convince anyone here that a private group of vets is acting as a secret mouthpiece for the Regime, and that their dissents against the Regime are actually part of a vast cover-up for the Regime, go right ahead, someone is bound to believe you. Not me though.

As for generations, it could as easily be said that the 1960s kids practiced vicious sexism, sung about it with pride in the anthems of their day, and treated automobiles as if they were toys, with the results we see today. And they didn't save the world from fascism so they don't have anything like an excuse.

But it was "official"

I'm not trying to convince anyone anything of the type. Only that the rules of interrigation are set fourth in an attempt to get equal treatment of our prisoners, which rarely happens.

Also, although I would make no claims that it hummane or right, but if a bomb is going to go off in the next 5 minutes, and you have found a man with a bag full of explosives and bomb making material, is traditional interrogation going to get the job done in time?

If you bend the rules for whatever reason then are forever labled a war criminal. Now which is more criminal?

Niether is a "good choice", but which one is "least horrible"? And after playing it by the book, and not getting the information in time, then watching people die or escape because of it; then you turn on the news and see them decapitate "prisoners" for no reason other than to spread fear.

What do you do the next time?

I'm just trying to emphasize the conditions people are put under durring war, not justify it.

Yes, I agree, soldiers under the stress of combat often resort to the use of force in interrogation. That is a deviation from the accepted rules of warfare. Combat stress can break people in all kinds of ways. Witness the guy who just got sentenced by court martial to 100 years in the brig for rape/murder of civilians in Iraq. Those cases are few and far between, but subtler forms of breakage occur more often.

However, scenarios of the "torture the prisoner to save a city from a terrorist atomic bomb" type are fiction, cooked up by Hollywood for dramatic effect. In reality if you've got someone on your hands who is already committed to martyrizing himself, no amount of putting his (and or his kid's) testicles in a vice is going to get the information in time to be actionable intel. The guy can simply lie and tell you a clever story to get his ballz out of the vice whlie you go on a wild goose chase and the terrorist atomic bomb goes off. Case closed.

Scenarios of that type are one subcategory within the larger category of an exercise called "what price your soul?" The game generally goes like this: Under what conditions would you be willing to compromise your morals? One player's goal is to rachet up the stakes and split hairs to make the other player cave in. The other player's goal is to stick by their values no matter what. It is entirely possible to contrive a scenario that is logically plausible in order to try to get someone to forfeit their morals.

The "torture the terrorist before the bomb goes off" scenario has been popular of late. The one I find amusing is, "how many Popes would you shoot in order to get one that changes the Catholic Church's doctrine on contraception, thereby saving the world from overpopulation?" Logically the answer to the latter question is, fewer Popes than the number of people who would die in an overpopulation dieoff crash. That's a hell of a lot of Popes, hopefully we won't have to go through quite that many!:-)

But, getting back to our hypothetical terrorist for a moment. Military deterrence is simply not effective against people who are committed to a martyrdom ideology. Military deterrence rests on the threat to be able to kill off an entire nation's government and ultimately an entire nation's people. This works with people who want to live, for example the leaders of the USA and USSR during the cold war. It does not work with people who want to die, any more than the threat of taking away someone's ice cream works on someone who doesn't care for ice cream.

And if you take someone who wants to die, and torture them until the pain causes them to go insane, all you have at that point is a crazy person, whose words are about as meaningful as the pattern of dog turds next to a fire hydrant.

The threat that works with martyr types, is the threat of being imprisoned with infidels for life, under conditions where they will not be able to communicate with the world-at-large. That neutralizes them as a hazard to anyone else, and it sure as hell deters those who want to get their 70-something teenage virgins while they are still young enough to get horny about 'em. After the horny hormones wear off, the virgins don't matter, and yesterday's wannabe martyr becomes tomorrow's burnt-out old bastard pacing back & forth in his cell muttering to himself and occasionally talking back to demons only he can hear.

Yes, but what about the tell us where this guy is before he gets away and we have to kill thousands more innocent people to get close to him again to make people feel safe knowing we have him even though there are a thousand more waiting to take his place scenario.

Thats more realistic.

Jbeckton, I'll meet your bet and raise it a notch.

What about the kidnapped bus-load of school children, after the terrs release a video of one of the kids having his head sawn off slowly in front of his friends, and threaten to do likewise to the rest of them...?

How'bout this one: You're on active duty. Your son is on active duty. Your son is in a convoy carrying nuclear warheads, and you've got sensitive intel saying the convoy is about to be hijacked and the only way to prevent the nuclear warheads falling into the hands of the enemy is to call down an air stike on the entire convoy, which will destroy the nuclear warheads and also kill your son.

See, there is no end to the scenarios one can construct in order to attempt to convince someone to do something they might otherwise find beyond the pale.

---

I believe those Marines are telling the truth on their website, along with many other professional military who have publicly objected to the present Administration's policies.

I am starting to wonder if perhaps there's more to your own words than meets the eye. Did you do something in combat that's been causing you much grief since then? I also believe in truth & reconciliation, as per Bishop Tutu: honesty and forgiveness. If there's something in your own background that's bugging you, the best thing to do is put it on the table and know that most of the people here will be willing to forgive. The first step toward dealing with traumatic events is to tell the story again and again, because that makes it possible to deal with the memories. Yes, I'm serious.

I've done nothing illegal and nothing I regret. I only wish people had a clue as to what they were takling about.