Build Your Case

The adage is famous, but the attribution ranges from Mark Twain to Ben Franklin to Oscar Wilde and a dozen others: "never get in a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel."

The idea is that you can't possibly counter the quantity of opposition that will be arrayed against you even if your are right in your position. Try to fight the mainstream media and you will lose. Try to counter a major talk radio figure who has three hours a day to rant against you and you will lose. Attempt to speak truth against huge Internet blogs and e-zines who will flood you with links and graphics and "authority" voices you will be overwhelmed.

I couldn't resist a look at Salon today where they offer "The 13 People Who Made Torture Possible." Since we've already considered that the legal opinions rendered in accordance with US and international law were little more than counsel's reviews and that the enhanced interrogation techniques were a far cry from finger-nail excissions, rope tricks and the rack I wondered who these enablers were.

I could have saved my time. You know the names already.

What really caught my eye though was this paragraph:

The Torture 13 exploited the federal bureaucracy to establish a torture regime in two ways. First, they based the enhanced interrogation techniques on techniques used in the U.S. military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program. The program -- which subjects volunteers from the armed services to simulated hostile capture situations -- trains servicemen and -women to withstand coercion well enough to avoid making false confessions if captured. Two retired SERE psychologists contracted with the government to "reverse-engineer" these techniques to use in detainee interrogations.

You see, I've been through SERE training. All US military combat aircrews are subjected to it.

Two things stand out in the paragraph. First we weren't "volunteers." We were required to take the training. It wasn't a choice, but a job qualification. There is no opting out.

Second, can anyone decipher that objective statement? "trains...to withstand coercion well enough to avoid making false confession..."???

So, I was trained well enough to make only true confessions? That hardly seems like a worthy goal. I could make a true confession simply for the asking. No need to torture me for that. What do you want to know? I'm trained not to be false!

The conclusion one reaches after that paragraph is that the author of the agit-prop piece is clueless about SERE and by extension the remainder of the assertions crumble under scrutiny.

Go here and read it for yourself:

The Usual Suspects Listed

I guess the adage should be not to argue with someone who accesses bandwidth by the gigabyte per microsecond.