Happy Easter!

It is disturbing to see Marc Thiessen making a nice living off of talking points and tortured logic.  It is more disturbing to see that a major American newspaper finds him to be anything other than a curiosity.  In our Federalist 10 world, the wall separating economics from ethical philosophy is built on more than obscure correspondence; remuneration goes to goods and services that others are willing to pay for, not necessarily for those that are good.  Where one man sees a delusional niche, another sees comparative advantage.  This is not to question the integrity of certain arguments so much as to acknowledge the propensity of people to actually believe anything that their salary/salvation/peace of mind/SUV depends on.  Thiessen's extended Daily Show interview provides a more complete primer than the one Desultory Eclecticism copies and pastes below:

The late William Kunstler was once asked by Andy McCarthy why he never represented clients on the right with whose views he disagreed. Kunstler replied: “They have a right to an attorney, but they don’t have a right to ME.”

Kunstler chose his clients based on his values. And so do the lawyers working with his organization to represent al-Qaeda terrorists.  

--Marc Thiessen, 3/11/10

Perhaps unfairly moving away from Thiessen's own words to address a Thiessen talking point that rivals his al-Qaeda sympathizer insinuation...pull:

Based on lessons learned from survivors of the brutal North Korean and North Vietnam torture of US military prisoners of war, the Department of Defense ordered all branches of the services to implement comprehensive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (S.E.R.E.) training programs...
...Now, let’s see Congress: Maybe forty or so students per week, let’s say 100 minimum per month, 1,200 per year for over twenty or thirty years? It could be as many as 40,000 students trained in S.E.R.E. and “tortured” at the direction of, and under the watchful eye of the Congressional Majorities on both sides of the aisle. Be careful that the 40,000 of us who you have “tortured” don’t come after you today with tort claims. I heard it pays about $3 million per claim. 

--Cdr. Frank Wead 11/05/2007

If the technique is derived from the accounts of servicemen who were tortured by the North Koreans and Vietcong, and if it is used to train airmen and special forces soldiers at high risk of future capture to resist torture, doesn't that suggest that administering the procedure 183 times might qualify as torture?  What about 100? 10? 1?


Last autumn, Desultory Eclecticism attended a Columbia University conference on post-election Iran.  Panelist Maziar Bahari talked about his masked interrogator's self-proclaimed humanity: 'you have seen the barbarities that the Americans commit at Abu Ghraib; here in Iran we do not photograph you naked with other men.'  Bahari suggested that perhaps the Americans, newcomers to torture, had not yet refined the technique, that this inexperience relegated them to the bungling crudity of Lynndie England while Iran's neo-SAVAK secret police combined psychological deconstruction with periodic beatings.  Unfortunately, "Rosewater" was behind on his history; we have come far enough over the last eight years that the former Vice President can advocate waterboarding on national television and respected intellectuals can abandon epistemological sanity:

On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."

Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate. 

--Charles Krauthammer, 5/15/2009

The above passage elucidates two points of interest.  First, Krauthammer is apparently conceding that, at least by the standards of a government that takes tacit credit for sloppily executed assassinations, "enhanced interrogation" may in fact include "methods so brutal that they violated...existing...guidelines."  Second, persons, places, things, ideas--nouns really, but possibly some verbs and an occasional adjective as well--are either good, or bad.  Yitzhak Rabin was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for making a fairly reasonable deal with the PLO, therefore...therefore what?  Does Krauthammer understand that a reasonable chunk of the thinking American left--along with an idiot fringe--criticizes Nobel laureate Barack Obama for the continued existence of Guantanamo Bay prison, that people are inconsistent and complicated, than Nobel laureates sometimes kill flies and commit comma splices?  In his interview on the Daily Show, Mark Thiessen protests that "liberal darling" F.B.I. interrogator Ali Soufan employed methods that Abu Zubayda himself deemed more harsh than some of the latter "enhanced techniques" that the C.I.A. tested on him.  Yes, and...? Anti-torture interrogators are sometimes still rough?  Liberal's condone violence too?  Waterboarding is okay because Ali Soufan is not the messiah (Happy Easter!)?  What's the sequitur here?       


Perhaps similarly tortured logic holds an equally prominent place on the left and Desultory Eclecticism is simply oblivious to it.  As alluded to earlier, there are plenty of liberal idiots.  Their straw man arguments are easily refuted by sensible conservatives like David Frum and are rightly ridiculed and wrongly assumed to be representative by cheerleaders like Sean Hannity (tangent: one of Desultory Eclecticism's prospective D.C.-based brain surgeons was genuinely frightened by this "documentary" in the run-up to the 2008 election).  Keith Olberman may be an openly partisan jackass (and the greatest Sportscenter anchor of all time), but he at least seems to do his homework.  If there is a prominent, influential left-wing nut to rival Glenn Beck, Desultory Eclecticism has not found her.