Thelma Drake's Unintelligible Torture Stance
By: dsvabeachdems
Published On: 7/30/2008 10:13:23 PM
A recent missive penned by (or at least over the signature of) Representative Drake is more than alarming in what it reveals about her concept of democracy, human rights, national security, and the intelligence community. Succinctly: she doesn't have a clue or a frame of reference. This is revealed very early in her letter as she blames the inability to prevent 9/11 on an intelligence failure which by inference comes to mean our failure to torture. Hard to say who it was we should have been torturing to develop that intelligence, but I doubt that our incompetent intelligence community had the right fellows in custody ever. It is important to grasp that we rarely "obtain intelligence." We develop intelligence from information we gather and those sources must be vetted.
Maybe she wants to tune up to partner with Dan Quayle on Dancing with the Stars, for here Representative Drake is dancing with the devil. In part, she reports that "...it was important to do everything in our power to protect our service members from reciprocal treatment and frivolous legal challenges." An interesting employment of the passive voice to justify her original position. Our service members would have no such concern if we took the track suggested since the time of George Washington: treat our prisoners the way we expect our soldiers to be treated as prisoners. Then there would be nothing to protect against, only to protest about from the advantage of the moral high ground; something we have forfeited. (The Representative has never served nor had a child serve and had to consider what it might be like to be treated or have her child treated like those we see here.) There would be no concern about "frivolous legal challenges" if we took our responsibility to set the human rights bar appropriately. It isn't frivolous legal challenges that the administration is attempting to preclude and Representative Drake is championing the defense from; it is any legal challenge. This is a guise that will be employed and expanded to shield what the administration knows were/are war crimes. They are very, very afraid and looking for anything to cling to in order to defend themselves when that inevitable time comes.
Her first sloppy segue leads us away from concern for our service members to the real crux of the matter. Suddenly we are talking about the intelligence community writ large. Let us remember that these genius "civilian intelligence professionals" she refers to have demonstrated a track record that indicates these techniques will be used on more innocent bystanders than "those who wish to kill as many Americans as possible," thereby spawning more of "those who wish to kill as many Americans as possible" than they identify from both the innocents who are tortured and their kin. Brilliant.
While it may be common knowledge that our enemies are trained to resist those techniques that they know about, it is also irrelevant. As much practice as I have had at being miserable, misery remains as uncomfortable as ever. Though training may increase the time to elicit the information, that information, patiently developed, is more likely to be reliable and not just the product of an attempt by the victim to deliver anything that will stop the torture. And if it isn't in the manual, it is torture. Oh, and for your information, I am confident that if we had been employing torture to develop intelligence prior to 9/11, our defenses would have been positioned at the ready to defend Disneyworld from a massive chemical attack. That's the quality of intelligence developed using shortcuts.
Finally there is that nice segue by the princess of the polemic to the price of gasoline on her letter's signature page. A hundred years from now, not a single mention will be made about the price of gasoline during this dark administration's tenure. They will, however, have much to say about these "crusaders of democracy," their human rights track record, and their failure to secure our national security. What I know today is that when President Bush invaded Iraq without constitutional authority, the price of gasoline was less than half that at this moment.
Cross posted at VBDems.org - Blogging our way to Democratic wins in Virginia Beach! Go RK!
Comments
A Telling Violation of Terms of Use (dsvabeachdems - 7/31/2008 8:25:33 AM)
Yes that image was disgusting. But this provides insight into what Representative Drake's license to torture represents. Maybe this one will meet Photobucket's terms of use and put the other one in perspective.
Maybe she wants to tune up to partner with Dan Quayle on Dancing with the Stars, for here Representative Drake is dancing with the devil. In part, she reports that "...it was important to do everything in our power to protect our service members from reciprocal treatment and frivolous legal challenges." An interesting employment of the passive voice to justify her original position. Our service members would have no such concern if we took the track suggested since the time of George Washington: treat our prisoners the way we expect our soldiers to be treated as prisoners. Then there would be nothing to protect against, only to protest about from the advantage of the moral high ground; something we have forfeited. (The Representative has never served nor had a child serve and had to consider what it might be like to be treated or have her child treated like those we see here.) There would be no concern about "frivolous legal challenges" if we took our responsibility to set the human rights bar appropriately. It isn't frivolous legal challenges that the administration is attempting to preclude and Representative Drake is championing the defense from; it is any legal challenge. This is a guise that will be employed and expanded to shield what the administration knows were/are war crimes. They are very, very afraid and looking for anything to cling to in order to defend themselves when that inevitable time comes.
