If they won't believe me

[pecunium]

Maybe they'll believe John Le Carré

“I know about interrogation,” he said, alluding to his days as a British spy in the 1950s. “I’ve done interrogations, and I can tell you this: By extracting information under torture, you make a fool of yourself. You obtain information that isn’t true. You receive names of people who are supposedly guilty and aren’t. You land yourself with a wild goose chase, and you miss what is being handed to you on a plate, and that is the possibility of bonding with someone and engaging with them and talking to them reasonably.”

Comments

[shunra.livejournal.com]

MAJOR pet peeve: people who don't believe facts until they've seen them in fiction or by a reliable-in-their-view writer of (or actor in) fiction.

I respond to that sort of thing as though it were Vogon poetry.


Clearly Le Carré is correct. Clearly you are. Common sense makes it so, not to mention all of human experience. (Can I have another planet please? This week has been brutal!)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I can't offer you another planet, how about anothe plant instead:

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Thank you, that is knot comforting, indeed, if you'll excuse the homophone.

Here's one that made me think of you (http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/most-alien-looking-place-on-earth.html), the other day.

On that island, regular lenses capture the sort of things I've come to associate with your combination of macro lens and eye. (I'm still trying to figure out what the thing that looks like a snail inside a mechanical jaw is. Long live RSS.)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I saw that post. I want to visit. The plants remind me of things made with the oddball plant generator I linked to a while back.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

They won't listen to him either: They've been brainwashed. :(

[daedala.livejournal.com]

I won't believe anything until I hear it from Anthony Price!

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

We - "we" - never wanted information.

When an outcome is obvious, it is at least worth argument to consider that the outcome was intended.

At the beginning of the war, Ann Coulter felt free to call for the execution of people who she didn't feel to be loyal enough. "Loyal enough" by her own arbitrary standard. She was hardly the only one feeling entitled to set those kinds of standards.

In a climate like that, is it any wonder that interrogation methods that would have involved viewing the person being questioned as not-other were avoided?

People were encouraged to view everyone as as Other as possible, to protect themselves.

We didn't torture people to get information. We tortured people to torture. The "hyperpower" had no need of gaining information. To seek to gain something suggests something is lacked. A few short years ago, that suggestion was treason. Or, treason on the part of anyone not in the in-group. As for the people in the in-group, it seems to me they bought their own press.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

I believe you.

Knowing you has done odd things for my taste in fiction, especially supposedly mindless thrillers, let me tell you. Le Carre and MacLean are still in. Higgins is increasingly out, though his early stuff was honest.

But God love Le Carre for taking his pulpit and using it, however he got it.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

One can hope.