I'll beat it out of 'em even if they do want to tell us!

I'm sitting here watching the Astros grudgingly work their way toward the end of a second win against the Cubs after watching the ending of The Great Raid, another of those formulaic WWII films which yearned to catch a ride on the coat tails of Saving Private Ryan with its template of glorifying the experience of the American fighting man during what was one of the most terrible conflicts in recorded history, not to mention one of the most far reaching in terms of how the ultimate outcome of it has shaped and is still shaping the world in countless ways right up to this very moment.

Ahhhh, the king of the run-on sentence is back in the HOUSE....

One of my issues with this series of films (which also includes Windtalkers and The Thin Red Line) is that while one of the apparent aims of all of them is to highlight the horrors of war that the professional fighting man is subjected to during the course of the conflict the main focus is on the experience of the United States fighting man with little attention paid to the opposition which, one must concede, is exposed to and must endure the exact same horrific episodes and conditions. The Japanese forces are shown as fellow Human Beings in a few scenes during Red Line, and there are briefs attempts at glimpsing the plight of the German Army regular soldier in Private Ryan (the surrendering soldiers shot with hands up at the end of the Normandy sequence opening the film, and Steamboat Willie), but they are tinged with humor that renders them without the appropriate weight for what they actually are: glimpses of the Jap or the Kraut as a fellow man in a plight that is chillingly similar to that of the average GI dogface stuck in a foxhole awaiting seemingly random orders from on high. One film that struck me with its (some would say unsuccessful) attempts at evenhandedness is Enemy At the Gates, which presented the plight of an invading army stuck in a circumstance where leadership has seemingly lost all initiative alongside the desperation of a defender pushed to the brink of logistical combat capabilities as well as Human survival in the form of the siege of Stalingrad. The narrow focus of the plot was the cat and mouse pursuit of a Russian sniper by a German master sniper, but the backdrop of a city the size of Cleveland transformed into a raging battlefront from block to block oozed from the back round during the entire film.

The bar to which all these films should be held is, of course, All Quiet on the Western Front, based on the novel by WWI German trench soldier Erich Maria Remarque.

But I digress.

Katherine Eban:

James Mitchell arrived at the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. He was one of America’s first high-value detainees. He was captured in March of 2002 in a firefight in Pakistan. He wound up in a safe house in Thailand. He was rushed to a hospital in order to save his life from infected wounds. The FBI had agents present at the scene, and because the CIA's interrogation team had not yet arrived, they began to interrogate Zubaydah.

And what they used was classic rapport-building techniques that almost every FBI agent is trained in, which is to find common ground with the person you’re interrogating, to treat them with humanity. And, lo and behold, Zubaydah responded and talked, and not only talked, but gave them the name of the person who had been the entire master planner of 9/11: K.S.M. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, referred to as Mukhtar. He identified him. He identified Jose Padilla. In other words, there was every indicator that rapport-building techniques were completely effective.

This first struck me as amazing, initially because it was one of the first occasions that I had heard about these techniques being used, without inflicting any pain or duress upon the subject, and then because the non pain and duress inductive methods were actually producing results in the form of credible information! Of course it couldn't last:

However, after those disclosures, the CIA interrogation team arrived with James Mitchell it tow and said, “Now, everything is going to change. We’re going to get him to say everything he knows, and we’re going to use these coercive techniques.” And, according to my sources, there was even a coffin present at the interrogation they were going to use to bury Zubaydah alive.

Now, the FBI agents who were present, once the CIA interrogation team introduced these harsh tactics -- basically there was the equivalent of a firefight within the safe house over what kind of tactics were going to be used. And the FBI ultimately deemed that its agents could not be present while coercive tactics were being used. You know, the FBI is a law enforcement agent. Their goal and their training is to bring people to trial using interrogation methods that are permissible at a trial, which don't include any of these coercive techniques. Of course, you couldn't bring anybody to trial saying that you had extracted a confession using these methods. And so, the result of the fight within the safe house between the FBI and the CIA was to give the CIA, which had much less experience with interrogations, control. And that’s how America's interrogation policies unfolded.

Or, as one of my fave authors phrased it in The Tommyknockers:

The FBI was on scene at 6:00 P.M., the CIA a 7:15 P.M. By 8:00, they were yelling about jurisdiction. At 9:15 P.M., a frightened, infuriated CIA agent named Speklin shot an FBI agent named Richardson. The incident was hushed up, but Bobbi and Gard would have understood perfectly--the Dallas Police were on the scene and in complete control of the situation.

All of this vengeful craziness seems to stem from the first few days after 9/11 and the soul searching that went on in the intelligence community about what wasn't done and why (so called 'human' intel and the types of contacts that needed to be initiated and fostered to gain such intel (with government money--who smells another Iran Contra scandal?)) and what needed to be done and whether or not we as a nation wanted to take a trip down that path (infiltrating the human networks and interpreting the intel gleaned from them). Based on the path that the administration has chosen, two conscious choices seem to have been made:

Infiltrating the human networks was going to be too slow and possibly not fruitful if the infiltration was detected and false intel was fed to the agents/assets, so members of the human networks needed to be seized whenever possible and intel was to be extracted from them.

This extraction was to be done in a shroud of secrecy, both due to its total illegality under U.S. and International law and also its total affrontery to human moral decency (when has that ever stopped anyone, though) and the potential fallout from the general population in the event of its diclosure as official policy (which we are witnessing currently, though not nearly on the scale we should be).

A portion of the inertia to enact these policies as well as large portions of the Patriot Act and the Authorization for the Use of Military Force came out of the all to Human emotion of fight when faced with a threat that has already inflicted damage and has the potential to inflict additional damage and flight is not a viable option. Flight to where? We were hit at home, in one of the most damaging episodes since the above mentioned WWII. However, we as a nation have also shown the ability to exercise restraint during the most advantageous of circumstances:

George Will:

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson's opening statement, delivered in a city reeking from the decomposition of 30,000 bodies still buried in the rubble, said: "That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason."

Nuremberg, says Dodd, was "the place where America's moral authority in the second half of the 20th century was born." That perishable resource has, he thinks, been squandered by Bush administration decisions inimical to the Constitution and international law.

Whether we will ever get it back in the eyes of the world remains to be seen.

BTW, the Astros managed to pull it out in the end after all...