Richard Cohen, after an opening paragraph in which he basically begs Leftist bloggers not to attack him (“I hate Cheney more than you do”) goes on to do a pretty honest evaluation of the merits of Cheney’s claim that “enhanced interrogation techniques” save lives (and throws in a nice little attack on Pelosi’s embarrassing efforts to avoid her own past):

Still, every dog has his day, and Cheney is barking up a storm on the efficacy of what can colloquially be called torture. He says he knows of two CIA memos that support his contention that the harsh interrogation methods worked and that many lives were saved. “That’s what’s in those memos,” he told Schieffer. They talk “specifically about different attack planning that was underway and how it was stopped.”

Cheney says he once had the memos in his files and has since asked that they be released. He’s got a point. After all, this is not merely some political catfight conducted by bloggers, although it is a bit of that, too. Inescapably, it is about life and death — not ideology, but people hurling themselves from the burning World Trade Center. If Cheney is right, then let the debate begin: What to do about enhanced interrogation methods? Should they be banned across the board, always and forever? Can we talk about what is and not just what ought to be?

In a similar vein, can we also find out what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it? If she did indeed know about waterboarding back in 2003, that would hardly make her a war criminal. But if she knew and insists otherwise, that would make her one of those people who will not acknowledge that the immediate post-Sept. 11 atmosphere allowed for methods that now seem abhorrent. Certain Democratic politicians remind me of what Oscar Levant supposedly said of Doris Day: “I knew [her] before she was a virgin.” They have no memory of who they used to be.

I’m impressed that Cohen was able to rise against both his own personal and political biases.  I’m not inclined to believe, though, that he was motivated purely by high-mindedness. I assume Cohen lives in either New York or Washington.  I therefore wonder if his sudden willingness to reexamine the whole “torture” thing is because he lives in cities that, to terrorists’ eyes, have big targets painted on them.

It’s easy to whine about the immorality of torture when you’re pretty sure that, despite your whining, your government is going to use a certain amount of bullying against the bad guys to protect you.  It becomes less easy to support that high-minded stance when you’re suddenly faced with the specter of a government that promises to take you seriously, even if that means it helps paint even brighter colors on the target currently decorating your backside.

[Today's guest blogger is long time commenter, Ymarsakar]

How is it that opponents of the Atom Bombs that killed 300,000 implicitly support a conventional war that would have killed ten million?

Let’s start off with Jon Stewart and this question posed by one Blackfive commenter and reader. My answer for why? Because they are warmongers. They love war. They love the suffering it causes. And they love the money, the power, and the wealth redistribution that war gives to them.

George Soros had a clear standard for war profit on this score, if you want to look up his dealings in Nazi occupied zones. Don’t be fooled by Leftist lies that they hate war and we should as well. They love war.

Tom W. said…

It would’ve been much more moral to invade Japan and kill 5-7 million instead of the 250,000 who died in the atomic bombings. And who cares about the 500,000 to 1 million casualties we would’ve suffered in the invasion?

And how come nobody ever talks about the firebombing of Japan? We killed twice as many civilians with firebombing as we did with nukes. If you’re going to shake your jowls in moral outrage, isn’t 500,000 civilians burnt to death worse than 250,000 killed by nukes?

Condemning the dropping of the two atomic bombs is intellectually lazy, which is why surface skaters like Stewart do it. He never acknowledges that horrible decisions have to be made in the real world. We killed 25,000 French civilians on D-Day, yet every year the Fench march in gratitude for us freeing them. The French aren’t vacuous middle-aged teenagers, like Jon Stewart.

When I lived in Japan I met a sweet old man who was very friendly and interested in visiting the U.S. He eventually revealed to me that in the war he was a suicide bomber who had been trained to put on a vest full of explosives and jump off a cliff onto American ships when they came into the harbor. I asked him if he would’ve done it.

“Hell, yeah!” he said. And he stood really straight for a second and got a creepy, hostile glint in his eye. “For my country and emperor? You bet your ass.” Then he got all sweet again. He was like a tame lion: Everybody’s read stories about how they suddenly snap and rip off their owners’ heads for no discernible reason. If we’d invaded Japan, we would’ve had to kill millions of those people

Jon Stewart is an intellectual amd moral lightweight whose contributions to serious discussions are worthless.

The thing with people like Jon Stewart is that they can’t expand their horizons. They refuse to comprehend other people’s viewpoints. The only thing that matters is them. Everybody else can go to hell. AND that’s what they prefer, using avenues such as Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Castro, etc etc.

Jon doesn’t have pride or love or patriotism in his country or any other thing. Not enough to die for. Not enough to kill for.

Thus he sees the atom bombs as “excessive.” It wouldn’t have taken an atom bomb to make Jon give up, so why did the U.S. use TWO a bombs on Japan? It must be because the warmongering Truman loved killing people.

(bviously we can’t blame FDR, under whose aegis the bombs were developed, because that’s pure heresy. So let’s just call Truman the war criminal, right?)

Okay, as you can see, we have hit upon an unconscious barrier, what I like to call a conscience redactor. You see, whenever something contradictory hits a Jon-type brain, the conscience redactor erases the memory and even the thought of contradiction. This way you can have all kinds of double, triple, quadruple, or quintuple type thinking, and none of it has to be consistent. For us, contradiction causes cognitive dissonance and a need to question, resolve things, or at least for some introspection and meditation. For fake liberals and Democrats? They don’t even notice. Like a man going into shock not noticing his foot has just been blown off by a mine.

Jon would give up if you simply threatened to harm him, as is true for most media journalists at Media (Fing) Matters.  Obviously, then, the U.S. is at fault for using “excessive” and “disproportionate” bombing force on the Japanese.  Because Jon sees every nation, people, and culture as simply a reflection and a projection of his own thoughts, beliefs, behavior, and sentiments, and because it would have been “excessive” or disproportionate” as to him, so too must it have been as to them.

That’s all Jon knows, that’s all he cares about. Roosevelt who? Naw, MacArthur=War Criminal, McCarthy=Inqusitor, Truman=bad. It is simplistic in a fashion, but that’s how people like Jon are. It is what they have made themselves to be.

These are the weaknesses of such people. They are both physical and moral cowards. They have nothing they believe in strongly enough to kill for, perhaps not even their own lives, although I wouldn’t bet on it when it comes to the line (got to watch out for those self-righteous fake libs like the Dalai Lama and Ghandhi, they may just end up using you as a human sacrifice for their pacifism, so long as they get to live and you get to suffer, anyways).

And I think Jon Stewart had some valid points about where is our moral foundation?

Since Jon doesn’t have a foundation, it would make sense that he would ask about ours. But Jon doesn’t have the answer and he never will until he gets his own ducks lined up straight.

This is true for every Leftist, fake liberal, and commentator.

Should a state be torturing people? Unlikely, you (or Jon) might say.

Actually, it’s very likely. Because out of all Western nations, America is the country with the lowest incidences of torture committed by the government. Canada, Britain, France, etc, all have and still are performing atrocities on their own people, except they don’t do it for “information”. They do it for power, for wealth redistribution, and for personal success or entertainment of an ideological bent.

Every single Democrat that supported the US withdrawal from Vietnam is guilty of supporting torture, and second handed cowardly torture at that, on both Vietnamese civilians and American service members.

Every single American born after the Ted Kennedy Dems of the Fall of Saigon is guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes every time they speak a single word about America’s war contribution to Vietnam being a mistake.

America is very fine with torture from what I have seen. The only people not fine with it are the military, those directly in danger of being exposed to it from Dems or US foreign enemies, and, of course, the truly powerless and innocent.

Democrats and fake liberals and Ted Kennedy/Soros hybrids with their ObamaNation loyalists and cult addicts? Those people are fine with torture. They have been doing it to Americans, blacks, foreigners, brown people, Asians, etc, for decades, centuries even, if Byrd ever lives that long.

Ted named his pet “Splash” after all, to commemorate the lovely evening drive that ended in such a magnificent conclusion off that bridge into the water.

Dems define torture as “anything that harms our allies and must be something we can talk about in order to steal more power.” That’s not what torture is in the real world. But the Dems don’t live in reality, they live in LaLa land: in the glorified utopia of the Obamanation.

I will [torture] and I will sleep just fine after having done so. (Which is a reference by Jimbo concerning what Jon doesn’t have the guts to do or even support the doing by others)

And now here are my views on this all consuming topic of torture. Grab a seat and hold on.

….

Everything the US has done to terrorists has been interrogation, not torture. Torture is hurting somebody cause you like it, it gives you a sense of power, or because you want revenge against somebody in your thrall.  [Ed's note:  Y is absolutely right here.  I'd slowly reached the same conclusion myself yesterday, but Y seems to have zeroed in on it instantly.]

Interrogating people for information using torture, on top of the regular motivations for torture, is unimaginative. No U.S. service member has done so in this war. Not even England, for she had not the expertise to comprehend the execution of interrogation vis a vis the methodology of torture. She learned her values from the Left. The Democrat supporters. The Hollywood chimpathons and the fake liberal military bashing Lawfare Oriented gungho cruisers. That is where she got her values and inevitably, it weakened and embarrassed the nation as a whole.

Psychological warfare has a derived branch in interrogation or torture, depending on the methods and motivations.

Most people think of torture as physical. That’s not the most powerful derivative to use, whether you want to hurt someone for reasons of cruelty or because you want to save lives.

The most powerful tool in any person’s arsenal is psychological, not physical. Everyone has certain weaknesses, buttons, levers, behavioral cues, etc. It is far more effective to target the mind and pain is only effective up until the point where it produces no concrete benefits in the mind of the targeted subject. But pain is not subtle. It does not persuade so much as bludgeon. If you do not know a person’s mind, what he says under pain will be of little value.

So let’s cover the subject of the mind in more detail. Jimbo has refered to his “fear” of an element (water). That is just a gross physical reaction. You may call it physiological, as the fear strikes the mind even though it comes from physical stimuli. Psychological pressure, in comparison, comes from forcing the subject to undergo gross mental friction and pressure in order to avoid even more horrendous stimuli.

I say that psychological tools are the most powerful, but in terms of the efficacy of interrogation, the most creative, and thus the most unorthodox and the most effective, are combinations of physical, physiological, and psychological factors.

For most people, simply the threat of pain or an initial pain stimuli will make them break to your will. For others, not so, either because of their beliefs (fanaticism or religious zeal or martyrdom or belief in a better afterlife if pain is suffered in this one) will allow them to tolerate inhumane pressures, or they’ll resist simply because of mental/physical training that has prepared them for vigorous interrogation.

Thus the most effective interrogation utilizes everything under the sun, in order to bypass the strongest or the most comprehensive training. For even the best training cannot cover all contingencies or combinations of factors. Even the best defenders have one sore lack, the lack of initiative for it is the attacker that decides where and when to attack. Same is true for an interrogator. He decides what will happen, how, when, and in what order. This is an advantage that should not be neglected. It is very important in terms of determining certain relationship factors, not to mention the ultimate success or failure of an interrogation.

For a crude example of one interrogation method, consider the mob sharks threat of “breaking your knee” if you don’t pay them back. The fear of a lasting crippling injury combined with the physical reaction to the threat of pain or actual pain, provides great motivation. More motivation, usually, than greed can provide, although it depends on extenuating circumstances and psychological profiles dealing with risk vs rewards (can we escape the mob boss or get a more powerful ally).

A more refined gambit on the mob intimidation is the classic “hostage” scenario where they kidnap your family member and threaten to “kill them” if you don’t do what they want. Thus you are given a psychological pressure, totally lacking in physical inducements, that is even more effective than gross physical violence, threats, or pain. THe psychological pressure, the very thought of your loved one dying or being hurt, motivates and propels you on basic human behavioral patterns.

But even though I call it “more refined”, it is still stereotypically crude. It utilizes only one methodology and counts on it disproportionately to deliver results. On the other hand, even though this is crude, it obviously works, otherwise the mob would not keep on using it.

For Islamic jihadists, they don’t particularly care about the lives of their whatevers. Perhaps they care about kinsmen, perhaps not. They do care much about their religion. A very sharp weak point. Many creative aspects could be forged from such a thing. Especially the Islamic world’s fear and hate of pigs, women, gays, etc. This is one good example of why knowing the mind of the subject is vitally important in determining which methods will work better than others.

Physical pain is not particularly effective in interrogation until you grasp the mental, emotional, and ideological forces and factors in the subject. The interrogator is the attacker and the subject is the defender. The attacker must have detailed plans ready, and to do that, he must have accurate data and intel to form those plans and contingencies upon. The defender need not have accurate data, but the defender must be ever vigilant. This wears the defender down, even in the absence of famine or lack of safe water.

Misinformation, disinformation, illusion can shatter the defender’s will to fight by making him over-react, calm down and start believing he is safe, and then hitting him when he has relaxed his mental guard. Do this over and over again and his own mind will rebel and refuse to fight. Refuse to feel safe. Refuse to tolerate fear. It will crack, and you need not do a single point of injury on his body. HIs mind will do that job for you.

Sleep deprivation is a merciful and pale shadow of its full potential. You can make people who are sleep deprived believe that they were never born, that they never had a lover, or family member, or been part of the global jihad AQ. You could make them believe that they were never a Muslim, that they had been programmed by America to infiltrate AQ to tell us what they were planning.
You do so by the simple expedient of destroying their mind and spirit and replacing it with whatever you wish to fabricate in its stead. Enough physical pain, psychological pressure, and emotional/ideological stress will render the brain into its natural defense mechanisms. Amnesia, regression, denial, etc. You can carve up a person’s mental landscape the same way you can do with his body and organs.

All of these are not techniques you learn. All of these are simply derivatives of obvious truths once you comprehend the very flawed and porous element that is in all humanity, our human nature.

But historically, complex and refined interrogation methods are almost never used. Or rather they are used in part. I believe P Hearst was one example, for ideological, not interrogation, purposes. Why is refined methods so rare? Simple.

It takes a lot of time, talent, skill, luck even, and devotion to exploit interrogation and psychological interrogation to its fullest potential. Oftentimes you can get the same result with cruder, faster, or less resource intensive methods. So why would anyone even bother? Well, cruelty and sadism is one reason.

No interrogator is worth his salt if he has not studied sadism and cruelty, if only to learn from the methodologies and inefficiencies of such people, even if they are not worried about falling into the twin vices of sadism and cruelty themselves as interrogators. Because you see, the only people that will most likely go to the extents to which I have listed are the sadists. They have the motivation to play with people’s minds, totally independent of what result it produces. But this has a side-effect you see. Because their motivations are entertainment based, they will not be the most efficient, the most skilled, or the most talented users of advanced interrogation methodologies.

The best people are those that do the job that they do because they love doing a good job at it: the professionals. Sadists love inflicting pain so they will eventually learn the best methods to inflict pain. But interrogators are there to get information, and oftentimes the best way to get information is NOT to inflict maximum pain. Certain detailed data cannot be communicated with the subject’s tongue bitten, sawed off, tooth impacted, or any number of other things that can be accomplished for maximum physical pain. And if you shatter a person’s mentality, well, he may not even remember what is the truth vs what you told him the truth is.

So, interrogators that wish to save lives with data gleaned from evil people often aren’t required to become evil. For the most efficient methods in terms of time used rather than the reliability or amount of knowledge gained, particularly the fastest methods, are not torture. Some are, yes, but one man interrogating one subject only has so much time in a day to use a limited set of interrogation methods and games. Can’t use em all, so why not use the less intensive ones, for they will save the interrogator’s time if nothing else.

The people who fear that the US will fall into “evil” are the same people promoting Hollywood trash that partially motivated those like England to perform their sexual malfunctions. The people who fear that “we will become the enemy” are themselves most likely of torturing, executing, and condemning to death millions of people, as they have already done for Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and a whole host of other nations like Japan, had they the power. And for those like Ted Kennedy, he already had the power and used it, even, to kill and torture innocents.

These are the people who are most loud about their “fears”. Because what they fear is themselves. As they rightly should. For they are pitiful enough that they will fear themselves and doubt their own ability to make the correct choices, for the pitiful fear everything, and rightly so.

Those on an enlightened path have already faced our inner demons using any number of journeys or voyages or methods. We know how to deal with AQ because we see them as where we ourselves would have ended up, had we not taken up the road of Enlightenment. They have fallen off the path or never got on it. That’s fine. But American Leftists and idiotards who voted for Obama. They claim to be on this path to liberty and salvation. They claim that we must do things their way or else we will fall off their highway. Or as Obama may say it, it is his way or the highway. They claim the Republicans have failed. That Bush has failed. Their criticisms are valid directly proportional to how close they really are to the road of Enlightenment, this voyage of the ages that all human beings are given an opportunity to travel on and to. Some of these Leftists, as you all know, have never even seen this road, this path to the betterment of mankind and humanity. Yet they would lecture us on how to stay on this path? Some of these Leftists were the ones that tried to shoot us from this road, to rob us and steal what we had gained for their own petty amusements and greed. Yet they would lecture us on the best way to “travel safetly” through the dark?

As if I would listen to Al Qaeda on how best to preserve my spiritual holiness for the next world. No more would I listen to the Left, to Obama supporters, and to the idolaters of this cult addicted world.

Btw, one surgical brace and two 3 feet, thin diameter, steel file through the knee and Jon would crack. All I would have to say is “give me what i want or I move the file”. This, of course, would be unethical. For ethics determines that anything you to do others, you must also accept as being valid as used against yourself, and I’d prefer not to have my knee cap shifted out of alignment from a steel file underneath the cartilage. Instead, I can put Jon in a black room and endlessly ask him the same questions over and over again. After 48 hours of little to no sleep, it has been said that the guilty ones will grow quiet and less energetic. The ones that know they are innocent will grow more agitated and throw tantrums.

That is an interrogation technique I would be perfectly fine with as applied to myself.

I wouldn’t half mind the Leftist idiotards and their AQ terrorist friends, were they ethical. Were they perfectly fine with the methods they used on us, to be applied against them.

But they are not ethical. They scream, they use lawfare, they do anything to us and then expect us to do nothing to them or we become “bad”. Dems get to use character assassination on us but the moment we hold people like Trent Lott responsible for his personal and public behavior, we are deemed hypocrites and “racists” that “aren’t doing enough”, according to the Democrat manual. Just like the Palestinians; Jews never give up enough land. It always must be more, more, more.

AQ is a bunch of brutish murderers, rapists, and sadistic idiots. But that’s not the primary reason why I hate them or why I would enjoy blowing pieces of them into the sky and making it fall on the mansions of George Soros and the Kennedies. No, I hate them because they are unethical. They do not accept what they dish out. They cannot accept it. They are cowards for one reason or another, weak, in this bargain. And it will be satisfying, on the road to enlightenment and on a purely superficial, personal, and universally just level, to make reality hard enough for them that their cowardice will demonstrate itself. As they run from their crimes in the burkhas of their most hated and most abused portion of their population, their women.

Al Qaeda, the Left, and most other terrorists will never equal us in sheer creativity for they do not love life enough to create. Thus, they will never equal our side in terms of focused power in war and peace. But they can equal us in terms of raw power. Raw enough to cow the spineless women and men of Media Matters and their eternal allies, the Jons and the Dems and the Leftist agitators.

That’s some good stuff

Hear and see that for Bill Whittle’s version of the Jon-Athon of the Joneleths.

You can read more from guest blogger Ymarsakar at his own blog, Sake White.

Paul Begala wrote an article at HuffPo contending that, following WWII, Americans executed Japanese as war criminals for water-boarding.  While I’m certainly willing to concede that water-based tortures numbered amongst the myriad tortures the Japanese used against POWs, it is absolutely ridiculous to believe that these Japanese soldiers were executed because of the water tortures.  In the grand scheme of things, that was nothing.

One of the Anchoress‘ readers forwarded to her a letter someone wrote (maybe as a comment to Begala’s own article) pointing out that actual historical documents put the lie to Begala’s claims:

Good Afternoon,

I have spent the better part of the morning reviewing the International Military Tribunal for the Far East’s indictment, trial, some testimony, the  sentences and the execution of sentences, e.g.; the Tokyo Trials.

What inspired me to get into looking at the charges and subsequent trial and eventual execution, was former Clinton hack and current Obama insider who manipulates information on CNN, Paul Begalia’s recent claim  that we executed individuals for waterboarding in 1948.  Here is Begalia’s recent column, note that he does not name who it is that we purportedly executed for this “crime”:

Yes, National Review, We Did Execute Japanese for Waterboardin

Instead of a mainstream publication, Mr. Begalia chose to go to a far left extremist publication, the Huffingtion Post, which shows the level of their journalistic skills, and what their reputation should be….I mean, if I can find this information in a few hours, so should any journalist be able to uncover Mr. Begalia’s lies, but I digress.

Begalia on CNN the other evening while discussing the alleged “atrocities” by the Bush Administration with former White House Spokesman Ari Fleicsher, stated that we had executed members of the Imperial Japanese Army for waterboarding, or water torture.  Fleischer called him on it, stating that he believed that Begalia has his “history mangled” and later, the National Review called him to task, believing that Begalia was referencing Yukio Asano, who was convicted of torturing Fliipinos by tying them to stretchers and drowning them, as well as burning them with cigarettes.  Mr. Asano was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor, and this sentence was hardly for waterboarding.

Begalia then goes into some song and dance, naming individuals who I have personally never heard of, that claims we did in fact execute indivuals for waterboarding.

Thankfully, Yale University has an excellent web site called the Avalon Project, which lists all of the documents, transcripts and pleadings from both the Nuremberg Trials and the Tokyo Trials.

Here is the actual Indictment:

There were seven individuals who were executed for war crimes stemming from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East:

General Doihara Kenji, spy (later Air Force commander) Convicted on Counts 1, 27, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, and 54

Baron Hirota Koki, foreign minister Convicted on Counts 1, 27, 29, 31, 32, 54 and 55,

General Itagaki Seishiro, war minister , Convicted on Counts 1, 27, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36 and 54

General Kimura Heitaro, commander, Burma  Expeditionary Force Convicted on Counts 1, 27, 29, 31, 32, 54 and 55

General Matsui Iwane, commander, Shanghai Expeditionary Force found guilty of class B and C war crimes; e.g.; for his participation in the atrocities committed at Nanking.

General Muto Akira, commander, Philippines Expeditionary Force Convicted of Counts 1, 27, 29, 31, 32, 54 and 55.

General Tojo Hideki, commander, Kwantung Army (later prime minister) Convicted of Counts 1, 27, 29, 31, 32, 54 and 55

http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/International_Military_Tribunal_for_the_Far_East_-_Sentences/id/1508175

http://www.trial-ch.org/en/trial-watch/profile/db/facts/akira_muto_82.html

None of these individuals were convicted for “waterboarding”!!   Although  some of the Defendants were convicted of Count 55, which was failing to observe and protect prisoners of war from the Allied forces as per the laws and customs of war, it is a far far, downright impossible stretch to conclude that any of the Generals who were convicted and hung were convicted and executed because of their involvement in anything that remotely resembles modern day waterboarding!

Do you think Mr. Begalia will offer an apology for his lie?  Do you think anyone from mainstream media will call Mr. Begalia to task for his lie?

I think not.

Shame on you Paul Begala!!

Keith In Tampa

In other words, while water-boarding might have been in these individuals’ repertoire, it was not the sum total of their acts.

As for me, I have my own reasons for doubting Begala’s history. My Mom was a 17 year old Dutch citizen living in Indonesia when Pearl Harbor took place. What a lot of people forget is that, after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese didn’t just take the Philippines, they also swept over Malaysia and Indonesia. My Mom ended up being interned for the duration of the war. She was shipped from camp to camp.

For reasons I don’t understand, the conditions the Dutch experienced were much worse than those that the American civilians experienced in the Philippines. The camp leaders treated these civilians with unimaginable brutality. This was separate from the “ordinary” horrors of disease and starvation.

The routine torture (that is, one that happened on more than one occasion) that lingers with my Mom, the one that still gives her nightmares so many years after the war, is when the prisoners were collectively punished by being made to stand for 24 hours in the tropical sun, without food, without water, without bathroom breaks — indeed, without any breaks at all. The weak, the sick and the elderly died where they stood. The survivors carried the memories. Her best friend’s father, imprisoned in a men’s camp, was beheaded for some infraction. This was routine.

There was one commandant who was worse than the rest. According to my mother, he had “moon madness,” and every month he went crazy and embarked on his own round of random torture directed against the women and children under his command. My Mom won’t even talk about what he did.

I mention all this to make a point: Of all these Japanese prison commanders who routinely inflicted the most horrible tortures on the Dutch civilians in their charge, the guy with the moon madness was the only one executed after the war. Just knowing that fact makes Paul Begala’s assertions absolutely ridiculous on their face.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in an incredible novel about the civilian experience under the Japanese during WWII, I highly recommend Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice. Although it’s ostensibly about an English woman in Malaya, it’s actually based upon the true story of a Dutch woman in Indonesia.

All of this brings me to one more point about whether something is “torture” or not.  In a psychiatric, self-actualized, self-realized, navel gazing world, torture can be anything that makes you unhappy.

Many years ago, Wendy Kaminer wrote a wonderful book called I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help, in which she pointed out that psychiatry, especially pop psychiatry, needs psychic pain in order to exist. Without in any way denigrating psychiatry’s usefulness, Kaminer points out that its spread through popular culture in the 1970s resulted in a leveling, with all pains being equal.  She noted that women who had escaped Cambodia’s killing fields and women dealing with suburban angst were treated as sufferers of exactly the same magnitude in pop culture parlance.  Both felt pain, therefore both were victims and both deserved precisely the same amount of sympathy.

With this kind of leveling (a leveling, that incidentally takes place at the opposite end of the spectrum, where an athlete or actor is accorded “hero,” rather than merely “star,” status), how in the world can our culture reasonably differentiate between true torture, which is the infliction of immense physical or emotional pain, and mere high stress infliction, against self-styled warriors who have taken upon themselves the task of killing our own citizens in the hundreds, thousands or even millions?  If someone is made unhappy, it must be torture, right?

Cross-posted at Right Wing News