My essay on “The FBI’s Right to Threaten Torture” has been deftly refuted by Bob Weir, the editor of The News Connection down in Texas. Here is the response he sent The Future of Freedom Foundation:
“Keep your eyes on this case, because it could help determine how far feds can go to destroy innocent people.”
Correction: It could help determine how far feds will go to save innocent people from terrorists who are willing to sacrifice their lives to kill Americans. If one of those murderous cretins had information about a school building, occupied by 500 children, that was about to be blown up, should torture be used to save those kids? Perhaps you think it’s noble to say it’s okay to let those kids die rather than use force on their killer. Most clear thinking Americans would say that’s not nobility; it’s insanity. I suppose
we should consider ourselves fortunate that you are not in charge of our security. We’d all be cinders by now.
Bob Weir
Executive Editor
The News Connection
*****
My response:
The fact that the FBI’s threat of torturing family members evoked a false confession from Higazy doesn’t trouble Bob.
Instead, all that matters is that people should blindly trust government and let it seize boundless power to keep us all safe.
If the White House ever needs a new spokesman to take the place of the next person who bails out of that job, Bob should be at the head of the list. He would be a natural for that gig, since he already equates groveling with nobility.
Poor Bob sounds like a fear-ridden Islamophobe and Jacob Hornberger is going to drive him over the edge if he keeps sending your articles to him, Jim.
You’d better get busy and start churning out 2 or 3 articles a week for Bob.
I wonder if Bob even read the Higazy article. It’s kind of hard to make the ticking timebomb case for torture when Higazy showed up weeks after 9/11 to claim his stuff – that didn’t include the radio.
I also noticed Bob has picked up on the Glenn Beck meme of the school building attack. I wonder if Bob would be OK with random pre-emptive waterboarding or roadblock renditions. Perhaps even 3 am visits by FBI psychologists with sodium pentothal. After all, if it saves the life of just one child…..
The Belsen school in Russia was a gun free zone until the armed terrorists arrived.
Isn’t that Bob “Al”-Weir, noted head of a number of local Islamic sleeper cells? I’m sure he’d be more than willing to confess to his leadership after a bit of “discussion” with people who are dedicated to rooting “murderous cretins” like himself. 😀
Ryan – here’s the deal on the hotel security guard (from Terrorism & Tyranny):
The hotel security guard stated that he had lied during a “time of patriotism.”
98 After the guard pled guilty to making false statements to the FBI, he received a slap on the wrist: jail time on weekends for six months. Newsday
columnist Ellis Henican noted that the hotel security guard “was aided and abetted in his recklessness by FBI agents and federal prosecutors—sloppy at best, incompetent or uncaring at worst. And just plain wrong. . . . They were so eager to make a high-profile terror arrest, they didn’t only accept the lie of a hotel security guard. They embellished it. They confirmed it. They carried it into court.” After Higazy’s interrogation, “federal agents were whispering to reporters that Higazy had confessed. At first, they’d said, he’d tried to weasel. He’d contradicted
himself, the way that criminals often do. But then, thanks to the brilliant interrogation tactics of the FBI, the radio man had come clean,” Henigan noted
I see that the neocon bedwetters are still glued to the latest episodes of “24”. They remind me of that Star Trek spoof that Tim Allen (Galaxy Quest, I think), where the space people believed that the TV show was a “documentary”.
Although the chances being harmed by a terrorism incident are more remote than being hit by lightning, there are a lot of Bobs out there eager to surrender their (and everyone else’s) freedoms if asked to do so. Come to think of it, they don’t even need to be asked. For crying out loud, since when has behaving like a frightened child in need of the protective “parental guidance” of government become a sign of both maturity and patriotism?
Alpowolf, The Galaxy Quest analogy is a good one. As entertaining and clever as the movie was, it’s a shame that it didn’t do better at the box office. The movies that deserve sequels never seem to get them.
Thats rich…..the security guard lying , “during a time of patriotism”.
Nods and understanding all around…another great victory for the Age of Counterintuition.
Just today, the uber-sophist Mr. Brooks writing in the NY Times that “the people” are generally happy and satisfied with their individual lives but disgusted by government. This may be true but he ended on a real stinker , true to form, asserting that the people just want their government to “defend them”. Let us now bow our weary heads in honor of the pursuit of defendyness. Gee, what ever happened to the good old american pastime of simply wanting to be left the hell alone in the peace and quiet of one’s productive pursuits?
Oh, I forgot, the Terrorists hate us because we’re free.
How many billion bucks did the CIA announce they spent on terrorist intelligence this year? To each person shall go a protective suit of armor consisting of 100 cubic feet of redacted intelligence files.
Onward Christian Filers.
…Hell, I say Torture ’em all and you’ll get the Guilty!
…Glenn Beck, is a loud mouth punk of a Disk Jockey who has taken Political Discourse to a level of reactionary idiocy comparable to that of the late Morton Downey’s. Beck would be comical were he not taken so seriously by those Poor Bastards he salaciously panders and lies to.
When Glenn Beck talks he spits all over the microphone, his desk and the camera. After thirty minutes of him reading his lines the camera lens gets foggy. He’s a fearmonger; giants are all over the beaches, and the skies are falling. He profits by promoting the war on terror.
…The terrorists hate us because we don’t go to Chruch, look at pictures of women’s asses in HUSTLER, drink beer on Saturday night, and watch The NFL with a hangover on Sunday.
I for one am prepared to be blown to the smallest of smithereens in order to keep looking at those Hustler asses…but that’s just me.