Don Jonnison likes to play down the threat of Islamic extremism in Oz and play up the anti-Muslim vibe:
Here Donnison blames the war in Iraq for the rise of ISIS and the radicalisation of Muslims…never mind that 9/11 happened before 2003.
No doubt he’s working on a line for this story…..
Let’s remember where his heart really lies:
The BBC’s idea of how a poll on the brilliance of its news website should really be run:
When assesssing the BBC’s coverage of the Democratic Party’s hatchet job on the CIA consider this from Douglas Murray:
Murray appeared on the BBC’s ‘This Week’ putting some of the points he raises in the article……but will any of his concerns be reflected in subsequent BBC reporting? The BBC has a habit of having such discussions on controversial issues but entirely failing to filter the relevant findings through to the news department or its presenters who carry on as if there is no other line to take other than the one chosen by the BBC in its general reporting, shows and news bulletins.
Here there’s not a single utterance of any doubt about the Senate Committee’s report.
But in this article the BBC actually looks at some of the nuances so often left out by the everyday news and current affairs discussions on BBC shows…such as the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee was the ‘oversight’ committee for the CIA and its activities……if torture was going on they must have known about it….the Democrats claim the CIA lied to them…but even the BBC admits the interrogation techniques were an ‘open secret’….
Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who heads up the Senate Intelligence Committee, spoke on Tuesday on the Senate floor. This committee oversees the CIA, and agency officials are required to tell committee members about their activities.
Yet she said the CIA officials misled her and others about the interrogation programme, keeping it a closely-guarded secret.
The real story is more complicated.
The CIA’s interrogation programme, for example, was a badly-kept secret.
People all over Washington knew what was going on. Condoleezza Rice, as President George W Bush’s national security adviser, said she would “not object”, according to the report.
Others at the White House followed suit.
The CIA was religiously demanding written sanction for their interrogations….did the SIC not know of these requests and if not why were they not asking about them?
In this climate of fear Mr Rizzo and other CIA officials were grappling with the prospect of conducting interrogations for the first time in the agency’s history.
Mr Rizzo paved the way for the harsh interrogations by ensuring they fell within the parameters of the law. He did it in the way a lawyer does: He got it in writing.
Between 2002 and 2005 the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel lawyers wrote several memos about interrogations, saying the methods could not be described as torture.
And:
According to the report, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden said: “every committee member was ‘fully briefed,‘ and that ‘this is not CIA’s programme. This is not the president’s programme. This is America’s programme.'”
People at the White House knew what the CIA was doing. So did people in Congress, as well as lawyers and journalists.
How then did the Democrats on the SIC not know anything….or are they just telling porkies for political gain?
I haven’t heard a BBC presenter talking on this issue who doesn’t start from the point that the Senate Intelligence Committee [failing to mention it was Democratic and didn’t interview any CIA people] found the CIA guilty of torturing people and went on from there to lead the discussion down a path that inevitably didn’t reach the right conclusions due to being based on a false premise to start with.
Will you see such important considerations reflected in the BBC’s everyday coverage when you listen to programmes from the likes of Nicky Campbell and Peter Allen that probably get the bulk of the BBC’s audience? I doubt it if past history is anything to go by…..look how the BBC reported the FIFA ‘investigation’ into corruption in the bidding process for the world cup when Russian and Qatar were allegedly cleared of any corruption whilst England were pilloried…and the BBC fully accepted that narrative until new revelations that couldn’t be ignored came along.
The narrative will be ‘CIA (Neo-con Republican approved) tortured people, Britain may be involved, this is a moral outrage and a stain on the West…isn’t it?’ with all the nuance, depth, complexity, and the failure to pin the blame on a single guilty party, removed.
There is another angle on the business of interrogation that looks at whether ‘torture’ is effective…the BBC has decided it has been proven not to work, choosing to highlight this finding:
What did the Senate committee find out?
1) The CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining co-operation from detainees.
2)The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
But do they work?…….
The enhanced techniques work.
The Central Intelligence Agency repeatedly tortured suspected terrorists, regularly lied about it to Congress and the White House, and, for all the pain and trouble this caused the agency and the United States, didn’t end up extracting a single piece of valuable information not readily available by other means.
That, at least, is the conclusion of the forthcoming Feinstein report, a long and, in certain quarters, much-anticipated review of the CIA’s detainee and interrogation programs during the Bush administration.
Now, for the first time, one of the lead interrogators is attempting to tell the other side of the story. Writing under the pseudonym Jason Beale, he has produced a provocative 39-page document in an effort to counter the narrative pushed by Democrats and amplified by journalists eager to discredit the program.
News accounts of the forthcoming Feinstein report make clear that a central claim of that narrative will be its most contentious: The techniques didn’t work.
Beale challenges that contention on the basis of his experience in the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) course taken by intelligence and military personnel exposed to a high risk of capture.
Here is the actual document from the interrogator that reveals the duplicity of the Democrats who now deny all knowledge of the interrogation programme…..
An Interrogator Breaks His Silence
When your unanimous and full-throated opposition to the program you once supported hinges upon the notion that it was not only immoral, but ineffective – because how can you explain shutting down a program, however objectionable, which was effective at pulling actionable intelligence out of high value Al Qaeda leadership detainees?
When the President who signed the executive order shutting down the program, having actually seen the intelligence after being inaugurated and spoken with the leadership at CIA, changes his campaign trail characterization from “It didn’t work; people will say anything to make it stop” to “even if it did produce some information, we don’t know if we could have gotten that information using standard techniques.”
When the only viable narrative remaining is that it was approved by Democrats briefed on the program, it had the full support of briefed Democrats until it (and the notion of their support) became public, those same Democrats then characterized it as ineffective and immoral, yet significant doubt remains after credible claims that information gathered in the program led to Bin Laden.
You [the Democrats of the SIC] can count on the media and various pundits to advance your position in an incurious and uncritical manner.
I know that we couldn’t have collected the same information using standard techniques because I was an expert in using standard techniques – I used them thousands of times over two decades – and the notion that I could have convinced the detainees [redacted] to provide closely-held information without the use of EITs is laughable. There is zero chance. Zero.
Would have thought this was wrong at any time and is merely the BBC pandering to its own inner fantasies:
BBC are ‘wrong’ and insensitive to broadcast book about Margaret Thatcher’s assassination, Tory MP says
BBC bosses are under fire over plans to broadcast a controversial story imaging the assassination of Margaret Thatcher.
Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries said the former prime minster’s family are still “grieving” from her passing last year and said the Corporation should have “taken stock” of their pain.
It comes amid outrage that BBC Radio 4 has picked Hilary Mantel’s controversial new novel for serialisation in its prestigious Book At Bedtime slot.
The Booker Prize winner’s new book, titled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, has been criticised for insensitivity over imagining the former Tory leader’s murder so recently after her death.
Mrs Dorries said that the BBC “has a responsibility to the people who pay its license fee”, adding that she would think the same if a book about Tony Blair’s death was broadcast by the Corporation.
On a related subject John Humphrys in the Sunday Times, as referred to in the previous post, said something about Mrs Thatcher which reveals the BBC attitude as to how it conducts interviews with certain people…showing an intent to take the interview down a particular route with a very particular end in mind rather than an open exploration of whatever issues they are concerned with…not to mention the belief that Thatcher was a ‘horrible woman’:
He describes one interview with her as the worst of his career-even though it sounds more like his ultimate throbbing fantasy. It was just before the 1987 election when Thatcher was “at her most powerful. I was wetting myself. The idea was that I would say to her: What is the essence of Christianity? And she was going to say ‘love’, and I was goig to say, oh well, you talk about love but you’re a horrible woman, aren’t you? And she’d resign and all that stuff.” Only she said “choice” and Humphrys had no comeback. “F***! What? Just a minute, prime minister!” He left the interview a “gibbering wreck”.
Just like Thatcher all the more don’t you!
Laughed long and loud this morning as Labour’s Keith Vaz came onto 5Live (11:40) and congratulated the BBC for its focus on immigration and the foreign national offenders being allowed to slip into the country by the chaos at Border Control as the BBC ‘discovers’ that one in seven people arrested in Britain today is a foreign national….and a listener involved in charity work stated that 75% of rough sleepers in London are foreigners.
The only reason the BBC focuses on it now is that it is embarrassing for the government…the ‘Tory’ government.
Vaz says its important that these foreign offenders aren’t allowed into the country in the first place…if we check and cross check we can run the border control sytem much more effectively.
Of course no link to Labour’s disastrous open door policy and Europe by the BBC that allowed untold numbers of criminals, not to mention foreign nationals sent to gather intelligence, both government and commercial, to enter the UK.
You might have thought that Labour’s part in all this would get a mention especially as last year the very same Keith Vaz said this:
Keith Vaz, the chairman of the influential home affairs committee, said the roots of Britain’s problems with immigration lie in the last government’s failure get to control the borders while issuing ‘jingoistic messages’.
And he ridiculed a speech by Labour’s immigration spokesman Chris Bryant for failing to provide answers to how to deal with the numbers of people moving to Britain.
In an article for the Leicester Mercury, Mr Vaz added: ‘The challenges with our immigration policy will not start on this day; they started a long time ago.
‘Seven years ago a Labour Home Secretary, John Reid, described the UK Border Agency as “not fit for purpose”, yet it limped along for another five years before being abolished.
‘The previous Government oversaw the disastrous contract for E-borders, the method by which we count people in and out, which so far has lost the taxpayer £750 million.’
The BBC does report this shameless piece of deception from Labour without any comment:
“Stronger checks” will be carried out to stop foreign criminals from becoming UK citizens if Labour wins the next election, Yvette Cooper has said.
The shadow home secretary told the BBC it was “shocking” that killers had been given British passports because “the Home Office failed to do basic checks”.
Immigration is one of the major issues in the next election as the same BBC report admits…and very important for Labour:
BBC political correspondent Alan Soady said immigration would be one of the big election issues and Labour was trying to convince voters that they can be trusted to tackle it.
So you might be asking why Labour isn’t being put on the rack about their record...as even one of their own MP’s admits is abysmal…not only that but has led to increased danger to the UK on many different levels…criminal, cultural, socially, political and commercial.
The BBC thinks the problem is not the actual immigration but that we don’t talk about it….we know that the BBC believes that people are anti-immigrant because they are uneducated and ill-informed not because they have been able to formulate some reasoned and coherent thoughts on the matter themselves. We need to debate this more…but only on the BBC’s terms…once you have had the chance to listen to and absorb the BBC’s narrative you will then understand the benefits of immigration and that your previous ‘thoughts’ on the matter were misinformed and prejudiced.
Here they illustrate that thinking….
Defining the problem – Bigotgate
His {Brown’s} private comments afterwards suggested that he thought to even raise the subject made someone a “bigot”. He apologised but the damage was done.
Have things changed under Ed Miliband?
The easiest way to sum it is up is from this speech a couple of years ago where he said “to put it simply I think we became too disconnected from the concerns of working people”. He sought to define himself against the low point of the Brown years, saying that worrying about immigration did not make people bigots.
So the problem with Labour wasn’t their actual immigration policy but that they decided that anyone who criticised it was a bigot. Now apparently Labour has agreed we can talk about immigration without being called racists….as long as you support their policies on it.
In the Sunday Times (paywalled) today John Humphrys talks in an interview with Camilla Long about this….
The Labour government underestimated by a factor of 10 the number of people who were going to move from Poland,” a vast uptick in numbers that, among other changes in population, was not sufficiently “interrogated” by the corporation. “We were too institutionally nervous of saying, isn’t immigration getting a little bit out of hand? And can we be critical of multiculturalism,” he says.
“We didn’t interrogate immigration rigorously enough. We failed to look at what our job was.”[The BBC] was “arrogant”, he says, employing people who “thought they knew what was best for the country. It was and still is relentlessly middle-class. Unfortunately. There was a predominant voice and that was the liberal Oxbridge male.” Exactly the sort of people who would fail to interrogate immigration, he says.
The BBC is still exactly the same…it professses to have changed and yet it hasn’t, it still fills the airwaves with pro-immigration propaganda.
On the 30th of November Frank Field stated that we would need a city the size of Birmingham every 30 months to be built to deal with the mass immigration we are suffering now….from the Daily Mail:
Almost immediately the BBC set up a counter argument to try and undermine the concerns….the Today programme decided to look at the issues…(07:40)
Attempts to measure whether immigration is on balance good or bad for the country are usually hijacked by the different political interests in the debate.
All, yes all four, ‘Establishment’ interviewees were pro-immigration. Not a single ‘official’ critic was allowed onto the programme.
The BBC field reporter, Matthew Price, summed it up with the new pro-immigration line of defence…..whilst most studies show that immigrants bring little benefit, if any to the country, Price decided to state that the problem is that the benefits they do bring are being hijacked by national government and resources are being removed from the area they are created in….the problems are created by government not immigrants.
So the BBC presents this as a problem created by….government cuts to local services. The number of immigrants isn’t the problem, it’s the ‘fact’ that government doesn’t cough up enough money to house, feed, school and treat them on the NHS.
Three days later the BBC finaly gets round to talking to Frank Field……where the Today programme wants to talk about Britishness. (07:33)
Britain is becoming less and less British….BBC reporter Matthew Price dismisses people’s concerns and local experience…he tells us ‘statistics show’ nothing to worry about….but the importance of this debate, as stated above, is shown when people say they will never vote Labour again due to immigration. Important then for the BBC to prove the benefits of immigration….and by default Labour’s open door policy.
Frank Field tells us that the BBC is part of the discussion and implies that it needs to provide accurate and impartial information about the debate, on immigration and the economy…good luck with that…..He says that no MP knows how to cut the deficit, and pressures on state services from immigration needs budgetting for and yet we don’t know how many will come here….he asks how can we fund a city the size of Birmingham every 30 months when budgets are so constrained?
Frank Field is also concerned about the watering down of Britishness saying we’ve been careless of our national identity and says we’ve never been brave enough to make immigrants conform to our values.
The BBC when criticised about its coverage of immigration will point to interviews with Frank Field and say that they prove the BBC is balanced in its reporting. However such interviews are mere drops in the ocean compared to the massive tidal wave of pro-immigration material the BBC broadcasts…not all of it obvious but subtly inserted into programmes ostensibly about other subjects but designed to educate ‘us’ about the wonders of the ‘immigrant’.
Siddiqui has written a book about Islam and the West ‘through the prism of her experience as both a Muslim and a modern woman’ and tells us her audience is not the Muslims really….presumably she must be trying to educate us Kufrs about the benefits of Islam.
She tells us most people see Islam solely though the prism of the veil, terrorism or extremism but most Muslims look at Islam through everyday events…living their lives by it….trouble is many of them don’t live the ‘full Islam’…which is where the fundamentlist ‘extremists’ come in who do want to live a life fully informed by the Koran.
She says radicalisation is not a generational thing…so does that mean it comes from a basic ethos then, such as a certain ideology, an is not merely young Muslims engaging in some adolescent rebellion?
She claims she does not know why it happens.
The BBC interviewer and chief fan it seems, Sarah Brett, asks…. Is it because people don’t understand Islam that they are frightened by it?
[Remember this from David Goodhart….Some claim that if people understood Islam more everything would be fine, they would be more tolerant, I think quite the contrary….the more they understand about it the more alien they would find it…authoritarian, collectivist, patriarchal, misogynist…..all sorts of things that Britain might have been 100 years ago but isn’t now.]
Siddiqui says that religion of all types struggle in the West..there’s no definition of religion…people do not understand religion….no distinction between private and public practise….People want to live their religion to the full not just in the privacy of their homes.
Hmmm..no, the problem is that people all too readily understand religion and don’t like it……and the fact that Muslims want to live their religion to the full is a problem…hence the Trojan Horse scandal.
Brett makes the usual uninformed claim that Christianity is characterised by violence…crusades and warrior popes….but that isn’t ‘Christianity’…nowhere in the New Testament, Christianity, does it tell you to go out and smite your enemies and conquer their lands as it does in the Koran.
Brett goes on….. there have been significant holy wars in the history of mankind….You could argue Islam isn’t the issue, religion is.
Siddiqui demurs…slightly, saying…here Islam is the issue….but not the religion of Islam, more the political, social and cultural strands behind it which can create a them and us conversation and attitude amongst Muslims.
Brett suggests that Muslim women are not radicalised by Islam…they are just misled by men
MS agrees with that…they like the excitement and glamour.
Brett gets to the meat of the intended lesson for today asking…How damaging is the narrative of ISIS and AQ being linked to mainstream Islam by media or a misguided public perception?
Siddiqui says….yes they are Muslims in ISIS but asks what are the causes of radicalisation?…nothing to do with religion..Islam is a short cut for the media to cast blame which disregards the geopolitical and cultural aspects of events…its the West’s fault then?
Brett then links immigration and Islam and Siddiqui says there is an atmosphere created by the politics of reaction and suspicion.
She tells us we can’t go back to some golden age of Britishness….native Britons will have to adapt to immigrants…not the other way round.
Brett then suggests we shouldn’t talk about immigration in the interests of community cohesion with only 6 months to an election and the topic is going to be immigration….she asks….how damaging is it to people who already feel marginalised, especially muslims, by all the talk of Muslims being seperate and Brits wanting to keep people out who aren’t originally from here?
Siddiqui calims she isn’t an immigrant…but, yes, she is..she came here aged 5.
She tells us all this talk about immigration creates a fundamental problem with the reinvigoration of a different kind of them and us attitude…too much divisive language.
We must cater for those who come here and we must have inclusive language…it is, apparently, quite dangerous at the moment.
But….she doesn’t want unlimited immigration….but then again….yes let’s have unlimited immigration on the quiet.
She says there is a deepseated fear of too many people and Brits just want to keep their own culture and society….it’s just not on you know! You’ve got to progress and adapt.
She says multiculturalism was an experiment….but not one that has failed just because of a few bombs….it’s a success really.
Notably she states that when growing up the converstaions you have, the upbringing you have, stay with you for ever….and shapes you into the adult you will be. All very relevant when Muslim children are culturally isolated and brought up to read and regard the Koran as the literal word of God.
How will such people develop, as Siddiqui says, a sense of loyalty, purpose and contribution to wider society?
She tells us we are too lost in political narrative of identity…not Muslims but government and all those who oppose immigration….but would she then abandon her Muslim faith…no…as she showed above when she stated that Muslims want to live their religion to the full and not compromise it.
There is the real BBC in action….trying to damp down any criticism and anger about Islam and the actions of Muslims, as well as promoting immigration and the idea that any criticism of it is from a group of Little Englanders wanting to recreate some golden age instead of welcoming and adapting their lives, society and culture to suit the immigrants…..ala foreign policy…now to be run by a few radical Muslims who threaten to bomb us if we don’t do as they say.
John Simpson, no doubt grateful to be handed an extended employment contract with the Beeb, does his usual fawning pro-BBC, ‘it’s not biased’, shameless promotion:
John Simpson: “The BBC faces an existential crisis”
It has always been an article of faith among a certain type of Conservative politician and in the right-wing press that the BBC is instinctively left-wing. It started as early as 1926, when the BBC was only four years old, and Winston Churchill tried and failed to make the BBC toe the government line in its reporting of the General Strike. Interestingly, the counter-view, that the BBC is always instinctively pro-Conservative, began at the same time and is held no less strongly. That’s what happens if you’re balanced.
I do believe that we are now facing a genuine existential threat. And knee-jerk, ill-thought-through decisions could do us and Britain’s national life as a whole irreparable damage.
Just the usual self-serving, uncritical, dismissive of criticism, type of response we have come to expect from those reliant on the BBC shilling.
“Well, having worked for BBC news for 40 years, I’m immensely proud of its rock-solid culture of honest, balanced truth-telling.
LOL
The BBC’s flirtation with radical politics and ideologies continues…whilst still promoting radical Islam as an antidote to supposed Western hegemony the BBC also continues its experiment in promoting extremist left wing politics, having backed Occupy, student riots and recruited Giles Fraser to their ranks, as they put a great deal of time and effort into brand Brand.
It looks like the BBC are trying to create and shape him into a political figurehead for all the Marxist malcontents in Britain spouting all that good stuff about bankers, capitalism and overturning democracy and the social order so often heard on the BBC.
They brought him onto Question Time last night where he got a good drubbing from the audience…but you’d hardly know that from this piece of puffery from the BBC….
Russell Brand: Can an outsider challenge the status quo?
Rather disingenuously, and as the last line in the article, the BBC only admits to this:
Many in the audience seemed dissatisfied with the response but it seems unlikely the flamboyant firebrand will ever put that claim to the test.
Try a different perspective:
Russell Brand Was Terrified on Last Night’s Question Time
Brand left the studio having lost much of the audience, sunken into his chair, almost reclusive compared to his usually extrovert eccentricities.
What happened? Put simply, Russell Brand was frit. Worse than that, he looked terrified. After Brand strayed from his notes – which at times he clung onto for dear life – and accused Farage of attacking the disabled, the microphone came to a gentleman in the audience wielding a walking stick.
He demolished Brand’s ill-judged smear and called his bluff: if he is the saviour of the masses, why doesn’t he have the nerve to stand for parliament? Brand stuttered. This was the question he feared most.
“Because I’m afraid I would become one of them,” he whispered, barely convincing himself. Howls of derision from the room. They all knew the truth, audience, panel and Brand together.
For all his bravado, this is a man scared of having to face the scrutiny of the people at the ballot box, scared that his hackneyed, teenage ideology will be resoundingly, humiliatingly rejected by the people he claims to represent.
The BBC is having a ball with the Senate committee’s report on interrogation……all too often forgetting to tell us that it is a partisan report produced by the Democratic party…
A scathing Senate report two days earlier said “brutal” methods like waterboarding were ineffective.
While he [John Brennan] was speaking, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who heads the committee that produced the report, was rejecting his arguments on Twitter.
…..and it was an investigation that did not bother to interview anyone from the CIA itself.
Who did the BBC get in to comment? James Rubin, a Clinton era democratic politician, a well known Islamist, Moazzam Begg, who was asked for ‘his thoughts’ on the report, and other democrats. Haven’t heard a single ‘off message’ voice supporting the CIA on the BBC….I’m sure there are one or two somewhere.
The BBC are playing fast and loose with facts…here failing to mention why Bush said terrorists shouldn’t be considered parties to the Geneva Convention…
September 2001: After the 9/11 attacks, President George Bush authorises the capture, detention and interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects.
February 2002: President Bush signs an executive order which says the Geneva Conventions – which prohibit mutilation, cruel treatment and torture – do not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects.
The reason the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to terrorists is because it says it doesn’t….
Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva, 12 August 1949.
A combatant, even one in a militia, can be considered a prisoner of war and be treated in accord with the Geneva Convention but only if some conditions are met…the combatants…
….having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
…. that of carrying arms openly;
…..that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
….And in particular that they treat nationals of the Occupying Power who may have fallen into their hands, according to the provisions of the present Convention.
None of those apply to terrorists or the Taliban.
However…..The BBC’s Jon Sopel bucks the trend and sounds a sceptical note about the Senate committee report..not something you would have got from Mark Mardell:
A whiff of hypocrisy about CIA report?
The really big picture is legacy. In 50 years’ time when the history books are written and children are sitting at their desks in Duluth, Des Moines or Detroit, and turning to the chapter marked “9/11”, what are they going to read? Here are two versions.
On 11 September 2001, the United States came under attack from al-Qaeda terrorists, claiming the lives of 3,000 people when planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania – a war on terror was declared, and those responsible were hunted down and detained, and there were no further attacks on US soil.
Or:
On 11 September 2001, the United States came under attack from al-Qaeda terrorists, claiming the lives of 3,000 people when planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania – a war on terror was declared, but the torture tactics used to hunt down and detain those responsible brought condemnation and America lost its moral authority in the world.
Remember Winston Churchill’s adage that “history is written by the victors”? This is a battle between Bush-era officials and the Obama administration over which narrative of these events should prevail.
A battle between most Democrats, who think that there are NO circumstances EVER when coercive interrogation techniques can be condoned; and most Republicans who say America was under attack, there was intelligence that there could be a second and third wave of attacks and we did whatever we could to prevent that.
But is there just a small whiff of hypocrisy here? What if it had been a Democrat in the White House when America came under attack on that dreadful September day. Would the response have been that different?
I’m sure there were sadists, oddballs and bad people out there. But weren’t the overwhelming majority of CIA operatives at that time just driven by one thing – a patriotic duty to keep America safe, by whatever means?
And this is where it gets uncomfortable. Of course I can sit here at my keyboard and pronounce that torture can never be justified. It is an absolute. I do totally believe that. But what if a child of mine had been kidnapped, and the police arrest the kidnapper, but say to me, “Well we’ve got the guy who took your kid, but despite us asking him really politely where he’s being kept, he’s not telling us… However there are these things called enhanced interrogation techniques – we could give them a go.” Would I say no? I’m really not sure.
Now that’s just something that you would never expect from the BBC….an entirely nuanced piece that suggests, in the circumstances, use of harsh interrogation methods might be justified.
Why interrogators prefer the soft approach
“At no time did the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques lead to the collection of imminent threat intelligence, such as the hypothetical ticking time bomb,” says the report.
In other words, all that mistreatment, all those hours of waterboarding, of dragging people hooded and shackled, up and down corridors, depriving them of sleep for days on end and subjecting them to white noise, did not actually yield any real information that stopped a terrorist attack.
Here quoting expert British interrogators…..telling us torture doesn’t work…and of course they never use it do they?…because it doesn’t work, does it!….and no hint of gloating and professional rivalry from the Brits…remember these were the ‘experts’ at counter-insurgency warfare…who got their arses kicked whilst the Yanks steamrollered through and wiped out Al Qaeda in Iraq.
So was there a better way for the US government to acquire this information without risking breaking international law and committing a moral outrage?
Yes there was. Talk to almost any trained British army interrogator and they will tell you that in the long run it is the “logical friendly approach” that yields the best results.
An experienced British army interrogator, who questioned high-value Iraqi POWs, says when a detainee is seized, often as a result of a violent struggle or firefight, there is the inevitable shock of capture and the fear of what is going to happen to them.
Often they imagine the worst – remember the Royal Navy sailor who broke down in tears when he and his crew were captured in the Gulf by an Iranian patrol boat and briefly held in 2007.
That sailor was not a high value prisoner…just a ‘callow youth’ way out of his depth. Most of the prisoners, like him, that would react to the soft approach and the slightest pressure are the humblest of recruits probably just there for the money and would know little information of any value.
Curious Gardner doesn’t quote ‘Andy Mcnab’ who tells us that everyone cracks in the end under intense interrogation…just a question of when and trying to hold out long enough to make any information you do have out of date and useless.
Gardner quotes this….
“They are hungry for affection,” says the former interrogator about prisoners he questioned. “Eventually, they will be willing to co-operate in exchange for safety and comfort.”
Gardner thinks such a statement means the interrogator is saying harsh interrogation doesn’t work….but he isn’t really saying that…..the subtext to that comment is that the prisoners are made to feel ‘unsafe and uncomfortable’...and only cooperate when to do so would bring such suffering to an end…in other words…..don’t be nice to them. Gardner reads into things what he wants to see…enhanced interrogation, or torture, doesn’t work when the subtle words of the interrogator suggests it does.
Perhaps the BBC should retrain its journalists so that they don’t have the wool pulled over their eyes…what does he expect the ‘expert’ interrogator to say…‘Yes we torture prisoners’?
Low level, non ideological recruits may well be more susceptible to less rigorous approaches, but then they know very little of value…… the hardcore jihadists are far more radical and determined…and not likely to compromise themselves for a cup of coffee, a cigarette and few kind words….or indeed the suggestion that their cause is hopeless.
The only thing that would work to any degree at all is those good old ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, locking them up out of troubles way or removing them permanently from the battlefield once and for all.
They have confidence that with much of Western media on their side and numerous human rigths organisations and pan handling lawyers advocating on their behalf not much will happen to them…..which is why the CIA used techniques that were intended to break that confidence and make them think that they were beyond help, no Seventh Cavalry coming to the rescue…..to break their defiance and mental resilience.
And as a contrast to Gardner’s one sided view there’s this from the Mail:
Did torture stop UK terror attack? Al-Qaeda terrorist captured in London after CIA spies interrogated Guantanamo Bay detainee
Al Qaeda’s top British terrorist was captured after CIA spies tortured former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg, it was claimed today.
Crucial information provided by Mr Begg while he was being held helped identify ‘dirty bomber’ Dhiren Barot who was plotting terror attacks on London, according to the long-awaited publication of a report into CIA torture programmes in the wake of 9/11.
The report claims that drawings by Mr Begg – who claims to have been beaten and deprived of sleep in Guantanamo Bay – helped lead British security services to Barot, who had gone to ground in London.
Begg, a confirmed Islamist extremist who admitted to training in terrorist camps, naturally denies he grassed on his fellow Islamists….
Mr Begg has also reacted furiously to the claim. In a letter to The Independent last night, lawyers for Mr Begg rejected any suggestion that he ‘volunteered or co-operated in the provision of information to any intelligence service’.
They added: ‘Insofar as he was tortured and under extreme and unlawful continuing duress for three-and-a-half years in Bagram and Guantanamo he, as every other individual subject to such treatment, cannot be regarded in any proper sense of the words to have ‘given or provided information’ voluntarily.’
‘……cannot be regarded in any proper sense of the words to have ‘given or provided information’ voluntarily.’
Yep….that’s the point….he was made to talk…not that he did of course!
This is a pretty decent exposure of BBC bias! Give it a read. It concerns the Shrien Dewani case.
Here you go, a new Open Thread for you to complete. The BBC has been quite hysterical in recent days, wallowing in the Senate Democrat attack on the CIA, trying to suggest that Miliband’s woeful speech on the economy could represent a leap forward for the glorious leader in waiting…..and the rest. The floor is yours.
