[lbo-talk] Billmon comments on Diary of an Interrogator

snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com
Mon May 3 04:26:59 PDT 2004


At 01:49 AM 5/3/2004, kjkhoo at softhome.net wrote:
>Aside from the scoop -- the best part of this is the bit where he writes:
>
>"Another point is that we can call our being here anything we want, but
>"liberating force" is only a political name. We are an "occupying force"
>in the eyes of the Iraqi people and you cannot tell them otherwise because
>they are not conditioned to play to political spin like Americans are. "
>
>Chomsky will take no pleasure in being thus vindicated!
>
>Is it true that the story of Abu Ghraib didn't make the front page of any
>of the major national dailies?
>
>kj khoo

No, that was what his "source" (detainee) said. No one would be surprised, least of all Chomsky, that an Iraqi might say that! What is more interesting is his defense, which completely ignores that the u.s. made things a mess in the first place:

here, Joe Ryan's describing what his source told him: "My source told me that before we came here, the borders were controlled and there were never any bombing attacks like this in Iraq until the Americans arrived here. Another point is that we can call our being here anything we want, but "liberating force" is only a political name. We are an "occupying force" in the eyes of the Iraqi people and you cannot tell them otherwise because they are not conditioned to play to political spin like Americans are."

[This sounds like typical interrogation tactics: you get them to talk by presenting yourself as a sympathetic listener to some of their claims. Good cop, bad cop. They've been abused by their handlers. The interrogator's job is to come off as the 'good guy', the reasonable one, to whom you can vent all the rage pent up from the abuse. Once the detainee feels grateful for the opportunity, the interrogator can find out the real tidbits that's s/he's after.]

At this point Ryan needs a place to vent what's he's pent up in the interrogation, what he wanted to say to the detainee but couldn't. He needs to justify it:

"There is nothing wrong with being an occupying force; that is what we were in Germany and Japan. As long as we can continue to make progress in rebuilding the infrastructure such as the power plants, we will prevail. I know that sounds like a weird objective, but envision your life without electricity or flushing toilets. Basic things we take for granted, but are essential to our standard of living. We have the ability to bring the people normalcy, it will just take time. We take steps each day, just sometimes we have to take one backwards due to the foreign fighters and insurgents."

Apparently Ryan, the dumbass, thinks that they had none of this beforehand. Of course, also fascinating that the u.s. military's resources were spent first and foremost on creating all those prisons only to turn them into the same torture chambers we supposedly went to Iraq to eliminate.

Kelley



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list