FROM 2012 INTO 2013 POLITICS THREAD

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Maybe just read his post again.

Could he be expressing two separate thoughts?

 

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Oh, as it's always been. People weren't crammed into the cities because they loved to hang with each other. People fled to the suburbs, and then to the exurbs, as soon as it was easy to do so. People have always clustered by certain labels, and have always focused on their interests. That's how our democracy was formed, based on dealing with competing interests

 

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

No.

 

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Az and Hayek: stop stepping warily around the ring and get in a clinch already!

 

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Yeah but they need to ratchet up the intensity. This is dull, unlike TP vs. OOP.

 

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Why?

 

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

The breadth and depth of Steve Coll's expertise on the matters under examination.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/steve_coll/search?contributorName=steve coll

 

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Was he in the rooms during the interrogations?

 

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

I'm sure not.

He's simply arguing that the use of 'enhanced interrogation' in the movie is overstated relative to what's already known about actual interrogation protocols.

In virtually every instance in the film where Maya extracts important clues from prisoners, then, torture is a factor. Arguably, the film’s degree of emphasis on torture’s significance goes beyond what even the most die-hard defenders of the CIA interrogation regime, such as Rodriguez, have argued. Rodriguez’s position in his memoir is that “enhanced interrogation” was indispensible to the search for bin Laden—not that it was the predominant means of gathering important clues.

and

The film’s torture scenes depart from the historical record in two respects. Boal and Bigelow have conflated the pseudoscience of the CIA’s clinical, carefully reviewed “enhanced techniques” such as waterboarding with the out-of-control abuse of prisoners by low-level military police in places such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Dan puts Ammar in a dog collar and walks him around in an act of ritualized humiliation, but this was never an approved CIA technique.

and

More importantly, Zero Dark Thirty ignores what the record shows about how regulated, lawyerly, and bureaucratized—how banal—torture apparently became at some of the CIA black sites. A partially declassified report prepared by the CIA’s former inspector general, John Helgerson, indicates that physicians from the CIA’s Office of Medical Services attended interrogation sessions and took prisoners’ vital signs to assure they were healthy enough for the abuse to continue. Agency officers typed out numbingly detailed cables and memos about the enhanced interrogation sessions, as the available outline of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s classified investigation makes clear. Videotapes were recorded and logged. This CIA office routine might have been more shocking on screen than the clichéd physical abuse of prisoners that the filmmakers prefer.

 

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Is it broader and/or deeper than Leon Panetta's?

Why is it so important to deny the role that the enhanced interrogation techniques played?

 

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

I'm not sure that it is important. In this piece Coll's criticizing their depiction in a movie (and the affect it has on desensitizing viewers) - not their use in reality.

The filmmakers took the liberty of creating a composite character rather then portray the dull bureaucratic truths of lots of CIA operatives following lots of leads to find Bin Laden. Why wouldn't they overstate the use of more picturesque interrogation techniques to suit their dramatic needs as well?

And what makes you think the head of the CIA would reveal the actual truth of its methods, programs or operations to defend a movie?

 

Re: THE 2012 POLITICS THREAD

Funny that about six years ago, AQB didn't have any complaints about torture.

HMMMMM