What the lady may not understand is that folks still remember vividly the events of 9/11, in which some 3,000 citizens lost their lives while merely doing their jobs as a result of the heinous crime perpetrated by the Muslim plane hijackers, who crashed four commercial airliners into buildings in NYC and Washington and onto a field in Pennsylvania. In other words concerning torture—Ho-Hum! Imagine the torture—though short-lived—experienced between the time it took a person to jump from the 99th floor until being smashed into nothingness on the street below...or fighting the butchers over Pennsylvania while the plane was being dived at 600 mph into solid ground. Compare that terror to something like sleep-deprivation used on terrorists to encourage their cooperation.
This is not to say that “anything goes.” Permanent damage is not acceptable but temporary discomfort is at the heart of the interrogation effort. The so-called torture was designed to satisfy this protocol. Water-boarding, for example, neither injures nor kills. It merely makes one fear drowning when actually he is not drowning at all. It's even used in some training exercises for special-ops groups in the U.S. military. Bombarding a prisoner with sound for extended periods will not damage that individual, only make him too unhappy to think it's worth it. The same is true with either cold and warmth, taking care not to induce pneumonia or other malady.
Some people have the notion that not even a prisoner's dignity—such as it is or isn't—should be degraded. Rubbish! Extreme embarrassment, such as nakedness, especially before the opposite gender, may work when nothing else will and causes no physical discomfort whatever. Thinking of the measures taken against American GIs by the Japanese and Germans in WWII or the the same against Americans in Hanoi during the Vietnam action, especially physical beatings, starvation and slavery, should make one wonder why the CIA was so easy on the jihad monsters. Read the book Unbroken for an idea, especially concerning the Jap POW butcher-shop called Omori and located in Tokyo Harbor.
Shades of the Church Committee! In 1975, Senator Frank Church of Idaho chaired a Senate committee in the wake of Watergate to shred to the bone the CIA, NSA and FBI. The solons seemed not to understand even after WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam that the world is not Camelot and that rogue nations play by no rules, not even their own at times. There's a time when fighting fire with fire is the only thing that works. The CIA is not a boy-scout-troop and is in the business of spying, just as other nations spend great resources of people and treasure in SPYING. Sometimes, the business gets rough and lives are made intolerable or lost through being apprehended or even assassinated.
As explained by former interrogator Dr. James Mitchell on a Fox News program recently, Feinstein's folly has put at risk the lives of former (and perhaps current) CIA operatives and their families. He's been receiving death threats and was phoned-up once and told to leave his house. These people have targets on their backs...and for what? Since there's no sensible reason for putting them at risk, one wonders if Feinstein operated out of simple spite, mad because of the possibility that some Senate info had been discovered by the CIA. The DOJ has been through all this stuff for years and made no charges.
Congressional staffers are privy to all sorts of information, with the always alluring possibility of blabbing for cash or other favors. Remember the office of then-senator Metzenbaum turning over rocks until discovering Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearing on his nomination to the SCOTUS in a grand effort at having her scandalize Thomas out of the job in 1991? The scheme didn't work but not for lack of trying by dedicated staffers. Maybe Feinstein feared something similar.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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