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June 20, 2006
Beat, beat, and beat again
WaPo reviews Ron Suskind's One Percent Doctrine (þ Jack Balkin):Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."
Outstanding!
Posted by ekr at June 20, 2006 8:59 PM | Filed under:
Comments
And no doubt, once he figured out that the torture stopped whenever he came up with another plot, he found himself able to come up with dozens of plausible plots.
Someone should alert Hollywood to this technique for getting disaster movie plots out of its writers--I'll bet waterboarding and beatings and sleep deprivation leads to some really productive brainstorming sessions.
Posted by: John Kelsey at June 21, 2006 6:44 AM