Sunday, April 4, 2010

Reading People

Addressing the Conservative political arguments of Adam Carolla is sort of like kicking the shit out of a straw man, after all, the guy brags about how he "doesn't read" and how he "barely graduated High School";  intellectually speaking, there's no way he's representative of real Conservative thinkers.  Oh wait, George Bush "doesn't read" either, and he also almost flunked out of school, the same is true of Sara Palin, so maybe the Aceman is a perfect representative of Conservative America, in fact, he just might be the smartest one among them - at least he's coherent.

The courtship of the Conservative male:  1) Firm handshake.  2) Exchange business credentials.  3) Complain about taxes/government regulations.  4) Discuss national security.  5) Complain that you "can't say anything anymore without being called a racist." 6) If all goes well, consummate the relationship by using the n-word.

Carolla recently did a podcast with screenwriter-turned-conservative Roger Simon, a former liberal who took a hard right turn after 9-11.  Carolla lept at the chance to rant about the usefulness of waterboarding, and how stupid these Hollywood liberals are to oppose it:

"Hollywood people...you assholes don't know shit, you're actors, you barely know how to do that, just shut the fuck up when it comes to what's going on in Guantanamo Bay.  You don't know shit, let the professionals handle it, and that's the way I feel." - Adam Carolla.

Whoa, wait a minute, that's the way you feel Carolla, but you're just an actor, so shut the fuck up and let the professionals handle it.  Who exactly are the professionals?  Interestingly enough, probably not the people who were doing the waterboarding; in fact the CIA "interrogators" who implemented the practice had no prior experience doing interrogations:

"It's easy to forget that when the U.S. began interrogating al-Qaeda operatives in 2002, the CIA had no idea what it was doing. The last time the agency had been charged with conducting hostile interrogations was during the Vietnam era, and most of those officers were long retired."  - Robert Baer, Time Magazine

Robert Baer would know a thing or two about the Agency, he's an ex-CIA who, according to Seymour Hersh, "was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East."  Baer goes on to say:

"When the CIA was asked to resume hostile interrogations after Sept. 11, some agency leaders were dead set against it, arguing that the military was better equipped for the task. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted the job belonged to the CIA."
"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. His interrogator, a former CIA colleague of mine, admits he had almost no training in the technique and knew nothing about how the cumulative effect of waterboarding might affect the quality of the information he was trying to extract."

Its too bad Baer's buddy didn't do a little research into the history of waterboarding, he might have found that:

"Waterboarding...was also acknowledged to have originated in "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War," a 1957 article written for the Air Force about abusive Chinese interrogations of U.S. troops during the Korean War. Anyone who wanted to could find it via Google for years."

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