The long life of 1950s sci-fi

Martin Kelley — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:59:18 +0000

Part of the playbook for American torture in Iraq and Guantánamo comes from Chinese interrogation methods used against captured Americans during the Cold War.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

It sounds like something out of the 1962 thriller film The Manchurian Candidate. And in a way it is: the idea that Chinese Communists had used inhuman ruthlessness to unlock the secrets of the brain to create the perfect truth technique would be a charming artifact of 1950s American culture, something to show alongside the hula hoop and the Jetson-like hover cars we’re all supposed to be driving in the year 2000. Instead it’s yet another exhibit in Pentagon amnesia.

Doesn’t anyone do any fact checking at the Pentagon? “Officials who drew on the SERE program [in 2002 to design American intelligence adaptation] appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.” And yet… it’s clear that Presidents Bush and Cheney wanted false information in 2002 to launch the war against Iraq. Whatever “confessions” can be wrung from the Baghdad taxi drivers who got caught up in the arrest sweeps can certainly be used to bully the growing number who oppose the war.

But what do we want, justifications or the truth? Peace in the region or protection from sins of the past? Forget that torture is inhuman: it’s also just an unreliable way of getting accurate information. It’s hard to imagine a realistic scenario where the horrible events of 9/11 could have been stopped by acts of torture by U.S. intelligence or military personnel but it’s could have been stopped if thoughtful analysts had been allowed to share information across agency lines and been focused on true knowledge and understanding.

Celebrating nuclear terror with amnesia and techno-lust

Martin Kelley — Tue, 19 Aug 2003 18:07:07 +0000

The Smithsonian Museum in Washington has “reassembled the enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945”:www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/national/19MUSe.html. Trying to avoid the controversy that accompanied a 1995 exhibition, the current museum director says this exhibit will:
bq. “focus on the technological achievements, because we are a technological museum… This plane was the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time.”
This continues the moral blindness that created the bloodiest century in human history. Instead of looking at how politics, war and technology intersected in an event that instantly killed 80,000 people, we shine up the metal and blabber on about technology. The bombing’s death count far overshadows the 3,000 deaths at the World Trade Center two years ago. If the sight of the towers collapsing is a horror we can never forget or minimize, then so too is Hiroshima’s mushroom cloud.
The only way militarism and nationalism survives is by abstracting war and ignoring the very real death, blood and tragedy. The Japanese people caught up in their country’s lust for war were victims as soon as the fighting started. Their participating in their country’s war was a result of propaganda and nationalistic fervor, the same mix that led so many Americans to support the war in Iraq.
The overwhelming majority of people killed on August 8, 1945 were people who never fired a gun. They were simply trying to stay alive in a world full of human-made terror. They were ordinary people who watched as their country’s leaders plotted and warred. Most were afraid to say no to war, to unite with pacifists around the world, or to denounce militarism wherever it existed and with whatever excuse it gave for its horror.
The roots of World War II were oil and terror: Japanese leaders attacked its neighbors to gain control of the industrial resources the home islands didn’t have. American leaders (industrial and political) had waged war against Hawaii and the Philippines for control of Pacific shipping lanes. The plotting for war started long before Pearl Harbor and involved the leaders in both countries. In a very real way, the war in Iraq is just the latest chapter in the century-long war over oil.
But history, truth and morality will all be stripped out of the Smithsonian’s new exhibit, as spokespeople for the American Legion and Air Force have declared:
bq. “As long as the enola Gay is presented in the light that it was used — to end the war and save lives — that’s fine.”
bq. “We are satisfied that it is in historical context this time and does not make comments about U.S. aggression in the Pacific.”
No, schoolchildren visiting Washington won’t learn the truth about the bombing. Another generation will be spoon-fed propaganda about its country’s greatness and goodness. Another generation will not pause to consider its country’s old sins and tragic mistakes. A typical blog entry about the Smithsonian exhibit that claims “no single plane did more to save lives in World War II”:http://www.hobbsonline.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_hobbsonline_archive.html#106130896137661056 . Abstract death and claim righteousness to your country, keep militarism going and keep peaceful people from uniting across national boundaries.

Air Force - Quaker Ranter

The long life of 1950s sci-fi

Celebrating nuclear terror with amnesia and techno-lust