The Old Hack

Hm. In this I am truly a little at sea. I am convinced that 24 had some effect on the public mindset but you are correct in that it would be a stretch to claim that it was transformative in its own right. Nonetheless, as a catalyst I feel it still did grave harm by helping to legitimise a mindset I consider insupportable. As to the larger pattern of propaganda, it is always there but as before I am reluctant to believe that there might be some great conspiracy behind it. For one thing it would be entirely unneeded, man is a political animal and expresses its ideas in its arts and entertainment. Why posit a conspiracy when just a few dozen entirely independent creators with related opinions airing their creations might have the same effect? And this goes for the entire political spectrum, of course, from left through middle to right. This is what I believe. Skilled interrogators are at the base of all information gathering. As you demonstrated earlier, they can be stunningly efficient when operating in a context where the subjects do not even know they are being interrogated. I cannot articulate scientific proof but I am nonetheless convinced that such comparatively 'gentle' methods can yield a great deal of fruit and certainly enough to be well worth basing an information network on. I should also mention that even within the framework of the Geneva Convention, harder forms of interrogation may nonetheless be comparatively róugh. One of my former superiors used to be in the Danish equivalent of the Seals. This is a very small but elite group which has at times had occasion to work together with the Seals. During one big exercise he was 'captured' and subjected to interrogation that kept inside the limits of the Convention and it did NOT sound like a picnic. Sleep deprivation, being forced to stand up in his undies against a wall for long hours at end, very harsh psychological methods used when he was actually being interrogated, and worst of all, those bastard interrogators got coffee and he didn't. Along the gentler lines, police interrogators have a huge cornucopia of tricks to draw on. The good cop/bad cop method is ages old but the reason it has lasted so long is that it works, even on subjects who know of it. Sitting down in a friendly manner with a subject and turning a visible tape recorder off, implying that this is 'off the record.' One very important technique is establishing a theme. If the interrogator can gain control of the narrative by convincing the subject that they are some form of authority, or that they actually want to help them, this confers enormous advantages. And so forth. Again, this was an era with an entirely different mindset. I recently had an interesting experience. I was discussing 'Star Wars: A New Hope' with a younger friend of mine. One thing he did not understand was the lackadaisical manner of the Imperials who just let the droids escape in their pod with the Death Star plans. He blamed it on cartoonish incompetence and felt it was 'an annoying but forgivable error.' I, on the other hand, had a different perspective. My friend had grown up in the increasingly security-minded post-9/11 era whereas I was a 70s kid. George Lucas made his first movie in an era where that sort of security would be considered obsessive and paranoid. The rather lax standards of the Empire fit with the times. I actually consider this a decent example of that very different mindset.

Splendid work, Illjwamh. It is good to have you back.

Hang in there, Prof. We're keeping you in our thoughts.

Back in 1888, someone wrote a book called The Titan, or Futility, in which a massive passenger liner said to be unsinkable met a disastrous end while crossing the Atlantic.

I am not against medications. In fact, precisely applied medication given to me with my consent has turned my life around for the better. It is when medication is used as a means to bludgeon an ill person into unthinking passivity because it makes them easier to handle that I start to twitch.

As long as it isn't like the execrable Enterprise episode Dear Doctor, in which Archer and Phlox decide that massive genocide is the only ethical course of action left to them.

http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=2348

Do you count Cheerleadra appearances separate from Elliot or do they also count as Elliot appearances?

Once again briefly suspending my own rule against posting here... In the Danish system, the mentally ill -- especially the severely mentally ill -- are subject to constant and merciless funding cutbacks. It is very expensive to treat certain of these patients because of the high requirements in support staff, environments and security. Underfunded and understaffed facilities find themselves so stressed by the demands of these patients that it becomes 'simpler' to drug them into insensibility or to keep them constantly confined/strapped to stretchers. Some patients have been kept immobile on stretchers for weeks or even months at a time. Inhumane? Monstrous? In my personal opinion, yes. Worse than corporate-run? I do not know. All that I know is that merely getting a single-payer system will not solve the problem. And so all I can do is sit and lament that it is so easy to strip a person of their humanity, and think 'There but for the grace of God...'

Meh. I am no conspiracy theorist. I might go so far as to say that it is conceivable but that I am personally unconvinced of it. I would demand just as rigorous proof of it as you would before I bought into it. Unfortunately, the deleterious effect on the public mind remains there even if it was unintentional or inadvertent. Fair enough, and you are substantially correct, yes. It is an important reason I object to the ticking clock argument. Another reason is that conventional interrogation may -- may -- be slower than torture, but it is not necessarily slow and it is by far more reliable. I have to object to the phrase 'immediacy that would require torture' due to my stated conviction that torture is unreliable and counterproductive, hence never required nor even advisable. But I agree with the rest. Hum. I do not quite agree with that last as the plot could still have been foiled at a very late stage with the simple instructions of "Ground all flights. Scramble interceptors over important areas. Any planes that disregard instructions to land and be inspected are to be forced down." Admittedly such an order would have to come from someone very high up, but if the Oval Office is issuing the order it would presumably happen, right? Still, you could reasonably call that a quibble. The reason the information was underestimated was, once again, the mindset of the times. Terrorists had never acted in such a manner before. If someone had told me such a story on the tenth of September that year, I would likely have boggled at it, or even scoffed. It is all too easy to condemn the intelligence agencies and the administration in hindsight. Whatever other issues I might have with the GWB administration, failing to prevent 9/11 is not one. (Actually preventing it -- now, that would have been a heroic tale and one where those responsible would deserve great honour and plaudits. Sadly, this did not happen.)

Certainly. I just can't see what its practical use would be. Let's say that I wanted to apply butter or olive oil to the Hubble telescope, for example. Out in the vacuum of space and the freezing temperature the fats and slippery oils would soon either harden or evaporate. The only real effect would be to get the lenses smeared, I think. Of course, if you just do it to regular telescopes down here on the surface, you just wouldn't be able to apply a proper grip to the darn things. I don't think they would provide a very good view if people have to desperately juggle their telescopes or fight to maintain their grip. Mind you, it wouldn't be as bad with microscopes. These are fairly stationary and as long as the surface they stand on is level and you don't accidentally jiggle them when you look into the lenses, they should stay put.

You need to get certification in how to treat Uryuom.

Hrm. Interesting. What would that be, a victimless noncrime? *scratches head*

Seconded.

But that is precisely my point. 24 was political propaganda used to assist in normalising torture for the population. Ethics and morals never entered the question; the unthinking TV viewer just had the notion introduced that, "Uh... maybe torture is a really good idea." If even one in ten of these spent as little time digging into the involved issues as I have done, let alone took the equivalent of a freshman college class course on the matter, I will eat my keyboard, monitor AND computer. Without salt. As to your proposals for your fantasy game, I defy you to find a way that will let a villain automatically beat all the ordinary non-torture security measures we have in place in the real -- repeat, real -- world. Yes. And how realistic is that? I do not consider the villains of, say, True Lies to be very realistic. Instead, let us look at a real life example. The World Trade Center. It features brutal and murderous suicide warriors brainwashed into thinking of their victims as subhuman and carefully trained to carry out one real-life attack. In that scenario, the ticking time bomb scenario falls completely apart. The main plotter was already on the radar and had been so for years. Various intelligence agencies, US and others, had kept a careful eye on the organisation. The agencies had months of warning that something was in the wind. Ultimately, what allowed the attack to achieve its 50% success was poor communication between various agencies and finally the administration. (Please note that I am not blaming the GWB administration here. It was a different time then and previous to 9/11 such an attack was unimaginable in not only the public mind but also in the minds of many who should have known better. Had Gore won the election, he might have been caught off guard, too.) Try to insert an organisation of torturers in the scenario above and explain to me how it could have achieved what the ordinary intelligence agencies had failed to accomplish with conventional methods, giving them the same months of time to operate in. Then explain why the poor communication problem would not have applied to them. In order to justify the ticking clock scenario for the WTC attack, you once again need to presume that the ordinary intelligence agencies would have completely failed to gain even an inkling of the attack up till 24 hours before the attack happened. Which was not what actually happened. Yes. In how many of these have torture managed to save the child's life where conventional interrogation provably could not? Please link me to respectable real world sources.

Which he had to make from a sow's ear.

Poor Dan. Throwing pearls for swine. >.>

Bah. Surely we can just have Jack Bauer torture the truth out of everyone. *grumble grumble*

Actually there are such lines. They are called the Convention of Geneva and the United Nations Convention against Torture. They are hardly perfect but in an imperfect world one has to start somewhere. Precisely. In this specific case -- the one I mentioned in my earlier post -- the interrogator himself was never informed precisely why his subject was remanded to the 'special interrogation' unit. As ever, jurisdiction lines and interagency rivalry may serve to muddy the waters to the point where it is impossible to say which impulse originated from where. The point was, this man was and is a very professional interrogator and he stated his firm belief that morals and ethics aside -- again, a step I take only with extreme reluctance -- torture is counterproductive. Once again I agree but I add this question: is it reasonable to take a thought experiment to such an extreme and then afterwards apply it to the general case? For this is what is done -- one takes an extreme, poses the question as it pertains to that extreme and then applies the answer to the general case. In other words, since one is willing to use torture to prevent a nuclear explosion, surely it is not such a large step to also use it to learn of enemy battle plans, gain the names of possible informants and finally in order to gain the confession of a suspected bicycle thief. Once the first step across the precipice is taken the rest of the way down is easy and inevitable. But '24' is not the real world. That was my entire point. It is a poorly written Hollywood fantasy which employs the logical fallacy of claiming that because of 'A' one must take step 'B' -- and then have the writers ensure that there is no other way to achieve the desired end. The entire scenario is in no way realistic. In the real real world, as opposed to the imaginary real world of '24', it might run in a far different way. Let us pretend that some vile individual decides that it is a wonderful idea to detonate a suitcase bomb in the shining metropolis of Chipping Sodbury, South Gloucestershire, England. Step one, of course, is to acquire the device itself. Simplest is to attempt to purchase one on the black market. As soon as our villain sends out feelers he is immediately at risk of touching the spiderwebs of numerous intelligence agencies, but let us for simplicity's sake assume that only British agencies become involved. Already at this stage there is a chance -- I do not know how large a chance, but surely at least a nonzero one, that some British intelligence agent hears that someone is trying to get hold of a nuclear device. If said agent is doing their job, they report this information upward and the intelligence spiderweb trembles ever so slightly, alerting the spider in the middle that a fly is testing the strands. Let us then say that our villain manages to obtain the device. At this point the spider may or may not have been alerted already. But as soon as an actual device comes into play, the chance of a strand being disturbed increases to some degree. Again it is impossible to say by how much, but again it is surely at least some amount. At this point the effort put into catching our villain also increases sharply. Step three is smuggling the device into England. I do not think this is as easy as television entertainment would make us believe. Ports, airports, the Channel Tunnel -- these all have safety measures. Even if the alarm still has not been raised at this point, there is now a large risk of bothering the spider; here near its home its web is woven more tightly and finely. And if the alarm has been raised, well, the plot is by now already almost certainly doomed. The amount of resources an alerted intelligence agency will pour into locating such a rogue device is not to be underestimated. Step four, in theory easiest, involves conveying the device to its target and detonating it. A single geiger counter on the way can make the plan come crashing down. We can only wonder how many of these British Intelligence have bothered with emplacing just in case. 24 would have us believe that all these steps can be entirely disregarded and that Jack Bauer is our only hope of stopping the device. I call taurine ordure. Assuming per default that our various intelligence services are all asleep on their feet for the weeks or months it takes to plan the operation, obtain the device/chemicals/biologicals or whatever, and move the weapon into or almost into position... no. In short, before you can say 'we have a fast changing situation a la 24', you first need to assume that all the other watchers were sleeping on the job for weeks or months AND that the villainous plan after all that time with perfect operational security leaks just enough info to Jack Bauer that he can get on the case but not enough to make anybody else in the intelligence community believe him. Sorry. I can't swallow that one.

All of the above serving to emphasize how utterly vital gun safety is. Once one has accepted that a firearm is to be used only in extremis, there is no longer any excuse for ever setting a gun down without also either 1) locking it away or 2) rendering it inoperable, and ideally both. When I was in the Army, this was what we did. It is not enough merely to leave the safety on. The safety is not protection from misfires, it is merely another barrier against them and one which may be bypassed through either mechanical failure or the manipulations of the careless. I have heard of cases where someone set a gun down for five seconds and in that interval a child that supposedly was downstairs picked it up, aimed it at an aunt and went, "Bang!" Then the child pulled the trigger and tragedy ensued. Given the level of care Don Edwards rightly insists on when the gun is in its proper owner's hands and the owner is mentally prepared for its use -- and how dangerous it is even then -- it becomes a no-brainer to work out how dangerous the situation instantly becomes should someone careless or untrained be allowed near the weapon. Once again, I am in no way arguing for gun control with this. I am, however, stressing the absolute need for discipline and caution when one actually possesses such a weapon.

It is such a simple invention. Incredibly easy to master. Yet the Hindu mathematical genius who did it solved a number problem that had stymied the ancient Greek masters for centuries. And that way paved the way for everything that followed.

Right! Thanks for clearing up the confusion!

...to me.

I would have but I had other readings in invisible writings that I had to leave unfinished.

I do not believe that torture works as an information gathering technique. Once again setting aside the ethics of it (something I only do with the utmost reluctance) it is simply too unreliable. Granting that history shows examples of occasions where it has 'worked', I feel unconvinced that it includes a full sample of the occasions where the 'information' obtained has been incomplete, misleading or even wrong. For example, who cares if the 'fellow conspirators' torture victims have named were actually in the conspiracy or were just desperate attempts to buy time free of pain. Certainly not the Gestapo or the KGB, the terror effect of mass arrests would be the same regardless of the actual guilt/complicity of those arrested. And given that accurate information exists, that can be used to speed ordinary interrogation, too. And do not underestimate the techniques available to professional interrogators, be they gentle or rougher. As to the time expended, well, the whole point of that POS 24 is to insert an artificial time limit that 'justifies' the torture. For example, I would like to know how many nuclear detonations in our world could have been prevented if torture had been employed rather than ordinary interrogation. I did read an article written by a professional interrogator in the US Army who mentioned the 'deficit' you hinted at above. He had been working with a youth who had given him some decent info, but then the youth was sent to 'special interrogation.' When he returned from it and the interrogator resumed work, he had clammed up. Totally. He no longer cooperated in any way or form. The interrogator could not prove anything but was morally certain that his subject had undergone torture in the 'special interrogation' unit. As for the brilliant interrogation technique you mentioned above, many forms of it still exist and are used frequently. For example, family members sympathetic to the cause of the interrogators are sent to visit the subjects where they are held. Authority figures respected by the subjects work very well, too, particularly priests of their faith. Much depends on the subjects themselves. Conscripts are wonderful subjects. Often they will resent having been forced to fight and a little kindness and promise of safety and preferential treatment will have them chattering endlessly in no time. Lastly and important to me is the fact that as soon as one employs torture one has immediately and completely ceded the moral high ground. There are many beliefs and ways of living in this world I am utterly inimical to. I do not wish to resist them by becoming them.