Post and Run

Sorry love, no time for the old in-out, just here to read the meter. Big week for Great Places and Clinton Wireless meetings and I also have to keep those billable hours coming. Look for an article in the Clinton Herald this week on wireless security featuring yours truly.

For today just read the curmudgeonly but very intelligent blog of Col. Pat Lang (Ret.), Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 Colonel Lang is a retired Green Beret veteran of Vietnam as well as other conflicts. He is also an Arabic scholar having been the first Arabic professor at West Point. He has an impatience with fuzzy thinking and incompetence that is especially withering when coming from a man of both a senior military background and sterling academic credentials. He is especially good on torture.

With the conversation having progressed to this point, a look of dramatic, and cynical world-weariness comes over some members of the audience and someone (often a woman) asks me what I would do if the "authorities" had captured "Fulaan Abu Shuismuh" (so and so, the father of what's his name) and this creep has the secret information needed to prevent a terrorist outrage, and won't talk. "Isn't it right to do whatever it takes....." That is the question that is always asked, often with a kind of dreamy, far off look in the eyes. I have gotten tired of this Sado-Masochistic day-dreaming, so, in response I ask them how far they would go in "whatever it takes?"

"All the way," is what these usually liberal, often academic, middle class Americans normally say. "OK," says I. "Let's say he is really obdurate and the clock is ticking on said 'terrorist outrage,' so we bring him in here and you and you will hold him down while I take his fingers and toes off one at a time with garden shears until he talks? Are you "in" for that?" Shocked silence follows. "Ah, I get it," says I. " You mean that it would be 'all right' for people like me to do these things." At that point it can be seen from the faces that this is the case.

"Ah," says I as a "follow up," "then how far are you willing to go in 'immunizing' the tormentors from prosecution once the GWOT is a memory?" This does not get an answer. So, this is all BS, a fantasy for everyman and everywoman (complete with guilty frisson of titillation).