Berkeley CSUA MOTD:Entry 33562
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2025/07/08 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
7/8     

2004/9/16-17 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq, Politics/Foreign/Asia/Others] UID:33562 Activity:very high
9/16    http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol48no1/article06.html
        From cryptogram, ex-CIA on interrogation
        \_ Cool article, thanks for sharing.  -John
        \_ Excellent, well written, makes some very good points. Thank you.
           \_ Jeez, I'm beaming like I wrote it myself. -op
        \_ good article.  I think this article, as well as the September 1st
           school incident in Russia brought a bigger issue:  What is a
           "terrorist?"  Terrorist are defined by the tactic they use, not
           ideology they believe in.  While this is relatively clear to most
           people in case of Vietnamese nationalist and Chechen rebel, I
           don't think USA has learn that our "terrorist enemy" are the result
           of our past 40 years of foreign policy in the middle east, from
           religious support of creation of Israel at the expense of Palestine,
           to overthrown of popular government in Iran.  Without drastic
           change in our foreign policy, we will not able to end the reluntless
           attack from Islamic extremist.       kngharv
           \_ Terrorists will attack us regardless of our foreign policy.
              They don't like the US for what it is -- a free and prosperous
              place not following Sharia law.  If you want to make an
              argument for a change in US foreign policy, using islamic
              terrorists is not a good way to go. -- ilyas
              \_ You're saying they hate us because they hate our freedom?
                 Utter nonsense.  Our freedom and prosperity might get some
                 two-bit mullah worked up, maybe he'll convince some young,
                 impressionable losers to do a minor attack; but convincing
                 a man to orphan his children, a normal young guy to give up
                 his chance with that pretty girl at the market takes a lot
                 more than "this old book says that freedom is bad".  Even the
                 WTC bombers were normal men once.  You can't just call them
                 crazy without wondering what got them there.
                 \_ ob40Virgins
                    \_ there was an interesting Kristof column recently which
                       said  that some modern scholars think this is a mis-
                       translation, and that they really get white grapes,
                       not virgins.
                    \_ http://www.angelfire.com/folk/patriotscorner/72Virginians.html
                 \_ They hate the products of our freedom.  They are envious
                    of our obvious prosperity, they are made insecure by the
                    inroads our "culture" makes into theirs (viz. blue jeans
                    and rock & roll helping bring down the Soviet Union), they
                    (in the case of the islamists) have issues with our lack
                    of restrictions on women, music, clothing, whatever, and
                    to some degree they feel left behind by economic
                    development.  Consider that the "Arab world" has never
                    undergone a sweeping renaissance or an enlightenment or
                    an industrial revolution, combined with the fact that many
                    countries spawning "terror" have a tremendous percentage
                    of unemployed youth, susceptible to demagoguery.  So yes,
                    they hate our freedom.  -John
                    \_ If it wasn't for GWB, they would love our blue jeans and
                       music and McDonald's and our freedom for women!  GWB has
                       ruined American credibility around the world for
                       generations!
                 \_ Well, they don't say 'freedom is bad.'  To them following
                    Sharia is freedom, while our kind of freedom is demonic
                    depravity and corruption.  We call this 'extremism,' but
                    this was a normal train of thought a couple of hundred
                    years ago in Europe.  They are not exactly crazy in a sense
                    of being mentally ill, they are just experiencing an
                    'outside context problem' (Ian Banks term), and are living
                    in a world we can't understand very well.  I am not
                    excusing what they do -- they are of course wrong, and
                    are doing evil.  -- ilyas
                    \_ (Responding to John and ilyas)
                       Who are "they"?  If "blue jeans and rock & roll"
                       brought down the Soviet Union, why don't we send
                       these instead of an invasion force?  And if it's
                       Islamic fundamentalism we are fighting, why did
                       we invade Iraq, one of the more secular middle
                       eastern states.  And why are we sending billions
                       of dollars to some of the most fundamentalist
                       countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait?  Perhaps
                       nationalism and belief in self determination
                       have more to do with the resistance we faced in
                       Vietnam and are facing in Iraq than you would like
                       to believe?  Did the Vietnamese conduct any
                       terrorist act on us after kicking us out?
                       \_ Because Soviet Union wasn't stuck in a feudal
                          mentality.  You can't expect 'blue jeans' to work
                          if it's unclear to someone that jeans are a good
                          thing.  A typical russian wasn't fooled by the
                          propaganda.  -- ilyas
                          propaganda.  As for the Vietnamese, they have no
                          fundamental ideological problem with the West,
                          whereas the muslims do. -- ilyas
                       \_ Nice try to transition to Vietnam=Iraq but no dice.
                          Please provide a URL for us *sending billions of
                          dollars* to Suadi Arabia and Kuwait.  We won
                          militarily in Vietnam, despite being the most
                          stupidly fought war in history.  We lost Vietnam
                          at home with people like Jane Fonda and John Kerry
                          telling the American soldiers and people lies about
                          our troops and the war.  If self determination is
                          the cause of resistence in Iraq then why are there
                          foreign fighters there?  Why didn't these self-
                          determined people do anything at all for themselves
                          during Hussein's reign of death?
                          \_ Lies?  Are you denying that soldiers didn't kill
                             civilians and didn't commit atrocities?
                          \_ They tried after the '91 war after Bush I promised
                             support but then basically helped Saddam crush
                             the insurgents. Have you ever led a military
                             revolt? I'm sure if they had you around Saddam
                             would have been toast. Moron.
                          \_ The Vietnamese had been fighting against foreign
                             colonizers for over 100 years, 400 if you count
                             periodic Chinese incursions. We would never have
                             "won" Vietnam, though we could still have troops
                             fighting and dying there, if we really had the
                             will. It might even be down to 1000/yr by now.
                             Why would we possibly want to do that???
                 \_ ob40Virgins
                    \_ there was an interesting Kristof column recently which
                       said  that some modern scholars think this is a mis-
                       translation, and that they really get white grapes,
                       not virgins.
                    \_ http://www.angelfire.com/folk/patriotscorner/72Virginians.html
           \_ Terrorists kill civilians (on purpose).
              \_ But I thought that's why we went to iraq.  So they could kill
                 our soldiers instead of our civilians...
                 \_ Yeah, Iraq is a big honeypot. People complain about the
                    dead soldiers but if we hadn't gone there we'd have
                    HUNDREDS of thousands of civilian deaths! If the stream
                    of terrorists starts to trickle out, we should bomb some
                    villages in Syria and other likely places to flush out
                    more terrorists, like fleas from beating a rug. Eventually
                    the terrorists will run out and we can go home!
                    \_ You forgot to capitalize "thousands"
                       Please tell me you're continuing the sarcasm and don't
                       actually believe this...
              \_ So the Commander of The Allied bombing campaign in Europe
                 during WWII was a terrorist? Dresden was known to be full
                 of civilians.
                 of civilians and had no legitimate military value. The
                 firebombing was undertaken to break the "will" of the
                 Germans to fight. Is that terrorism in your book?
                 \_ If you kill civilians on purpose as a military leader
                    and with a strategic purpose in mind, people start saying
                    you are a war criminal.  But it sticks less if you're on
                    the winning side and the winning side is a democracy.
                    Terrorists do it from a position of little power.
                    War criminals do it from a position of great power.
                    It's similar to "why is it racist when white people make
                    fun of black people, but not so in reverse?"
                 \_ Terrorism performed by national militaries isn't
                    called terrorism. It is terrorism in fact though, and
                    so was Hiroshima. There's no getting around it.
                    (the key is deliberate vs. accidental civilian killing).
                    \_ The U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, killing
                       80,000 civilians outright, to end the war early.
                       This is a war crime under the current accepted
                       definition.
                       Because it ended the war early, and may have saved
                       hundreds of thousands of American lives, and because
                       Japan had attacked first -- many would argue it wasn't
                       a war crime, or at least the definition should be
                       refined so it excludes the 80,000 dead innocents in
                       Hiroshima being a war crime.
                       \_ Victor writes the history. Duh!
2025/07/08 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
7/8     

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www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol48no1/article06.html
Merle L Pribbenow The war on terror is frustrating and confusing. It is a war of shifting targets and uncertain methods, a war that is unconventional in every sense of the word. One of the most difficult parts of the war for the average American to understand is the trouble we have had in obtaining information from some of the captured terrorists being held at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other locations around the world. A college classmate of mine, someone who knows I am a retired CIA operations officer, recently expressed to me his frustration with the pace of the war on terror. He said he believed that the terrorist threat to America was so grave that any methods, including torture, should be used to obtain the information we need, and he could not understand why my former colleagues had not been able to "crack" these prisoners. Our current war on terror is by no means the first such war our nation has fought, and our interrogation efforts against terrorist suspects in the United States, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay are (hopefully) based on lessons learned from the experiences of past decades. This article details one particularly instructive case from the Vietnam era. Nguyen Tai More than 30 years ago, South Vietnamese forces arrested a man who turned out to be the most senior North Vietnamese officer ever captured during the Vietnam War. This was a man who had run intelligence and terrorist operations in Saigon for more than five years, operations that had killed or wounded hundreds of South Vietnamese and Americans. US and South Vietnamese intelligence and security officers interrogated the man for more than two years, employing every interrogation technique in both countries' arsenals, in an effort to obtain his secrets. Frank Snepp, the CIA officer who conducted the final portion of the interrogation, devoted a chapter in his classic memoir of the last years of the CIA station in Saigon to the interrogation of this man, whom he called the "man in the snow white cell." Nguyen Tai Photo Nguyen Tai (Photo courtesy of author) Snepp was wrong. A few years ago, he published a slim memoir of his years of imprisonment and interrogation titled Face to Face with the American CIA. His book may provide some insights into the problems, both practical and moral, facing our interrogators today. Early Nationalist Like Osama bin Laden, Nguyen Tai was a sophisticated, intelligent, well-educated man from a prominent family. His father, Nguyen Cong Hoan, was one of Vietnam's most famous authors. Tai's uncle, Le Van Luong, was a member of the Communist Party Central Committee and the second-in-command of the communist Ministry of Public Security (Vietnam's espionage, counterespionage, and security organization, patterned after the Soviet KGB). By 1947, when he was only 21, he was Chief of Public Security for French-occupied Hanoi city. The woman kept the suitcase next to her until it exploded, thereby becoming perhaps the first female suicide bomber in history. Following the communist victory at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the communist takeover of North Vietnam that followed, Nguyen Tai rose quickly in the hierarchy of the communist Ministry of Public Security. One aspect of his rise was said to have been his assistance in the prosecution of his own father for anti-regime statements. 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www.angelfire.com/folk/patriotscorner/72Virginians.html
The 72 Virginians After getting nailed by a Daisy Cutter, Osama made his way to the pearly gates. "You wanted to end the Americans' liberty, so they gave you death!" James Madison comes up next, and says "This is why I allowed the Federal government to provide for the common defense!" Osama is subject to similar beatings from John Randolph of Roanoke, James Monroe, and 65 other people who have the same love for liberty and America. As he writhes on the ground, Thomas Jefferson picks him up to hurl him back toward the gate where he is to be judged. As Osama awaits his journey to his final very hot destination, he screams "This is not what I was promised!" An angel replies "I told you there would be 72 Virginians waiting for you, idiot.