RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

When most people hear or read of “enhanced interrogation” they automatically think of waterboarding or Abu Ghraib (Iraq) or torture. And even of Guantánamo Bay.

James E. Mitchell, author of Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America, is a clinical psychologist, who, shortly after 9/11, served years in the CIA’s interrogation program of “debriefing” captured top al-Qa’ida leaders and terror suspects, held in “black sites,” to wheedle information from them about past acts of terrorism and those being planned.

Mitchell writes in his book that he has never been to Iraq or Guantánamo Bay. He does not identify the “black sites” where he interrogated prisoners; which is a good thing, for otherwise ISIS or some other terrorist organization would raid it. But, to read Mitchell’s book, is to get the impression that he is some kind of peace-loving Quaker. He often intervened in interrogation sessions when the CIA interrogators resorted to physical abuse of the prisoners. However, Mitchell is nothing if not patriotic. He begins his book in its preface. Some time after 9/11, he got an urgent call:

“You need to leave your home immediately.” It was the chief of security for the CIA on the phone. “We have a credible death threat by ISIS against your life, and we want you to evacuate until we determine how viable it is.” ISIS had tweeted a request that a jihadist cut my head off, and according to the CIA, someone had just volunteered to do the job and the person was already en route. It was December 2014 (p. 1)….

Over the next few years Mitchell and his co-interrogator, Bruce Jessen, also a psychologist, “interrogated” over a dozen captured terrorists and passed their appraisals and evaluations on to the CIA to have the information checked and double-checked against information garnered from other detainees elsewhere. When they dealt with a terrorist, it amounted to a mind game with the detainee. Mitchell and Jessen infrequently resorted to EITs Enhanced Interrogation Techniques), such as waterboarding, “wall standing,” sleep deprivation, and stress positions, only and unless a detainee was known to be lying or had been especially difficult, all approved – by the DOJ as legitimate means of interrogation. Reading through Mitchell’s account, one is educated, first, that they are not “torture” in the Inquisition or auto-da-fé sense, and that they are meant to persuade a terrorist to “squeal” the truth without actually harming him. Doctors were usually on hand to check on a detainee if it seemed he had been hurt.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/book-review-the-world-as-it-is-ben-rhodes-obama-reaction-trump-election/Barack Obama’s revealing reaction to Trump’s 2016 victory

Maybe you can help me out. I’m puzzling over a line in a New York Times story on The World As It Is, the forthcoming memoir from Barack Obama’s deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes. The article, by Peter Baker, is about the parts of Rhodes’s book that deal with Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton.

“In the weeks after Mr. Trump’s election,” Baker reports, “Mr. Obama went through multiple emotional stages,” including flashes of “anger,” “rare self-doubt,” and taking “the long view.” Do not think, however, that during the final weeks of his presidency Barack Obama was withdrawn or more self-obsessed than usual. People needed him. The day after the election, Baker continues, “Mr. Obama focused on cheering up his despondent staff.”

For example — and here is the line that confuses me — “he sent a message to Mr. Rhodes saying, ‘There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.’”

Say what? How does a dimly remembered Carl Sagan quote relate to 2016? Was Obama speaking in code? Was this an example of him taking the “long view” — implying that lol nothing matters because we are all cosmic dust adrift in the void? Was he suggesting the planet might be saved from Trump by an alien invasion? It sounds like the message you’d find inside an especially pretentious fortune cookie.

Obama’s words once again revealed his colossal lack of self-awareness. The passages of The World As It Is that Baker quotes in his piece reinforce the widespread impression of our 44th president as an aloof, smug, vainglorious chief executive totally divorced from political reality. The shock, disgust, confusion, and horror with which Obama and his team greeted the election results exemplified the very attitudes toward democratic procedure and populist conservatism that fueled Trump’s rise. The only lesson Barack Obama drew from the election was confirmation of his own moral superiority.

https://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Systematic-coordinated-genocide-556643

Father Patrick Desbois, a French Roman Catholic priest, has devoted the past 15 years to locating the mass grave sites of Jews who were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile mass murderers. In his 2009 book, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, Desbois documented the shooting murders of 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews.

His second book, In Broad Daylight: The Secret Procedures Behind the Holocaust by Bullets uses interviews, wartime records and forensic methods to locate hidden, mass grave sites to provide yet another account of mass killings, this time of Jews in seven former Soviet bloc countries.

Desbois’s interest in the Holocaust began in childhood after he learned that his grandfather, a French soldier, had been deported to a Nazi prison camp during World War II. After studying Judaism, Jewish culture and antisemitism, he embarked on his quest to visit the Jewish execution sites in Ukraine and Belarus. Shortly thereafter, he founded Yahad-In Unum, an organization that collects information about the mass murder of Jews that took place from 1941 to 1944 in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and Romania.

Desbois and his organization have interviewed more than 5,700 witnesses and visited more than 2,700 extermination sites. With simplicity, he poignantly describes the timetable, coordination, mechanization and spectacle of the genocidal process committed in broad daylight. His accounts describe how these events occurred repetitively and systematically from village to village. As the Nazis arrived empty-handed, local resources became tools for killing and pillaging. Because every resident in the Soviet Union was required to register, the Germans had an easy time locating all the Jews.

Although many are familiar with the death camps where Nazis gassed millions of Polish and German Jews, fewer are aware of the extermination of Jews by firing squad in eastern Europe. While the deportation of Jews to concentration camps was handled discreetly, the “Holocaust by bullets” was conducted openly with full participation of local communities. The German killers moved from town to town, requisitioning what they needed from the local population, including labor, vehicles, food and other provisions. With clock-like precision and coordination, shooters, police, transporters, diggers, cooks and others worked together as part of a genocidal machine.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/05/a_politically_incorrect_feminist.html

The word memoir comes from the French memoire, meaning “memory” and it is an apt description of Phyllis Chesler’s latest book titled A Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement with Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women. It takes Chesler’s readers into her world as she remembers, reminisces, and reflects on her myriad experiences.

As a Jewish immigrant daughter, Chesler saw firsthand the degrading conditions of women in the Muslim Middle East. As one of the leaders during the heady days of mid-20th century feminism she was enthralled by the potential for change, and finally as a scarred and experienced warrior, she recounts the stinging rebukes of people she once called close friends. It is the evolution of a person who revels in a good fight and who understands that courage can come in many different ways including calling out those she once greatly admired. It is also “dedicated to the men who helped,” to the “strong and fiery women” and to those who “served the cause of women’s freedom.”

The granddaughter of a woman who was “hacked to death by Cossacks,” Chesler’s book is an intimate portrait as she describes her evolution during the 1960s and 1970s when American women learned of feminists who had battled for women’s rights in the 18th and 19th century. The fight against sex slavery, wage slavery, and the absence of women’s legal, economic, educational, and political rights did not begin in the mid-20th century but few knew of the early feminist battles beginning as far back as the American Revolution with Abigail Adams.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-unknowns-review-fallen-sons-unforgotten-1527191591?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=2&cx_tag=contextual&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

In a grand ceremony on Nov. 11, 1920, an unknown French soldier from World War I was buried beneath the Arc de Triomphe. That same day, the British entombed their own unknown soldier with similar honors in Westminster Abbey.

Other European nations followed, but the United States, having lost 116,516 doughboys in 19 months of fighting—and with more than 2,000 unidentified Americans still buried in France—had no plans for the same.

It was not until the next month that Hamilton Fish, a New York congressman who had served in combat on the Western Front, introduced a bill providing for the repatriation of “a body of an unknown American killed on the battlefields of France, and for burial of the remains with appropriate ceremonies.” Congress passed Fish’s Public Resolution 67, and on his last day in office President Woodrow Wilson signed it.

How that decision led to the selection of one American soldier, an interment ceremony in Washington, D.C., commensurate to a state funeral, and ultimately to the honor the nation bestows upon the present-day Tomb of the Unknowns, is the fascinating history that Patrick K. O’Donnell explores in “The Unknowns.”

His later novels may be his most enduring, but future readers may shun even those, because of what they understand about who he was.

The reputations of novels and novelists wax and wane over time. Herman Melville died impecunious, and Moby-Dick didn’t begin to rise to the head of the canon until 30 years after he died. The Great Gatsby was not a great success until after F. Scott Fitzgerald died. Zora Neale Hurston died in obscurity in 1960, was rediscovered in the 1980s, and is now so revered that this spring’s publication of an 87-year-old Hurston manuscript was a literary event, and the book Barracoon today sits at number 2 on the New York Times bestseller list.

On the other hand, Norman Mailer was once the most famous novelist in America. As recently as 1991, publication of one of his books (Harlot’s Ghost) was major cultural news. His books sold hugely. His mantel groaned with the tonnage of his awards. He was a fixture on talk shows. No one who cared about books could fail to have an informed opinion about him, but even people who didn’t read books knew who he was. Today, if you stopped by the English department of an elite university and talked to the undergraduates, you’d have a hard time finding anyone who cares about Norman Mailer, just a decade after his death. Certainly you’d find students who have never heard of him. Norman Mailer is no longer important.

A similar fate may await Philip Roth. Before his death on Tuesday he was widely seen as America’s greatest living novelist. But will he be widely read in 30 years’ time, or even 20? I doubt it, although he may be saved by works that are among his least characteristic efforts.

Departed artists get subjected to a harsh, often unfair reductionism, and in Roth’s case a prodigious output — more than 30 books — will be collapsed into an unflattering assessment passed on from professors to curious undergraduates to less curious undergraduates. Roth, like many of his protagonists, will be described as a striver from the urban immigrant ghettos of the 1940s with a Holocaust-informed persecution complex and a ferocious, rageful lust. Roth, like Mailer, grew up in a culture that struck him as a prison of sexual convention and repression. Much of his writerly energy went into a frenzied, wailing hammering against those walls.

In his memoir Notes on a Century, Bernard Lewis observes that it has become “fashionable to assume that everything Western is bad”. Lewis, nonetheless, allows himself to make one “blatantly chauvinistic statement” by claiming that “the quest for knowledge” is a “peculiarly Western feature”. Throughout the past half-millennium, from the time of the earliest European Orientalists, the intellectual curiosity of Western philologists, adventurers and scholars has transcended provincialism, religion, sentiment and compliance. Notes on a Century goes a long way towards explaining why this phenomenon appears to be under threat, dwelling as we do in an era of “intellectual conformism unknown for centuries”.

Bernard Lewis, speaker of some thirteen languages, has been a leading Western authority on the Middle East for an astonishing seven decades, since the publication of The Origins of Ismailism in 1940: a colossus in his field, impossibly brilliant and an intellect of the highest order. The late Edward Said, one-time professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, described Lewis in 2003 as “a tireless mediocrity”. This says more about the founder of post-colonial studies than it does about his adversary. A more accurate description of Lewis was made by a Muslim critic in 1966: “[He is] either a candid friend or an honest enemy and in any case one who disdains to distort the truth.” Lewis, now ninety-five years old, wants to be regarded as a dedicated and single-minded scholar who successfully avoided the pitfalls of both polemics and apologetics. Despite (or perhaps because of) bouts of celebrity, and interludes as an adviser to various heads of state including the United States of America and Turkey, Lewis has his Western critics. Most—but certainly not all—hail from the ranks of post-colonial studies.

One of the best books I’ve read this past year is “Dear America: Who’s Driving the Bus?” by Linda Goudsmit (Contrapoint Publishing). I would recommend it to anyone who wants to understand school shootings, millions of abortions, fatherless homes, the Deep State, today’s social chaos, and just about any other new millennium societal problem. I wish I had read the book before I married… certainly before I had children. It would be great input for a first-time voter, too.

As Goudsmit explains it, the “Bus” is you. It’s me. It’s the narcissistic amoral teenager who killed 10 and injured 10 people in Santa Fe, Texas last week; it is the narcissistic amoral teenager who has been charged with 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder in the February 14 shootings in Parkland, FL. Donald Trump, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and all familiar political names have a “Bus.” Each of the treasonous Deep State participants who think they know better than the people what’s good for America has a “Bus.” It is who is carried on each of our busses that make the Never Trumpers think they have the right to undo the results of a democratically-elected President and try to force him by crook and hook to leave office – a coup of which any third world dictator would approve. The “Bus” is each individual liberal who thinks decisions are best made with emotions rather than logical facts and truth — and the “Bus” is each conservative who disagrees.

Goudsmit explains that each of us carries within us the personal hurts and emotional traumas suffered at various times of our lives – mostly from childhood. These personalities, buried so deeply within each of us that they are often totally unknown to us, are passengers on our individual busses. We are unaware that these personalities live within us. When life circumstances create a mirror-like threat that shouts “danger” to one of these trauma-induced personalities from childhood, they often try to take control of the way in which we respond to the perceived threat. If our adult identity chooses to let the emotionally traumatized childhood personality dictate our response to the perceived threat, a child is driving our bus.

Conrad Black’s erudite biography of Donald J. Trump is different from the usual in mediis rebus accounts of first-year presidents. He avoids the Bob Woodward fly-on-the-wall unattributed anecdote, and “they say” gossip mongering. Nor is the book a rush-to-publish product from former insiders of the Trump campaign or administration. Instead, Black, a prolific and insightful historian, adopts the annalistic method in carefully tracing Trump’s earliest years in business through his various commercial misadventures, financial recoveries, and sometimes wild antics. Black’s aim is to illustrate how much of what Trump has done since announcing his presidential candidacy in summer 2015 is hardly mysterious. Instead, Trump’s methods are fully explicable by what he has always done in the past—in the sometimes troubling, but more often reassuring, sense.

Black is neither a hagiographer nor an ankle-biter. He seeks to understand Trump within the three prominent landscapes in which Americans had come to know their new president: politics, the celebrity world, and the cannibalistic arena of high-stakes Manhattan real estate and finance. Of the three, Black is most jaded about the anti-Trump hysteria within the first two, not because the real estate business is inherently a nobler profession, but because it more often lacks the moral preening and hypocrisies of both the beltway and tabloids. The result is an argument that the first president to have neither prior political nor military service nevertheless has his own demonstrable skill sets that are making his presidency far more dynamic than either his critics or supporters quite imagined. Black’s unspoken assumption is that it is more difficult to build a skyscraper in Manhattan than to be a career politician or an evening news reader.

In Trump’s rise and fall and rise as a billionaire, Black never whitewashes his ruthlessness, his fast and loose relationship with the truth (e.g., “He is not so much a cynic as a methodological agnostic, not a liar as much as a disbeliever in absolute secular truths”), and his occasionally tawdry P. T. Barnum hawking.