Administration vs Terrorism

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So, somebody made a spelling mistake in the name of a terrorist. Mistakes in official documents also happen, according to my experience of 70 years and lots of travels, about ten percent of the times, more so, obviously in countries that are not your own. I have had in turn on my passport/identity/visa forms/driver's license and various permits the wrong first name, the wrong middle name, the wrong date of birth, and one time the wrong sex. Several times, the authorities refused to correct their mistake: it was not in the power of the person handling me the document.And the name Lambert is shorter to spell than Abdulmutallab.
I am quite certain that somewhere in the US archives, somebody has statistics about mistakes done on uncommon and difficult names. And obviously nothing came out of it. As Justin Fox remarked today in his blog, how come the State Department is not equipped to handle this? Police files have many cases of people trying to escape justice by changing themselves a small detail in their own identity, so we must account for our own administrative mistakes plus a number of cheaters.
If you had asked me a few days ago how I imagined the State Department verifies if you have a visa, I would have said: "They probably have a list of similar names coming up with access to your picture, face recognition stuff, prints, possibly coded access to your whole file and the various alerts from different departments, CIA, criminal files, etc." I would also imagine that if you look for a Nigerian who has been a student in Britain, they all come up on the touch of a button.You could check on the list who also has a visa for the US. All this is elementary, so I also hope they get a good intersect with other agencies. Is it too much to ask?

Why is it the way it should work? I do stuff like that all the time with history problems. For instance, if I want to know who was at the US embassy in Vichy during WWII, it comes up, at the touch of a button and in a few minutes work.

Searching is a skill: it can be learned. How educated are people of the State Department in searching? How fast do they find ten red balloons?
How do you do a decent job without a decent instrument? A good no-nonsense search software seems to me more efficient than waterboarding!

Does torture work? YES it does. It would with me.

I am getting tired of watching young (compared to me, they are all young) reporters discussing whether torture works or not. Of course it works. I for one would tell anything to my dentist. Any American who is afraid to go to the dentist should understand that torture has a very good chance to work. Let us quit the attitude and use common sense. MOSTLY, it "works": many people would talk.
So, a lot of people are like me and would say anything under duress. Here come the questions:
1) Would I tell the truth or anything to please the dentist and escape the experience? What would you do?
2) Do I know anything interesting? I do not. Most of us do not know squat, and most of our enemies do not know squat. How many people who do not know anything are we willing to torture? Do we even know who is the enemy? In this kind of war, we don't. Where do we stop? Are we going to torture a hairdresser just in case he or she has heard something useful?
3) If torture is so efficient, how come we never learned where was Osama Ben Laden?
4) There has been a vast experience of torture in the last 60 years. Nazis tortured, got good information and lost the war. French tortured, claimed it saved lives and lost Algeria, Britain tortured and did not keep India or Ireland, the KGB tortured and communism lost.

You make your own mind. I think that the strength of Americans is that they can outsmart their enemies.
Let us not forget it: outsmarting is something Americans are good at.

Robert Gibbs: torture, outsmarting the bad guys

It is ironic that I came to this country because it was against torture: I was not sure about any other country, but I was sure about this one. I found it extraordinary that many journalists today seem to imply by their questions to Robert Gibbs that torture is the only way to acquire knowledge of the enemy. Of course it is not: do not believe an instant that the CIA is powerless without torture!
I had in the past worked for several human rights agencies and collected stories from people who had been tortured East, in communist countries, and in Greece under the colonels and West, specially in South America, and South from Spain to Iran to South Africa. Keeping notes of torture was a despairing job: torture was almost everywhere in the 70s, but it was nothing like seeing the results with your own eyes. I do remember people with burns, people without nails, and people with arms or legs torn and unusable: I still have nightmares filled with blood. The Prime Minister of the “New Yugoslavia” was once interrogated about Kosovo, in London, and answered: "All history books should be kept away from children." This gave me a bitter pleasure.

To me the Nazis tortured and lost the war, the British and the Americans used another weapon: they outsmarted them.


When each generation comes to war, there is a temptation to save lives by forcing some people to talk under torture. It is easy to find young men who believe that by torturing, they achieve a greater good, save lives of their countrymen, protect their own. And then, they are not sissies; they have to do what has to be done. The discourse is successful in any country. It was in France in the 60’s, a country that has many faults but is generally considered civilized.
The problem is that we never really know who knows, so we torture innocent people. The problem is that most of our enemies don’t know squat, and they tell us what we want to hear. The problem is that with each wrongdoing, each atrocity, we create a century of hate. I know exactly what the Germans did to my family in 1914. Armenians know exactly what the Turks did. Black people remember their history. You will have a hard time finding Japanese Americans who do not know that their grandparents were in camps during the war. None of us wants to forget 9/11. It is a pity that each generation has to be explained this again and again and again, and that so many governments hide bad deeds, poor administration and stupid revenge under the guise of a need for information.
Legal wartime behavior is not easy to achieve: there is the pressure of war, the rage of seeing your friends killed, the fear, the sense of urgency. So I do not condemn soldiers who go too far: wanting to pummel somebody’s face to get to the truth is very human. What I criticize is the executive for its lack of vision and for the lack of training in appropriate techniques of war when it will boil down to man-to-man contact.
What do we want after the war ends? All wars end. It used to be that Americans, specially the army, were admired worldwide for their restraint as opposed to the Nazis’ immorality and for the way they carefully protected works of art in all of Europe during wartime. We seem to have lost our interest in protecting art.
At the end of the day, let us be efficient and use restraint, protect children, protect history, protect art. But let us also outsmart the bad guys. We got a weakness there that waterboarding never compensated for.