Should the Government have Secrets?

-->

It is very naive to think that governments should have no secrets. Here is an example: You negotiate the exchange of one of several American soldiers who are prisoner in a foreign country, and of course you want them back. The foreign country says: "OK, we will give this one back to you on the condition that you never say in public that we tortured him." It is horrible and unpleasant, but what are you going to do? Publish this in the media? What about not only this prisoner, but the other ones?

It is not an unrealistic example. One time, when Franco was still dictator of Spain, the Spanish government promised not to execute a political prisoner on the condition that his lawyers did not publicize the fact that he had been tortured. The lawyers were indignant because it is a disgusting deal and they went to the Press. The prisoner was garroted. What good did that do? It is easy to defend your principles with the life of somebody else.

The best example we know of secret deals happened during the Cuban crisis in 1962. We escaped narrowly a third world war thanks to a deal between the USA and the USSR about the withdrawal of US missiles from Italy and Turkey. If you think that you could have done better, go into politics or work for the State Department: don't blow what your Government does by publishing it to have your name on Facebook. 

If you dislike what your Government does, vote for the other guy next time. Half of the country does not like what the Government does, then it is the turn of the other half to be unhappy about it. We call this democracy, we have no need for traitors.

What the USA did wrong during the Cold War was very public and accepted by everybody at the time, such as favoring fascists over democrats as foreign allies. Maybe we should protest the crimes we know before we protest the conspiracy we don't.

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.

Revamping the CIA

I have been wondering why it is that the CIA always has a worse rep than their equivalent in other countries. All nations have spies, and all spying institutions sometimes misbehave. We got spy scandals in every democracy I have known in the last fifty years, It goes with secrecy that bad stuff is committed and that a few traitors are somehow generated. We got to keep both down best we can.

So there are scandals galore everywhere: how come the CIA is always the only bad guy in the news? I think it is cultural: Americans are raised to tell the truth, to talk in you face and go for a good fight: dissimulation is just not American. It is not true for the British, who have been raised in the complex heritage of Victorian times: all their education is about keeping to the weather, keeping a straight upper lip and all the restraints of the rules of good conduct. They may like a good fight too, but they understand the need for secrecy much better. As for the French, they have a large practice of double entendre and an unhealthy respect for the authority in place coupled with underlying rage: it is why they always leak information.

But of course we need our spies and they need to be respected. It is time to stop playing "I am a good person because I don't like the CIA". Maybe part of the bad stuff that happened at the CIA did so because they could not recruit in a net large enough. So all these people who felt too good for the CIA are to be blamed too.

It is time for the CIA to have a good image: it will help the institution inside and outside. They should spend a few million dollars on self-promotion. They battled Communism by supporting good anti-communist books, so they know the power of books, they should support themselves with good pro-CIA literature. The trouble with present CIA mystery novels is that they are based on the British model, and it does not quite "take" over here, except if the hero is British. The key, I think, is to put the accent on outsmarting. Let us leak some stories where we have been outsmarting bad guys (there must be leak-free stories, there always are) and pay some popular writers to enhance the CIA image.
I am getting tired of that constant criticism of the CIA: it is like walking on your own foot.

Torture useful?

All these gallons on water, and we do not know where is Osama Ben Laden.

Torture up close

People like me, born with WWII, have a different view of torture:it was in conversations so much that it was one of the first words you learned. I remember hearing of a man tortured by the Germans who was forced to count the whipping. It frightened me: I did not know very well how to count then, I must have been four years old. Then came Nurenberg: the American legal team said that torture was forbidden and that you were responsible for your own acts, even if your boss told you to torture somebody. The most awesome was that they did teach that to their own soldiers. Such was the American doctrine. This is why they hanged the main nazis and it is why I wanted to become an American.
In the following decades, most European countries did use torture, usually far away or just far enough from the mainland, in the colonies fighting for their independance (Algeria, Northern Ireland etc.)
When I worked with new colleagues or a new boss, the first question that came to my mind was would they betray me if there was a war? Would they betray you if you were a Jew? Most of them would, you learn to live with that. It is even worse with boyfriends. For anybody else, if a guy betrays you, he is just sleeping around; for me, he might send you to a gas chamber.
It is what happens to the mind of little girls in wartimes. I kept thinking: I want to die in America, where they do not torture anyone.
And finally my dream came true. Good thing I did not die last year.

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.

Ways to treat civilians in Afghanistan

This from a CNN documentary. You could see some American soldiers coming to a remote village of Afghanistan armed to the teeth. They came with a translator and asked if there was any terrorist around. My heart bleeds for these soldiers, because I think that the way they have been told to act is not right and that it puts them in more peril than it should.
What would you think if you were an old Afghan peasant who never saw a foreigner before? Now suppose you yourself go to work and there is a Martian there with big weapons asking you if there are terrorists around? What would you say?
A lot of Afghans have no idea what a terrorist is to start with. It is not the right question, because Afghan have a whole series of subdivisions in their mind, and Talibans is too big a word: some they like, some they dont. Explain that you are there for peace, ask them if there are problems with robbers or armed people that you can help with, but asking for terrorists or even Talibans directly are not good words and it is no way to start a conversation. It is like saying we came to kill more neighbors of yours, not a great idea.

You know this, but people forget: there is a cultural difference between people who live from agriculture and city people. You can see that in the United States: the values, the rhythm of life, the politics are different. In general, agricultural societies are more set in their ways and live more by rules, because they see less diversity.

I did work next door to an Afghan young man many years: we were in France; he could not go back to his country thanks to the Russians. He was a very peaceful and nice gentleman with no sense of time. He was also very sensitive to what is polite and what is not: it is basic in all agricultural societies. There are ways to talk to people. Many years ago, I worked in Ireland and I observed the same thing: the sense of time was not the same as mine, and the rules of politeness could not be overlooked. In Ireland, for instance, it is impolite to ask a direct question before you have a conversation, it is why Gallup answers were so unreliable at the time: many people considered that the method was offensive; I do not know if that has changed. My guess is that it has not changed much in the western part of the island.

The mistake here is to come as a bare army: why on earth, at least on the documentary I saw on CNN did not they come to a remote small village with some elders from the next village, it they were willing? They would, as a courtesy, because they are very polite and neighborly people, and they want to protect visitors. They would of course if they did not think of us as the new invader. To say the least, soldiers need to come with more people in civilian clothing: people that old civilans can relate to. It takes more time, but it is the way it should be done: make friends here, go to the next place. Why on earth are our soldiers not told to have a conversation before they ask about terrorists? If there was one in the surroundings, the elders would not tell us anyway, because the perception of us is not good, so it is just as well to spend five minutes talking about the weather and the fact that we are on a peaceful mission, and ask if they have enough food. It is basic politeness, folks. Being blunt and efficient is not the way Afghans work.

I am not saying that all Afghans are "nice", I know that there is a lot of armed people and small tribes of thugs, drug dealers and terrorists, but how are we going to find them in that difficult terrain if we behave like the Russians? There is a U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual that every soldier should read: it is full of good advice, and it is not that complicated; in one sentence: Talk to people as if they were your grandparents, but do not believe that they will behave as your grandparents would.

We need the population to help us, and it will not, if we do not respect its customs and if they do not understand what we want. Let me recommend the book of LCOL John A. Nagl Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. It is a fantastic read for anybody interested in our success in Afghanistan. If one of your loved ones is in Afghanistan, send this book over: it could save lives.