August 22, 2003
Jose Padilla
We Have Ways of Making You TalkA sobering article - glad the thoughts are all in one place.
I'm seeing a lot of analysis lately about "testable hypotheses" and "self-justifying assertions", glad to see that line of thought is coming out into the open. The little tricks are becoming more exposed.
As Josh Marshall writes in Talking Points Memo, in reference to the administration using the Iraq failure as justification for the war on terror, "they're yet again trying to bend logic and chronology into a metaphysical pretzel in which the failure of the policy becomes the justification for the policy."
And the US's methods for making Padilla talk are used as justification for not allowing him to talk.
Josh also earlier wrote that usually for a scientific hypothesis, it must be accompanied by a test case that would show how it can fail, and how our current foreign policies don't have this.
The best way to stop this kind of behavior is to expose it, over and over again. Point out how it is not rational, but bullying - tyranny, actually. The problem, though, is that they have no accountability. I know what happens to a person when they live as if something is true because they believe it should be true, rather than because it actually is true, and what happens is that it works for a little while and then they get a big reflection back that affects them negatively. In this case though, the reflection will hit the country, not the leaders. These men do not care about what they are doing to the country. They simply don't care.