More Stupidity From Andrew Sullivan - (Mætenloch)

Yesterday Andrew Sullivan had a post on his blog about the WaPo's article that DrewM mentioned below and managed to completely embarrass himself. Ann Althouse pointed out a major error, but trust me there are plenty of others. Here's the post in its entirety:

A commenter on Ann Althouse's pro-torture blog reminds readers what the Washington Post chose to omit from its story - KSM's debriefing from the Red Cross:

"During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time," he said."

The bulk of the information seems to have come when he was not being tortured - from traditional, legal and ethical interrogatory methods used by the West as a way to distinguish civilization from barbarism. But, as we now know, the barbarians were at the very heart of the American government for seven years.

The original post not including his quote from the WaPo article was only 6 lines long. Yet he managed to make the following outright mistakes, unfair accusations, and other assorted idiocies:

1. The Washington Post did in fact include the quote from KSM in its article as you can see here.
2. Ann Althouse does not run a pro-torture blog. Only in Sullivan's bizarro world could you believe this.
3. Sullivan is overly credulous of KSM. Sure he helped plan the murder of thousands but he would never tell self-serving lies to the Red Cross. That's simply inconceivable.
4. The information revealed by KSM didn't come during the moments when he was undergoing EIT. Well duh. The point of these methods is primarily to break the detainee's will to resist and get them to reveal something (anything) that makes further holding out pointless. It's not like cops have to do the whole good cop/bad cop routine for every single detail a suspect reveals. Once is usually enough, and the details come out after the routine.
5. He claims that the Bush administration were barbarians for the last seven years. You can only misuse a word so far before it becomes meaningless. I wonder where actual head hackers like KSM fall on the Sullivan scale...really bad barbarians?

So in just six lines he managed at least 5 major stupidities. That has got to be approaching a Fisk-ian level of compressed stupidity.

posted by xgenghisx at 09:19 PM

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