re: #2 Killgore Trout

Not really. I’ll skip the debate of the value or morality of waterboarding but I really don’t buy the claim that it creates terrorists. The Abu Grahib pics were use as Islamist propaganda too and the effects of that were probably fairly minimal. They are much more outraged by our support for Israel and the Danish cartoons. Even if we were to drop Israel and stop drawing cartoons it would make absolutely no difference.

Why would you disregard the field experience of the interrogators who actually talked to the foreign fighters that we captured?

I have read several accounts of interrogators who testify that foreign fighters began to pour into Iraq after Abu Ghaib and that they were motivated by the pictures of Arab men being humiliated by Americans…female soldiers in particular. The stories of similar treatment at GITMO has been used successfully for recruitment as well.

This is a huge cultural taboo in the Middle East. Humiliation of men is something that not only gets the person in question and his immediate family motivated for blood revenge, but many of the neighbors as well.

But you find this to be inconvenient because, well, I don’t know.

Why?