The Intellectual's Curse
A street fight demands new rules
By Dr. Jack Wheeler
jwheeler@politicalusa.com
12/4/2001
If
you’ve ever had the ugly misfortune of being in a real street
fight with someone determined to do you in, you know that
fighting fair will get you killed.
If America should lose the War on Moslem Terrorism, it
will be due to the increasingly hysterical demands of liberals
and libertarians that we must fight fair with the terrorists.
Somehow, protecting the “rights” of terrorists is
more important than protecting our lives.
It’s the Intellectual’s Curse.
What causes people to be intellectuals is a disposition
to think that abstractions and concepts are more real than
actual reality – so they get more afraid of the hypothetical
consequences of the abstractions in their brains than by
concrete threats in the real world.
What
else could possibly account for their freaking out over GW’s
holding military tribunals for foreign terrorists?
Or John Ashcroft’s holding illegal aliens who may
clearly have material knowledge of September 11?
Folks who are not US citizens and have participated in
the slaughter of thousands of Americans have no rights, no moral
or Constitutional protections of any kind. You do not read them
their Mirandas. You
do not let legal perverts like Johnnie Cochran and Alan
Dershowitz try to set Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts free like
O.J. Simpson. You
determine their guilt under established judicial guidelines of a
military at war, and if found guilty, you line them up against a
wall and shoot them dead.
We
are in a street fight, and our survival depends on GW’s
ability to brush aside liberal and libertarian complaints that
we’re not fighting nice and fair.
The obvious example is Israel.
If Israel fought fair with those who wish to destroy her,
she would no longer exist.
Israel survives because she has the nerve to assassinate
her enemies, and efficiently extract information from them when
caught.
When
a Palestinian terrorist is captured, how many Israeli lives can
be saved depends on how quickly and efficiently Mossad agents
can get him to talk. They
strip him naked and sit him in a chair with his legs forced
apart. They bring
in a large Doberman pincher whose muzzle is placed inches from
his genitals. They
explain: “This is
Herman. Herman is a
very unusual dog. Somehow,
we don’t know how, maybe by smell, Herman can tell when
someone is lying. When
someone lies, it gets Herman very mad.
And when Herman gets mad, he bites – really hard.
So we suggest you tell us the truth.”
While this often works, it is very far from foolproof.
The
ability to quickly extract truthful information – and know
it’s true – from a captured Al Qaeda terrorist has the
potential to save countless American lives.
Here is an interrogation method currently being
considered:
[Note:
You don’t want to use a so-called “truth serum”
like thiopental sodium. It
acts by confusing your memory so much you forget who is your
friend and who is your enemy.
So you think the interrogator is your friend and you talk
– except you can’t think or remember clearly.
No, the terrorist needs to be thinking and remembering
with crystal clarity.]
The
best lie detector – although it’s not used as such – is a
medical brain scanning device called a functional MRI (Magnetic
Resonance Imaging). Light
years in effectiveness beyond a polygraph, a fMRI scan can
distinguish – instantly, in real time -- when someone is lying
as opposed to telling the truth, as different regions in the
brain light up.
A
fMRI is set up in the interrogation center at the Termez airbase
in Uzbekistan. When
OBL (Osama Bin laden) or any of his cohorts are captured, bring
him to the center and do three things:
place him under the fMRI brain scanner, put him on a
mechanical respirator, and give him an injection of a paralytic
drug called succinyl choline chloride (SCC).
SCC,
used as a vetinarian anesthetic, causes muscle paralysis by
blocking neuromuscular junction.
It causes immobilization without affecting the central
nervous system, such that OBL cannot move yet he is fully
conscious and there is no analgesia (pain relief).
Injection by an M.D. anesthesiologist of SCC into the
nerve tracts leading to the diaphragm will paralyze the muscles
needed for breathing. OBL
can think, remember, and talk, but he cannot breathe.
The mechanical respirator breathes for him.
Without the respirator, he would quickly suffocate and
die.
The
respirator is a CPAP, a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure unit
used for treating sleep apnea, with a nasal mask.
The unit itself is placed in an adjacent room with a long
hose, as no metal can be around the huge magnets of the fMRI.
The unit will force air via the nasal passageway into the
lungs. His mouth is
free and clear to talk.
Now
the interrogation begins. OBL
is asked a series of questions to which the answers are known
(e.g., Are you a Moslem? Would
you like a drink of pig grease?)
If he lies, the respirator is turned off.
Few experiences are more terrifying than that of
suffocation. After
a sufficiently terrifying period of suffocation, the respirator
is turned back on, the question is asked again, and the process
repeated until he tells the truth.
Once you have the regions in OBL’s brain clearly
distinguished that light up when he is lying or telling the
truth, the serious questioning starts.
It will not take long, an hour or two at the most, before
OBL or his agent is singing like a full chorus of canaries.
That
is how you fight a street fight with terrorists.
It is far worse than useless to argue that not fighting
fair with them could hypothetically lead to tribunals and
torture someday for US citizens. It has clearly not done so for
Israeli citizens. Such argument is murderously dangerous by
inhibiting our capacity to protect ourselves from those who are
attempting – for real, not hypothetically – to destroy us.
We – you and I and all American citizens – have
rights which we must zealously protect.
The OBLs of the world have none, and we should act toward
them accordingly.
It
is worth understanding that so acting is a necessary condition
for the economy recovering from the current recession.
Until and unless winning the War on Moslem Terrorism is
clearly in sight, the recession will continue.
The only way to win this war is to terrorize the
terrorists into giving up their evil Jihad.
We can only do that by not falling victim to the
Intellectual’s Curse.
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