Should civilized nations use "Enhanced Interrogation" techni

[--Pete]

Hi,

We can't just wait for "crimes" to happen, then go arrest the ones who did it, then build a case against them, then perhaps put some of them in prison.

You make it sound like the *only* alternatives are to do nothing or to arrest them for life on suspicion. There's a lot of room between those extremes, including tracking, intelligence gathering, blocking travel, etc. And, yes, all we can do is try to anticipate and foil their attempts and punish them *after* they've committed a crime. Right now, we're not doing too well on either front.

What we agree upon, I think, is that the challenge is to convince all the would be martyrs that terrorist actions against the "west" are useless.

Close, but not quite. The 'would be martyrs' are already past convincing. The challenge is to change the society that generates those martyrs from one that champions that behavior to one that condemns it. We have our home grown lunatic fringe that generates the rare act of terrorism, but we do not condone it.

Israel does this actually in a number of ways.

And they've been successful against terrorist, but not against terrorism. As long as there are *governments* that support terrorists (even passively by ignoring terrorist organizations on their soil), so long will terrorism be a major problem. And in dealing with governments, small threats and threats to their populations have little effect. If one is going to go the hard core line, then one needs to be ruthless enough to engender great fear. The USA could have threatened Afghanistan with the destruction of one of their cities every week until Bin Laden was turned over. The thing is, it could not afford to be a bluff. And if the threat was carried through, the world would have known that we meant business. The number of countries willing to support terrorism would have dropped drastically. And the number of terrorists would have increased astronomically. Harsh measures can subdue a population, but they don't solve the problem. The prime example is the Balkans -- look at their history, it is very illuminating.

I believe that the liberal approach is to make friends with the terrorists.

Then you believe wrong. The liberal approach is to not further make enemies of the moderates and to try to turn some of the supporters of terrorism to moderates. And to be willing to talk to our enemies. Unless you have the ability and ruthlessness to force almost total suppression, then retaliation leads to escalation. And if you are sufficiently ruthless, then eventually the situation will explode, a Serbian nationalist will shoot an Austrian archduke and hundreds of millions will die over the next forty years. Or something similar.

If we hug them enough they will stop killing us. If we change our policy to condemn our good friend Israel, and if we help them kick our good friend Israel off the Palestinian land, then they will be our friends. If we capitulate to their "no infidels can step on our sacred soil even when invited by the legitimate government" dictum, and make smooth the way for their expansion of "The Jihad" into every nation, then maybe they will stop killing us.

Hyperbolic ultra conservative natural fertilizer.

So, there probably does need to be a third way which; A) works to prevent terrorist attacks,B)utilizes appropriate parts of law enforcement, C) utilizes parts of the military for covert missions to gather intelligence, destroy a stronghold, or capture an enemy, D) respects our alliances and works to build a network of interdependence, and E) communicates clearly to the people what is happening and why.

Yep. But you left out the most important element of all. Remove the underlying causes for terrorism. And that is something that will need honest effort from both sides. As long as the attitude of *either* side is 'you're either with us or against us', then the conflict will continue. Ask the Irish.

. . . but just the mature recognition that not everything may be what it appears to be.

Bah. I've been told by many travelers, and this was long before 2001, that the only nation that routinely treats random tourists as criminals is the USA. And, no, these weren't Dutch euro-trash American haters. These were citizens of the USA and good ol'boys.

I think we might also petition all sides to adopt a shorter memory, and try to forgive their enemies for the things that happened decades, centuries, or eons ago.

Every real world problem has a simple, easy to understand, wrong solution. What makes this one wrong isn't that it is bad, but that it is impossible.

--Pete