Posted on 08/31/2009 6:17:51 PM PDT by Kaslin
Call him Ishmael. Call him a terrorist or a suicide bomber or anything else you want, but understand that he is willing — no, anxious — to give his life for his cause.
Call him also a captive, and know that he works with others as part of a team, like the 9/11 hijackers, all of whom died, willingly.
Ishmael is someone I invented, but he is not a far-fetched creation. You and I know he exists, has existed and will exist again. He is the enemy.
Now he is in American custody. What will happen? How do we get him to reveal his group's plans and the names of his colleagues? It will be hard.
It will, in fact, be harder than it used to be. He can no longer be waterboarded. He knows this. He cannot be deprived of more than a set amount of sleep. He cannot be beaten or thrown up against even a soft wall.
He cannot be threatened with shooting or even frightened by the prospect of an electric drill. Nothing really can be threatened against his relatives — that they will be killed or sexually abused.
He knows the new restrictions. He knows the new limits. He may even suggest to his interrogators that their jobs are on the line — that the Justice Department is looking over their shoulders. The tape is running.
Everything is being recorded. He is willing to give up his life. Are his interrogators willing to give up their careers? He laughs.
(Excerpt) Read more at freerepublic.com ...
This is clever Richard Cohen implying that terrorists and suicide bombers are equally Jews and Arabs.
Richard, I call you evil.
It actually is a good column. For instance, Cohen writes,
No one can possibly believe that America is now safer because of the new restrictions on enhanced interrogation and the subsequent appointment of a special prosecutor. The captured terrorist of my fertile imagination, assuming he had access to an Internet cafe, knows about the special prosecutor. He knows his interrogator is under scrutiny. What person under those circumstances is going to spill his beans?
I believe you have missed the point of the article.
Didn’t the Clintons use threats of violence against those who’d dare speak out during their investigations? Dead cats, slashed tires, descriptions of what the target’s kids wore to school and their names?
You’d think that the public would hold terrorists to the same standard that was “ok” when the Clintons did it to US citizens who’d witnessed criminal activity.
I read the article. But I believe there is more than one point to it, and I named the one I feel is extremely offensive - not only because it is a gross lie, but also because it was designed by the writer to slip into the mind of the reader sublinimally.
I missed the subliminal message. In what way did Cohen imply that Jews are terrorists and suicide bombers? He doesn't even mention Jews.
On the other hand, he does say that Obama's new rules will make it very difficult to obtain intelligence from prisoners. That is quite an admission from a leftist.
He starts the article of with the phrase, "Call me Ishmael," and then directly invokes suicied bombers and terrorists.
Ishmael is an ancient and revered Jewish name, which is also nominally claimed by Arabs. However, it is mostly referenced as Jewish.
It is also the first sentence of the book "Moby Dick." But that use also derives from it's Jewish reference in the Bible.
In any event, because of the occasional Arab invocation of the name, he thinks that if he's called on it, he can claim it as an Arab name as "plausible deniability" against it's Jewish association.
In Arabic the name is Ismail. Ishmael is the Hebrew form.
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