>>>>>>This is a very odd response to this article... I am not really sure how to take it. Are you wanting to know this information or not? Are you wanting it posted somewhere in an official memo detaling all techniques employed by the US Government on interrogating detainees? If it were posted, what purpose would it serve?
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>>>>>It would serve as instruction manual for anyone wanting to give a fair and balanced extraordinary rendition to any American personnel detained anywhere.
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>>>>You mean like Danny Pearl - or William Buckley?
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>>>Don't know the gentlemen, and from the context, I'd conclude I'm better off not knowing them.
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>>Danny Pearl was the American journalist beheaded on the internet and William Buckley the Beirut station chief tortured and murdered by Hezbollah.
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>Um, confused "Pearl" with "Pearle". Either way, not the case upon we'd want to build the standards, was my point...
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>...which was that regardless of the monetary and metric system, whether there's gold under the dollar or not, and is the ruler a yardstick or a meter stick, the golden rule should still apply. Specially between countries and specially against foreigners. Because we are all foreigners (aka "internationals") everywhere except at home.
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>>Not sure what you mean by "from the context, I'd conclude I'm better off not knowing them". I guess if they had been prisoners in Gitmo forced to endure harsh words from culturally insensitive guards they would be more worthy of sympathy.
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>Sorry if I wasn't rooting for the right guys on this case - didn't really look who's wearing what kind of drab khaki gray camo garb, sunshades or not. I rarely have any sympathy for mercenaries, regardless of the color of their money.

Mercenaries? Hardly fits Pearle (sorry for the egregious misspelling which made the name unrecognizable <s> ) or Buckley. I guess you mean the Blackwater guys. I don't really have an opinion on that one way or the other. I guess they should be as respectful of Iraqi lives as the Iraqis are of theirs and as merciful to those who are trying to kill them as the insurgents would be to them. I don't particulary see them as being responsible for a higher standard. When the shooting starts, it becomes very simple - the guys who shoot at you are bad guys. And of course, identifying bad guys does not reductively identify good guys.

And I don't see the issue in terms of rooting for anybody but rather of being weary of so much smug self-righteousness. This whole rendition and torture debate has smacked of all this from the beginning. If an American soldier shoots an Iraqi it is a human-rights tragedy rather than just one more senseless killing. If an Iraqi (or other arab or persian in Iraq) blows up a marketplace and slaughters 80 it is also our fault for not preventing it. And if we are less gentle in attempts to prevent such attrocity that too is a moral failing.

There are people who have the responsibility of preventing unspeakable horrors, and who must deal with the fact that doing that is a very very very messy process which is morally compromising and sometimes doesn't leave you feeling good about yourself. The decisions they often have to make would not fit well into a script where you wanted George Clooney to play a good guy.

I don't doubt some of the people with those responsibilities are also themselves sadistic or evil. It is a very complex world. The place where I do not see that complexity reflected, however, is in the unending moral pronouncements from those who have an endless need to declare themselves to be among the morally pure.

Sometimes there is no choice which involves moral purity - unless one is standing on the sidelines determined not to get one's jersey dirty ( but is nonetheless willing to accept the protection of the watchers on the wall and eager to hold them fully accountable if suddenly some dark force - even more evil than Cheney or Haliburton - manages to nuke or poison an American city )