The U.S. Media and a Blackwater Kind of Fantasy . . .

“Steve” writes to say that my theory concerning the “pro wrestling” character of political debate and politics generally becomes more and more incontrovertible. As usual with letters like his, I replied that unless he could show a more reasonable explanation for everything we see having to do with elections, my theory must stand.

Steve also sends me the latest revelations having to do with U.S. torture of prisoners:

“When,” the article says, “the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency

Sometimes, I feel as though I’m the only one awake in my country. My reply was:

Steve,

Yes, but it's a mistake to believe this only began occurring under Bush. The CIA and U.S. intelligence services in general - Army, Navy, Marines - have tortured prisoners from the CIA's inception. Check what was done to Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko, for instance That was 1964..
Then, there was a guy named Luebbert. For more than twenty years, he was subjected to relentlessly continual burglary, attacks by muggers, motor vehicles, and snipers (three wounds); hounded relentlessly, he was stopped on the nation's streets and highways more than a hundred times in a few years, by cops who approached with pistol holsters un-snapped or the weapon actually in hand. Twice, he was poisoned by something put surreptitiously in his toothpicks and vitamins. His family was informed repeatedly by official sources that he was suspected of all manner of depraved crime, including child-beating, murder, and treason. His credit and police records were continually falsified, in order to incite not only law enforcement and others in government against him, but his own children.
And more (MUCH more).
Why is it - how has it been done - that people in the U.S. believe their government is better - more moral and respectful of one another - than THEY are individually? Why have these same people said nothing all these years, even after the Church Hearings in 1967 (68?) revealed things like MKULTRA, MKCHAOS - more than a hundred hideous medical and scientific experiments secretly conducted against the government's own people - and the like?
Better yet - why do these same, pious citizens do little or nothing about the atrocity that is the war in Iraq generally? Steve, for the right price, these sanctimonious citizens of the most sanctimonious society ever would torture their own children (some actually do that now, you know). You can make anyone whose god tells him what to do, do anything. "God" to the U.S.A. is money. When the money god speaks, its disciples obey.

Hal

Of course, my readers on TagWorld, MySpace, Truthout, and elsewhere know that there are many, many “Steves” in the U.S. “My country, right or wrong,” is the mantra-ized slogan. Even watching the other night the episode of Tom Hanks' televised history of One Hundred First Airborne Easy Company (my old outfit, by the way) entitled “Band of Brothers” probably wouldn’t help. The episode to which I refer, of course, is that having to do with the Screaming Eagles’ discovery of a Nazi Work Camp, together with the attitude of German civilians who lived near it.

Nazi Germany wasn’t the only place there are “good Germans.”

But the subject disgusts me as much as does that particular episode of ‘Band of Brothers” – I’m full-blooded German, with relatives still in Germany, you know – and I’d rather talk about something else. For now, at least; disgust is just as poor an excuse for doing and saying nothing as the “German Excuse” (“I didn’t know anything about it,” in case you’ve forgotten your history of the war [which is another reason these things . . . oh, never mind!]).

Part of the hypocritical hand-wringing going on today among the oh-so wondrously pious among us has to do with Blackwater Security and its civilian military soldiers. Today’s paper, for instance, has a cartoon (immediately above my own “Guest Column,” incidentally) depicting the Disney character Yosemite Sam, firing two six-shooters into the air while applying for employment with Blackwater. “I hear you’re looking fer reckless, trigger-happy employees,” Sam says – to which a supposed Blackwater executive replies, “When can you start?”

Writing in my own column on another matter, that having to do with a recent column by Walter Williams on the subject of global warming, I pointed out that Argument by Ridicule is logically fallacious. And, therefore, worthless as commentary. So is the Yosemite Sam cartoon.

It happens that I know something of high risk security work: It was I, as a matter of fact, who wrote the first Special Operations And Tactics tactical doctrine and Table of Operations and Equipment; SWAT tactics having to do with personal protection were my idea, and I still instruct high-ticket and known-threat operatives in that line of endeavor. So, while I do not have sufficient information – the U.S. media, being dedicated to the contrary, is the last place to get anything useful where determination of fact or truth is concerned – I have some thoughts and questions.

First, one method of tactical learning, intelligence, and planning having to do with protecting someone of something from a lethal or totally destructive attack is that of mental experiment. Let’s try it:

You are protecting someone or something – yourself, for instance. Walking toward the local Wal-Mart, for further instance, you are surrounded by people and vehicles, some moving, some stationary. All are nondescript – there is nothing to call your attention to anyone or anything.

Oh, there are plenty of distractions. That gorgeously built woman over there in the white short shorts, the one with the big bazoomas. Damn, shorts and high heels – here, this time of day? What’s that about?

That’s when the first shot is fired. It takes your hat off – that close.

But momentarily, you can’t be sure concerning where, or whom, it came from. You’re quick, though, and superbly trained (with me personally, it’s been almost daily for more than fifty years); you pick him up in less than a fifth of a second, so fast that he hasn’t had time to trigger the second shot from the automatic pistol he is aiming in your direction. And the finger on that trigger is tightening as you look . . .

I digress here momentarily, but with purpose. As some of my readers and most of my friends and associates know, it is all but impossible to surprise me. Even wife Rita is tempted to try me continually, reaching suddenly – for instance – for my “package.” No matter how sneaky she is, her hand never reaches its target, always being intercepted and held. Recently, an Airline Flight Deck officer I have trained demonstrated to a friend my “gift” by repeatedly, as swiftly and from as many varied directions as possible, trying to strike or touch me. Repeatedly, he found both his hands caught in a grip he could not resist or overcome to repeat his attack.

I trust I have made a point. Back at Wal-Mart, I see that trigger finger tightening, about to hurl terrible injury or death. No problem – I’m that fast, and that accurate. He’ll be stone dead before his falling body reaches the ground.

No problem? Not quite: among the first things I was taught as a four year old learning to use a firearm was to know what was behind my target. Actually, my parental and family teachers demanded that I know everything of the environment surrounding the trajectory of my prospective shot. Bullets, I was told again and again have no brain and no eyes. They damage, wound, or kill whatever they hit, whether you’ve aimed them and intended that or not. Bullets are all about responsibility.

What’s behind the guy with the finger tightening on that Glock automatic?

I’m good, as I said – very good. I will shoot just once to end this (let’s for the moment assume one assailant; and if you’re ahead of me there, good for you). When my full metal jacketed, .45 caliber slug goes – as I know it will - through the head and brain stem of the would-be killer, what will it hit next? The baby in the arms of the woman behind him? Maybe it will strike the concrete block wall behind him, then ricochet. What will it hit then?

And so on.

That finger is tightening on that trigger, and I am looking right down the barrel of that pistol . . .

Five decades of training have resulted in my deciding whether and what to do in situations like this in less than two-fifths of a second (yes, you’re damned right I’m already too late, but this is fantasy - for drill, remember?). WHAT DO I DO?

No, not in an armchair in air-conditioned or climate-controlled hearing or conference room listening to witness, or even watching the ubiquitous video tape of it all, not in your likewise comfortable living room before a television set listening to the inevitable panel of media pundits doing their inevitably ill-informed and/or biased post mortem of it all; you are in that damned parking lot and looking down the barrel of a firearm about to kill you. You are a split second from eternity.

NOW tell me. What do you do?

I’ll tell you what you do. You kill him. You put a bullet right under his nose, and through the brain stem. He never so much as sees the drawing of the gun with which you kill him. And that, right there – no matter what society and all its investigators, pundits, and commentators say - is as far as your moral responsibility goes. Period!

Oh, if the bullet kills that baby in the arms of the woman just behind him, you may never get over it. You may never have a full and undisturbed night again. Society will do everything in its power to assure that, too. You will be arrested. Depending upon what witnesses say – there is always a witness who for some reason, ideology, religion, race, or the like - is totally out of touch with reality – you may be released. There will be weeks of Nancy Grace, Greta Van Susteren, Kimberly Guilfoyle and the sisterhood of PMS hate pillorying (that may depend on the babies gender, of course). You will be sued – and only god knows by whom beside the child’s family.

But the person morally (I wish I could say legally, too, but this is no longer that kind of society) responsible for everything that happened after that bullet killed your assailant is the assailant. Any other reasoning is insane, chaotic in its result – and the reason for the societal metastasis occurring today in our sickened and dying nation.

There’s even more. When one is a sworn member of the Fifth Profession – samurai, knight paladin, bodyguard, or the like – he has no longer the right to decide even on the basis of saving his own life. Not if he holds inviolable – as do I – his honor. He has given his word to the retainer – the person he is protecting – that no harm from any human assailant will come to him. His word. His honor. That simple.

At the risk of redundancy and/or over-complicating my argument, even weakening it with proof irrelevant and beside the point, there is also the responsibility of those surrounding our imaginary shoot-out, the public’s responsibility for its own safety.

Oh, they are of course “in the same boat” with me, the samurai. The imaginary attack today has been so sudden as to be controlling morally and even otherwise. No time for choices means morally no responsibility for outcomes. But we, the public, know about these things. Incidents of this kind are daily fare nowadays. How does one justify his going about in what the late Colonel Jeff Cooper called “Condition White” – fat, dumb, and happy? Has he no responsibility to do at least some part of the mental experiment I described a moment ago here? Does his choice of pretending that everyone else is responsible for his own safety bear responsibility nonetheless?

What is the responsibility of those who would not only see to it that everyone in the Wal-Mart parking lot was actually and physically disarmed, but would have spread the ideology that has it that a good citizen is one who will quietly submit to violence – even rape or murder – rather than “take the law into their own hands?”

What is the responsibility for what happened of the people who equate my actions in that parking lot today with “shoot first and ask questions later?”

Let me put it another way, for those moral types who always intervene at about this point in any discussion like this one. Let me, for an instant, play god (after all, that is akin to what all the humanist liberals and their like profess to be doing) on Judgment Day. Remember the eschatology? “I was hungry,” etc.?

“I was beaten, terrorized, raped, and murdered while you stood and watched – justifying yourself with “Christian Principles.” I was helpless against my assailants, because you disarmed me. I was beaten, terrorized, raped, and murdered because you not only deluded me into believing that there was no danger or that I could protect myself, but insisted that to do anything else was to “take the law in to my own hands.” Alone against my enemies, I was permitted by you and the government you did nothing to change only to call the police miles away. You were instrumental in convincing your society and nation that to give in to evil being done to your neighbor was my idea. You twisted and tortured the writings you insisted I dictated – the “Bible,” as you call it - until it made me my own victim.”

The judge might go on, but you get the idea.

As everyone who reads what I write, or knows me otherwise, knows, too, that I am no apologist for CIA, Steven Canyon, proprietary company soldiers. But two and two is four even if Hitler says so. Go back with me to that Wal-Mart parking lot for a minute. Make it a Wal-Mart in Baghdad (well, this is imaginary, so you can do that easily – right?).

Need I add that the threat of sudden death is now literally everywhere? A car starts suddenly; tires screaming, it heads right for you and your family. Fifty yards away, you know instantly that if that car contains a suicide martyr for Islam and enough explosives, you must stop it NOW!

So – same question – what do you do? Play with it (this is a fantasy, remember?): you shoot, the car explodes, and with six months in the hospital you and yours escape – only deafened, disfigured, and what-have-you – but alive. Or, the driver is only one who lost control of his car momentarily when the accelerator stuck. You killed him, and all that happened was that the car hit a light pole and knocked it over. Or . . .

While you’re fantasizing, imagine that when your city becomes Baghdad (as it most certainly will, should you persist in accepting what’s being done concerning the Blackwater samurai team), the judge in my eschatology a minutes ago has decided that you will live and do everything according to how you have judged my actions today in that Wal-Mart parking lot.

Be it done unto you according to your own word . . .?