A senior British commander in southern Afghanistan did an amazing thing a couple of days ago: he asked American Special Forces to leave his area of operations because the high number of civilians they kill is undermining the work of British combat troops there.

This is quite incredible. The Brits have been in heavy combat in that region, and the Americans have been supplying them with air power. In effect, this commander is saying that American are so indiscriminate about who they drop their bombs on, in would be better for his soldiers to not have air support.

Also, keep in mind the debate among NATO countries about who would send how many troops to Afghanistan – every country wanted the other countries to send more. Now the British have decided that the Americans kill so many innocent people it would be better if they just left.

It is also worth noting that the province in question, Helmand Province in the south, is a Taliban stronghold, and one of the few places where the NATO war effort is going well, thanks to the British.

Anyone who thinks the United States should delay in putting a decisive end to Bush’s disastrous foreign wars, who thinks it would be rash to just pack up and leave, should carefully consider the implications of these remarkable outburst from the British.

for the story, see http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/09/world/asia/09casualties.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The Sunshine Project, a Berkeley based research group which does research on biological weapons, has discovered that a proposal in the US Air Force to develop a "gay bomb" that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other was under discussion for some time in the US military. $7.5 million was requested for initial development.

Gay "leaders" are denouncing this as offensive, though I am not sure why. Certainly it is a better use of money than building useless missile defense shields, more aircraft carriers, and hi-tech planes that can't fly. A gay bomb could be most useful, even here at home. We could start out dropping a few on Kansas, Orange County, and certain counties in Florida, for example. If it really works that would be bargain at $7.5 million.

Sunshine Project is here. Seems like a good group doing good research.

News report about the gay bomb here.

Buried deep inside the final section of the New York Times of Sunday, June 4, was an amazing story about how current CIA interrogation techniques were copied from Soviet interrogation techniques of the 1950s. In other words, the techniques used in Guantanamo and elsewhere – disrupted sleep, exposure to extreme heat and cold, hours in uncomfortable stress positions, and “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner’s face is covered with cloth and water is poured from above to create a feeling of suffocation – are all copied directly from Soviet cold-war practices.

In 1956, a group of American doctors working for the Defense Department published an article titled “Communist Interrogation” in The Annals of Neurology and Psychiatry, in which they stated:

“The effects of isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger produce disturbances of mood, attitudes and behavior in nearly all prisoners. The living organism cannot entirely withstand such assaults. The Communists do not look upon these assaults as “torture.” But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.”

The article’s description of the judicial proceedings the Communists subjected prisoners too accurately describes the situation in Guantanamo as well:

“Prisoners are tried before “military tribunals,” which are not public courts. Those present are only the interrogator, the state prosecutor, the prisoner, the judges, a few stenographers, and perhaps a few officers of the court.”

Furthermore, the Bush administration’s argument that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to al Qaeda detainees turns out to be a rehash of Soviet arguments concerning their prisoners:

“In typical Communist legalistic fashion, the N.K.V.D. rationalized its use of torture and pressure in the interrogation of prisoners of war. When it desired to use such methods against a prisoner or to obtain from him a propaganda statement or “confession,” it simply declared the prisoner a “war-crimes suspect” and informed him that, therefore, he was not subject to international rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war.”

Back in the 1950s, Defense Department doctors argued that while Soviet techniques amounted to torture, they were ineffective at producing good intelligence:

“The cumulative effects of the entire experience may be almost intolerable. [The prisoner] becomes mentally dull and loses his capacity for discrimination. He becomes malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate. By suggesting that the prisoner accept half-truths and plausible distortions of the truth, [the interrogator] makes it possible for the prisoner to rationalize and thus accept the interrogator’s viewpoint as the only way out of an intolerable situation.”
There is nothing to be added to this remarkable bit of research, except to note that it odd that the TImes would do research that would uncover such a bombshell, yet bury deep inside the paper.

NYT article here.