wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Wow. I checked back on my own comment & it doesn't exactly look like what I meant. When I talked about "those who do break," I meant whether they're innocent or not, & whether they have any info the torturers want or not. Also, I should've taken out the word "who." Would've been clearer if I hadn't been in a hurry.

Let's go back to to 2001, September 12 to be exact, when some of us were already reassuring our panicky relatives that the attacks the day before were the most success al Qaeda would ever and could ever have. Before the dust had even cleared, using information from the radio, tv and internet, we rapidly developed an assessment of the so-called "worldwide terrorist conspiracy" as a bunch of parochial fanatics who couldn't pick targets that didn't fit neatly on a t-shirt. We understood the greatest threat post-9/11 to be our own Government curtailing vital civil and human liberties in the name of short term security while the smell of the Towers and their victims burned our nostrils.

I actually chuckled aloud.... he definitely enjoys having his books compared to Le Carre. The difference between the two would be that Le Carre was on the so-called "frontlines" and he has written and spoken about the "madness of spies." He is rooted in reality where this guy clearly is not. See his piece in the New Yorker a few years ago, and interview with Terry Gross...

Mr. Berenson's views on torture are exactly those of Mr. Cheney. I wonder that he's not a Republican.

Ill-informed or delusional people like Alex Berenson might have been worried that al-Qaeda had a nuclear weapon.

Nobody else did.

And the fact remains -- we have a system of RIGHTS for a reason.

Utilitarian arguments do NOT trump rights -- that's the very essence of a right.

Wow. Just how far backwards into the Dark Ages have people like Berenson crawled, oozed, creeped, slithered?

The problem isn't that "guys you can't break" will tell you what they think you want to hear--they'll tell what *they* want you to hear. It's that the ones who do break who will tell you what they think *you* want to hear. In either case, the info isn't reliable.

Shouldn't this interview be about the author's novels? He isn't an expert on terrorism.

A reporter turned novelist who consults for "24"?? Can't take anything he says about torture seriously.

If Mr Berenson is so much a reporter at heart then maybe he should dig deeper into the successes or other wise of torture ... his espoused views are plainly crazy! Watching '24' is not enough.

Pro-torture extremists like Alex Berenson need to inform themselves better. Berenson has done one thing in the right direction by leaving the New York Times.

If he can cite ONE verifiable example of torture working, I'll eat my hat, donate what little forture I have to WNYC,... you name it.

And what will he say when one of his favorites is tortured? Say Judith Miller, who certainly crossed the boundary from journalist to combatant.

And what does he say of Joshua Tabor (sp?), former US soldier now under arrest for waterboarding his 4 year old daughter?