Month: February 2015

Torture Supporters have Better PR and Marketing People

by Spocko 

On the most beautiful sunny day of the year in San Francisco I took a train to the East Bay then walked up a hill into a windowless room to listen to five experts talk about torture.  This was my idea of a good time, and possibly the reason I’m a laugh riot at parties.

It was a symposium titled: Torture, Security, and Law.

The senate intelligence committee report
The involvement of psychologists and lawyers
Holding ourselves accountability

 It was held at Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley School of Law which is the current home of distinguished scholar John Yoo.

I went to hear the progress of bringing accountability to the people who encouraged, legalized and normalized torture in America. I was also hoping for a path to accountability for those who tortured.

I was very disappointed.

I was not alone in my feeling. The panel members expressed their own disappointment with their progress. ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer talked about his problems getting documents out of the government or getting the voices of the people tortured to be heard by the public. He was fighting to get images of their torture seen but kept getting blocked.

What was especially frustrating was hearing the failed attempts of facility, law professors and alumni at Bolt trying to figure out a way to deal with Yoo’s continued presence.

On the way home my scholar friend and I discussed what it would take to bring protest of torture to the front of people’s minds. He pointed out that during the Berkeley protests war wasn’t abstract, it was personal. Killing others is a big moral issue, but personally being killed is a practical issue. Ending the war would mean keeping you or your loved ones safe and alive. It can raise the question:

Why protest torture when it has been sold as an effective means to keep Americans safe and alive? 

As I thought about accountability or changing the acceptability of torture and war in America, I kept coming back to something my Canadian friend Interrobang said to me.

“When Americans talk about torture they always see themselves in the power position asking the question. ‘Should I torture?’  They ask themselves
‘Is it justified? Will it keep me safe? Does it work?’ But Americans never see themselves in the position of the person being tortured unjustly.”

CIA Sold Media The Lie, “Torture Works!” 

At the end of the symposium I made a point and asked a question.

“You know why the public thinks torture works and is justified? They have a better PR and marketing team. ”  

I asked the audience if they were aware that since 2004 the CIA had developed a campaign specifically for the media that pushed the “effectiveness” of using torture techniques on detainees. Following the release of the Senate Report we now know the examples fed to the media on effective torture were blatant lies, designed to mislead the media and the public.

I asked the panel, “How can we help you push back against these lies?”

Mark Danner, the excellent journalist and author of books on torture, took on my burning question. I was looking for a snappy response, but he gave me a thoughtful, nuanced answer about the powerful CIA lobby.  Damn you Danner!

Another panelist pointed out how the current preferred method of warfare, drones, is squarely in the CIA’s control. Any attempts to get the administration to “look backward” at the CIA folks who tortured could be a problem, especially since some players were taken off the table legally.

So what about people who encouraged, legalized and normalized torture? What happens to the players who aren’t protected legally? The former CIA analyst and whistleblower John Kiriako wants them prosecuted, Who’s supporting him in that? Who’s booking him on Meet The Press opposite Dick Cheney?

Here’s the thing, the CIA’s strategic lying leaks were wildly successful.
   58% all adults now see torture as often or somewhat justified.

—Jan, 3 2015 Washington Post poll

I wonder what it would take to change the perception of effectiveness of torture. I have a few ideas that I’ll share tomorrow. I know they will be ignored and not funded for implementation by anyone. Unlike psychologists James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who got $81 million for developing torture programs, there isn’t a lot of money pushing against torture. But there are people doing it anyway.
Tomorrow, “Why people don’t change their minds when it comes to torture, even when they have “all the facts.'”

It’s a nice day here, I’m going out for a walk.

LLAP,
Spocko

You know you wanted to watch this again

by digby

… and again:

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Exporting homegrown torture

by digby

I wrote a piece about homegrown torture in Salon today:

Torturing other human beings does something to a person, something dark and deep and ugly. And by allowing it to become part of the fabric of our military training and intelligence gathering we were making some American soldiers and agents into people for whom torture became an end unto itself. We wondered, how many of these people were out there? And what would happen when they came home?

That question remains unanswered. But this series by Spencer Ackerman in the Guardian raises an entirely different one. Perhaps the question isn’t whether those who took part in torture will bring their immoral practices back to America but whether America actually took its existing dark practices to those prison camps around the world…

Read on. Ackerman’s piece reveals that a notorious police torturer from Chicago PD was one of the primary torturers at Guantanamo.

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Say hello to Jebbie’s lil friend

by digby

This story by Ryan Grim about Jeb and Miami in the 80s is a must-read:

Jeb Bush personally lobbied the secretary of health and human services, while his father was vice president, on behalf of a Miami figure who would later flee the country accused of one of the greatest Medicare frauds in the program’s history.

Bush pressed then-HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler to give the man’s HMO a waiver so that it could accept larger sums of Medicare money than it otherwise would have been allowed, Heckler told The Huffington Post.

Miguel Recarey Jr., head of the health maintenance organization International Medical Centers (IMC) who often boasted of connections to the Miami Cuban mafia, paid Bush $75,000 in the mid-1980s. Bush has acknowledged receiving the payment but said it was tendered for real estate consultation. But the deal he consulted on was never closed.

It’s quite a story. Let’s just say that Jeb had some interesting buddies back in the day.

And it looks like he has some new lil friends that he’s going to deploy against Hillary Clinton:

For his communications director, Jeb Bush is turning to a Republican operative who specializes in opposition research and runs a conservative outfit that has become a persistent thorn in the side of Hillary Clinton and other Democrats running for office.

America Rising executive director Tim Miller confirmed Friday that he is joining Bush’s new political action committee ahead of a likely White House campaign. The former Florida governor has been staffing up and fundraising as he explores a run.

Hiring professional character assassins would be another Bush family tradition:

[A] BBC documentary titled Digging the Dirt … was filmed during the 2000 campaign and never aired in the United States. The film centers on a team of Republican opposition researchers —a species that has existed in politics for eons but had recently undergone an evolutionary leap. From deep within the Republican National Committee headquarters the BBC tracked the efforts of this team, whose job it was to discredit and destroy Al Gore.Political campaigns always attempt to diminish their opponents, of course. What was remarkable about the 2000 effort was the degree to which the process advanced beyond what Barbara Comstock, who headed the RNC research team, calls “votes and quotes”—the standard campaign practice of leaving the job of scouting the target to very junior staff members, who tend to dig up little more than a rival’s legislative record and public statements. 

Comstock’s taking over the research team marked a significant change. She was a lawyer and a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill who had been one of Representative Dan Burton’s top congressional investigators during the Clinton scandals that dominated the 1990s: Filegate, Travelgate, assorted campaign-finance imbroglios, and Whitewater. Rather than amass the usual bunch of college kids, Comstock put together a group of seasoned attorneys and former colleagues from the Burton Committee, including her deputy, Tim Griffin. “The team we had from 2000,” she told me recently, to show the degree of ratcheted-up professionalism, “were veteran investigators from the Clinton years. We had a core group of people, and that core was attorneys.” 

Comstock combined a prosecutor’s mentality with an investigator’s ability to hunt through public records and other potentially incriminating documents. More important, she and her team understood how to use opposition research in the service of a larger goal: not simply to embarrass Gore with hard-to-explain votes or awkward statements but to craft over the course of the campaign a negative “storyline” about him that would eventually take hold in the public mind. “A campaign is a lot like a trial,” Comstock explained. “You want people aggressively arguing their case.” 

Maligning an opponent, even with his own words and deeds, is a tricky business; voters take a dim view of “negative” politics, and are liable to punish the campaign carrying out the attacks rather than the intended target. 

Digging the Dirt provides a rare glimpse of how political operatives have learned to use the media to get around this problem, by creating a journalistic black market for damaging stories. During the first debate between Gore and Bush, in October of 2000, the BBC crew stationed itself inside the RNC’s war room, filming researchers as they operated with the manic intensity of day traders, combing through every one of Gore’s statements for possible misstatements or exaggerations. The researchers discovered two (Gore erroneously claimed never to have questioned Bush’s experience, and to have accompanied a federal official to the site of a Texas disaster), and immediately Tim Griffin tipped off the Associated Press. Soon the filmmakers would catch the team exulting as the AP took the story.

And it went both ways:

During their months of filming BBC producers also observed producers for NBC’s Tim Russert among others calling to enquire if the team had any new material.

And where are they now, you wonder? Comstock is in the USA Congress and Tim Griffin is the Lt. Governor of Arkansas.

More on the Netanyahu speech: “The real ruler of Israel is Sheldon Adelson”

by Gaius Publius

Howie Klein has written a perfect extension to my earlier piece about Benjamin Netanyahu’s still-planned speech before the U.S. Congress. Ron Dermer, Israeli ambassador to the U.S. had a lead role in setting up the speech. I wrote:

[Dermer] is a former U.S. Florida politician, from a Florida political
family, now serving as Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. — a non-political
position, there as here — who is one of the key behind-the-scenes
players in setting up Netanyahu’s speech before Congress, over
administration objections. As Hartmann asks in the video, “How does that
happen?”

Papantonio’s answer [from the embedded video], “Real easy. Jeb Bush.” Because Dermer comes from the same neocon Florida crowd that Jeb Bush comes from.

That piece asks the question, “Why Is Netanyahu Coming to Congress?” Klein digs back even further in the chain, and finds this (from his embedded inner quote; my emphasis):

For example, the appointment of our ambassador in the US. Ron Dermer is an American, born in Miami, who was active in Republican politics. To appoint an American functionary of the Republican Party as ambassador of Israel to a Democratic administration may seem strange. Not so strange if Netanyahu acted under the orders of Sheldon Adelson.

It was Adelson who prepared the witches’ brew that is now endangering Israel’s lifeline to Washington. His stooge, Dermer, induced the Republicans in Congress– all of them dependent on Adelson’s largesse or hoping to be so– to invite Netanyahu to give an anti-Obama speech before both Houses.

While this intrigue was in preparation, Dermer met with John Kerry but did not tell him of Netanyahu’s coming. Neither did Netanyahu inform President Obama, who, in a fury, announced that he would not meet with the Prime Minister.

From the point of view of Israel’s vital interests, it is sheer madness to provoke the President of the United States of America, who controls American’s flow of arms to Israel and the American veto power in the UN. But from the point of view of Adelson, who wants to elect a Republican president in 2016, it makes sense. He has already threatened to invest unlimited sums of money to prevent the reelection of any Senator or Representative who is absent from Netanyahu’s speech.

There’s much more there, including but not limited to information about the political effect of the Adelson-owned, widely distributed, free Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom (“Israel Today”). The case is pretty strong. Both Klein and Uri Avnery, the quoted author above, assert that:

“The real ruler of Israel is one Sheldon Adelson, 81, American Jew, Casino king, who was rated as the world’s tenth richest person, worth
37.2 billion dollars at the latest count”. 

Please read. Then think — If Israel can have foreign-controlled politics, so can we, and we very likely we do. Stay tuned.

GP

Yes, we can make things worse. And we often do.

by digby

When the Libya crisis hit there were some very energetic debates on the left about whether or not it made sense to intervene in such a volatile and messy situation even if it was intensely frustrating to watch what was happening. The impulse to humanitarian intervention is a thoroughly understandable — any decent human being wants to do something if at all possible to stop violence and death if they can. But the US isn’t a superhero, just a superpower and there’s a huge difference. A superpower is often a bull in a china shop that is so clumsy and muscle bound that it makes things worse.

This article in Foreign Affairs takes a look at the failure of Libya. It’s well worth reading as the war drums pound in the background:

In the immediate wake of the military victory, U.S. officials were triumphant. Writing in these pages in 2012, Ivo Daalder, then the U.S. permanent representative to NATO, and James Stavridis, then supreme allied commander of Europe, declared, “NATO’s operation in Libya has rightly been hailed as a model intervention.” In the Rose Garden after Qaddafi’s death, Obama himself crowed, “Without putting a single U.S. service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives.” Indeed, the United States seemed to have scored a hat trick: nurturing the Arab Spring, averting a Rwanda-like genocide, and eliminating Libya as a potential source of terrorism. 


That verdict, however, turns out to have been premature. In retrospect, Obama’s intervention in Libya was an abject failure, judged even by its own standards. Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state. Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have increased severalfold. Rather than helping the United States combat terrorism, as Qaddafi did during his last decade in power, Libya now serves as a safe haven for militias affiliated with both al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The Libya intervention has harmed other U.S. interests as well: undermining nuclear nonproliferation, chilling Russian cooperation at the UN, and fueling Syria’s civil war.


Despite what defenders of the mission claim, there was a better policy available—not intervening at all, because peaceful Libyan civilians were not actually being targeted. Had the United States and its allies followed that course, they could have spared Libya from the resulting chaos and given it a chance of progress under Qaddafi’s chosen successor: his relatively liberal, Western-educated son Saif al-Islam. Instead, Libya today is riddled with vicious militias and anti-American terrorists—and thus serves as a cautionary tale of how humanitarian intervention can backfire for both the intervener and those it is intended to help.


And this is why skepticism of the cries to “do something”  is always called for:

Although the White House justified its mission in Libya on humanitarian grounds, the intervention in fact greatly magnified the death toll there. To begin with, Qaddafi’s crackdown turns out to have been much less lethal than media reports indicated at the time. In eastern Libya, where the uprising began as a mix of peaceful and violent protests, Human Rights Watch documented only 233 deaths in the first days of the fighting, not 10,000, as had been reported by the Saudi news channel Al Arabiya. In fact, as I documented in a 2013 International Security article, from mid-February 2011, when the rebellion started, to mid-March 2011, when NATO intervened, only about 1,000 Libyans died, including soldiers and rebels. Although an Al Jazeera article touted by Western media in early 2011 alleged that Qaddafi’s air force had strafed and bombed civilians in Benghazi and Tripoli, “the story was untrue,” revealed an exhaustive examination in the London Review of Books by Hugh Roberts of Tufts University. Indeed, striving to minimize civilian casualties, Qaddafi’s forces had refrained from indiscriminate violence.


The best statistical evidence of that comes from Misurata, Libya’s third-largest city, where the initial fighting raged most intensely. Human Rights Watch found that of the 949 people wounded there in the rebellion’s first seven weeks, only 30 (just over three percent) were women or children, which indicates that Qaddafi’s forces had narrowly targeted combatants, who were virtually all male. During that same period in Misurata, only 257 people were killed, a tiny fraction of the city’s 400,000 residents.


NATO’s intervention appears to have increased the violent death toll more than tenfold.
The same pattern of restraint was evident in Tripoli, where the government used significant force for only two days prior to NATO’s intervention, to beat back violent protesters who were burning government buildings. Libyan doctors subsequently told a UN investigative commission that they observed more than 200 corpses in the city’s morgues on February 20–21 but that only two of them were female. These statistics refute the notion that Qaddafi’s forces fired indiscriminately at peaceful civilians.


Moreover, by the time NATO intervened, Libya’s violence was on the verge of ending. Qaddafi’s well-armed forces had routed the ragtag rebels, who were retreating home. By mid-March 2011, government forces were poised to recapture the last rebel stronghold of Benghazi, thereby ending the one-month conflict at a total cost of just over 1,000 lives. Just then, however, Libyan expatriates in Switzerland affiliated with the rebels issued warnings of an impending “bloodbath” in Benghazi, which Western media duly reported but which in retrospect appear to have been propaganda. In reality, on March 17, Qaddafi pledged to protect the civilians of Benghazi, as he had those of other recaptured cities, adding that his forces had “left the way open” for the rebels to retreat to Egypt. Simply put, the militants were about to lose the war, and so their overseas agents raised the specter of genocide to attract a NATO intervention—which worked like a charm. There is no evidence or reason to believe that Qaddafi had planned or intended to perpetrate a killing campaign. 


Admittedly, the government did attempt to intimidate the rebels, promising to pursue them relentlessly. But Qaddafi never translated that rhetoric into targeting civilians. From March 5 to March 15, 2011, government forces recaptured all but one of the major rebel-held cities, and in none did they kill civilians in revenge, let alone commit a bloodbath. Indeed, as his forces approached Benghazi, Qaddafi issued public reassurances that they would harm neither civilians nor rebels who disarmed. On March 17, he directly addressed the rebels of Benghazi: “Throw away your weapons, exactly like your brothers in Ajdabiya and other places did. They laid down their arms and they are safe. We never pursued them at all.”


The rebel groups who’ve been fighting each other in post Qaddafi Libya (and committing atrocities the whole time) are now calling themselves ISIS for propaganda purposes and perpetrating similar acts. And the press is portraying this as if ISIS has marched into Libya as an invading army. That’s not the right story and it’s leading people to the wrong conclusions. Again.

I don’t doubt that people had good intentions in Libya. But the idea that the US has the capability of parachuting into a country, deposing a leader and then all the flowers will bloom just isn’t realistic. I know people want to help. But the sooner we get off the idea that the best way to help is by bombing and deposing, the better off we’ll be.

Libya was the one time where Obama let the military interventionists have their way. His instincts have proved to be better since then. Unfortunately, the war drums are getting louder and louder and I’ll be very surprised if he’s able to resist escalating. And I have not heard even one person offer a scenario in which that escalation will do anything to fix the situation. If experience is any guide, it’s likely to make things worse.

Not that that matters. Politics are now fully engaged, the hawks are circling, and when that happens, war happens.

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Pocket-protector terrorists?

by digby

Must be. The government is monitoring their private communications and they have assured us that they only monitor people they have reason to believe are a threat:

With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt.

As part of the covert operations against Gemalto, spies from GCHQ — with support from the NSA — mined the private communications of unwitting engineers and other company employees in multiple countries…

Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment. “Once you have the keys, decrypting traffic is trivial,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.”

You just never know which engineer might be aiding some terrorists somewhere, even by accident. Best monitor all of their communications. Just in case.

But hey, if you’re not a terrorist or a drug dealer or a money launderer or a journalist or an activist or a Muslim or a government worker or an engineer or possibly anyone who might be mistaken for any of them or might know someone who knows someone who knows any of those people you have nothing to worry about. Relax.

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Neolib epiphany?

by digby

Check out Robert Rubin guys:

We may need an increase in the income tax credit, not only for those who receive it at the present time but perhaps much further up the income scale. Measures that facilitate collective bargaining can result in a broader participation in the benefits of productivity and growth […] If we have ever rapid technological development and it is labor displacing, at some point in the future — as i say, that may be some distant point in the future — should that lead to some basic change in our lifestyles with less work, more lecture and a richer, more robust use of that leisure? […] In addition to everything that needs to be done to enhance growth, tighten labor markets and to improve the position of middle and lower income workers, should there be increased redistribution to accomplish the broad objectives of our society?

Mike Konczal has the rundown of a recent Hamilton Project panel in which it appears that the likes of Summers and Rubin took the robots and sheepskin crowd downtown. If it signals a change in the Clinton-style approach to economics, it’s all good.

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Charlatans and cranks
by Tom Sullivan

Paul Krugman this morning
smacks down three of the right’s preeminent purveyors of supply-side voodoo. The column is sure to leave them fuming.

“Charlatans and cranks,” Krugman suggests, invoking a phrase used by former George W. Bush chief economic adviser, Greg Mankiw. The occasion was Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s appearance at a New York dinner featuring supply-siders Art Laffer (of the eponymous curve), CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, and Stephen Moore, chief economist of the Heritage Foundation. Making obeisance before the high priests of bunk – like questioning climate change, evolution, and the current president’s American bona fides – has become a “right” of passage for Republican presidential contenders.

Reality takes a holiday. Ideology takes precedence. Because, to riff on a song, it’s all about that base. But we’ll come back to Krugman later.

The New York Times also reports this morning on something I’ve mentioned before. The University of North Carolina’s Republican-appointed Board of Governors is closing several academic enters on its campuses dedicated to studying poverty, climate, and social change. It couldn’t also be about ideology, could it? The Times writes:

“It’s clearly not about cost-saving; it’s about political philosophy and the right-wing takeover of North Carolina state government,” said Chris Fitzsimon, director of NC Policy Watch, a liberal group. “And this is one of the biggest remaining pieces that they’re trying to exert their control over.”

A lot like
Wisconsin that way. The UNC Center for Civil Rights is also a target:

Steven B. Long, a member of the advisory group and a former Civitas board member, said that the center had engaged in “inappropriate” activism. He also criticized it for filing costly lawsuits against local governments.

Local governments are also being targeted by a state legislature that frowns upon those who refuse to meekly submit.

Gene Nichols, director of the UNC Poverty Center recommended for closure, responded in print this week:

I have been repeatedly informed, even officially, that my opinion pieces have “caused great ire and dismay” among state officials and that, unless I stopped publishing in The News & Observer, “external forces might combine in the months ahead” to force my dismissal. Today those threats are brought to fruition. The Board of Governors’ tedious, expensive and supremely dishonest review process yields the result it sought all along – closing the Poverty Center. This charade, and the censorship it triggers, demeans the board, the university, academic freedom and the Constitution. It’s also mildly ironic that the university now abolishes the center for the same work that led it to give me the Thomas Jefferson Award a year ago.

The Poverty Center runs on an annual budget of about $120,000. None comes from the state. Grant funding has been secured through 2016. These private dollars will now be returned. UNC will have fewer resources, not more. Two terrific young lawyers will lose their jobs. Student education, employment and publication opportunities will be constricted. Most importantly, North Carolina’s understanding of the challenges of poverty will be weakened. These are significant costs to pay for politicians’ thin skin.

Scott Walker would feel right at home in Art Pope’s North Carolina. So would Kansas Republican, Gov. Sam Brownback, whose aggressive tax cuts cheered by national Republicans have driven his state into a deep fiscal crisis. North Carolina’s Republican Gov. Pat McCrory isn’t quite there yet, but he’s working hard on it.

Back to Krugman. He concludes:

So what does it say about the current state of the G.O.P. that discussion of economic policy is now monopolized by people who have been wrong about everything, have learned nothing from the experience, and can’t even get their numbers straight?

The answer, I’d suggest, runs deeper than economic doctrine. Across the board, the modern American right seems to have abandoned the idea that there is an objective reality out there, even if it’s not what your prejudices say should be happening. What are you going to believe, right-wing doctrine or your own lying eyes? These days, the doctrine wins.

And hands down.

Remember Bill O’Reilly’s sexy Falklands novel?

by digby

So it’s looking like Papa Bear might have made up his war stories. He has repeatedly, on the record, claimed that he reported from the war zone during the Falklands war.

Unfortunately:

American reporters were not on the ground in this distant war zone. “Nobody got to the war zone during the Falklands war,” Susan Zirinsky, a longtime CBS News producer who helped manage the network’s coverage of the war from Buenos Aires, tells Mother Jones. She does not remember what O’Reilly did during his time in Argentina. But she notes that the military junta kept US reporters from reaching the islands: “You weren’t allowed on by the Argentinians. No CBS person got there.”

That’s how Bob Schieffer, who was CBS News’ lead correspondent covering the Falklands war, recalls it: “Nobody from CBS got to the Falklands. I came close. We’d been trying to get somebody down there. It was impossible.” He notes that NBC News reporter Robin Lloyd was the only American network correspondent to reach the islands. “I remember because I got my butt scooped on that,” Schieffer says. “He got out there and we were all trying to get there.” (Lloyd tells Mother Jones that he managed to convince the Argentine military to let him visit Port Stanley, the capital of the Falkland Islands, but he spent only a day there—and this was weeks before the British forces arrived and the fighting began.)

Schieffer adds, “For us, you were a thousand miles from where the fighting was. So we had some great meals.”

Ooops.

But it’s understandable. He may have confused his experiences with his fictional alter ego, a psychopathic journalist who was assigned to Buenos Aires during the Falklands war and had his story stolen by a major anchor he later murdered.

I wrote this about it 10 years ago:

Saturday, November 20, 2004

Semper Falafel

O’Reilly understands that war is hell:

Having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands War, I know that life-and-death decisions are made in a flash. If that wounded insurgent had a grenade or other explosive device, the entire marine squad and the photographer could be dead right now. In a killing zone, one cannot afford the luxury of knowing what is certain.

As with all literary greats like Mailer, Jones and Heller, O’Reilly has memorialized his scorching wartime experiences in his novel, “Those Who Trespass” a murder mystery partially set in Argentina during the hell on earth that was Buenos Aires after the Falklands war:

The sky was clear, but clouds were assembling in the west. Shannon ran his fingers through his thick mane of wavy brown hair. His teal blue eyes were locked on the agitated crowd. It was his eyes that most people noticed first–a very unusual color that some thought materialized from a contact lens case. But Shannon, the product of two Celtic parents, didn’t go in for cosmetic enhancements. His 6′ 4 frame was well toned by constant athletics, and his pale white skin was flawless–another genetic gift. Shannon’s looks, which he thoroughly capitalized on, made him a natural for television.

As the mob continued its boisterous serenade, Shannon slowly shook his head. Most wars were foolish, he thought, but this one was unusually idiotic. The Argentine Junta, a group of military thugs led by General Galtieri, had ordered an invasion of the British-administered Falkland Islands on April Fool’s Day, 1982. The government claim was that the islands, which the Argentines called the Malvinas, became a part of Argentina through a Papal declaration in 1493. The British disagreed. So, nearly five hundred years after the grant of land, the Argentine Army swarmed ashore, startling eighteen hundred British subjects and tens of thousands of bewildered sheep.

Sends chills down your spine, doesn’t it? I don’t want to ruin the story by revealing the fiery hell that our blue eyed Celtic hero endured when he had to cover the street protest and deal with some gas cannisters and a soldier who looked at him funny. Let’s just say that that marine in Falluja won’t know what hell is until he’s had to film a news story with his flawless white skin covered in dust and dirt. It just makes you sick to even think about it. The horror… 

In case you were wondering the fictional account is probably taken from a protest he covered for CBS:

The protest in Buenos Aires was not combat. Nor was it part of the Falklands war. It happened more than a thousand miles from the war—after the fighting was over. Yet O’Reilly has referred to his work in Argentina—and his rescue of his cameraman—as occurring in a “war zone.” And he once told a viewer who caught his show in Argentina, “Tell everybody down there I covered the Falklands war. They’ll remember.”

Update: Here’s a clip of Billo reading a sexy shower scene from the book. Don’t listen if you’ve just eaten:

“Closing her eyes she concentrated on the tingling sensation of water flowing against her body. Suddenly another sensation intruded, Ashley felt two large hands wrapped themselves around her breasts and hot breathe on the back of her neck. She opened her eyes wide and giggled. I thought you drowned out there Snorkel Man. Tommy O’Malley was naked and at attention, drowning is not an option he said unless of course you beg me to perform unnatural acts right here in this shower.”