Ugh

[moon_custafer]

Linking with the permission of leahbobet -- please note that the site eventually took this article down, and also please respect Leah's wishes that we not turn this into a 'shitstorm' but:

Leah was asked for an author interview-by-questionnaire for a column called "The Rack." She was told it was "kind of brutal," but the questions seemed normal so she answered. Turns out the "interview" format is to portray the author's answers as information obtained by torture.

Let's just think about that for a bit.

As she puts it in a later comment:

The interviewer explained to me that he wants to counteract the kind of interview which fawns over the author, or is "overly respectful". I can see where that motive comes in; but I think the execution has overstepped into being disrespectful to the person who the author also is.

I repeat that she wants to take the high road here, and anyway I don't want to give the site any more google hits, so no dogpiling. I just wanted to let people know that this has been going on.

Comments

[donald hutton (from livejournal.com)]

In addition to being disrespectful I posted that it's dangerous behaviour:

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Probably a lot of people here have already thought of these and perhaps they've gone into your private correspondence with the interviewer but I'm always in favour of spelling things out.

1 - I bet they didn't do any checks to see if the people they're interviewing have really been tortured in real life. There are lots and lots of people in the GTA who have and some of them are doubtless authors. I've met a few (who weren't authors) originally from the Middle East, mostly from Saddam's Iraq, and some of them *really*, REALLY don't want to deal with any portrayals of anyone, let alone themselves, being worked over. But here these interviewers are, springing this little surprise on them in the form of a fictional transcript of an interview. Depending on where someone is with this issue they could have a complete breakdown over this.

2 - Pet peeve that there's still this childish meme out there that torture even vaguely implies a way to increase the reliability of your information. It's exactly the opposite. In interviews with real Master Interrogators (the head of the FBI's interrogation centre, the British guy responsible for the 100% success rate of the UK in keeping out Nazi spies in WWII), some one always brings up this idea of torture as a way of getting the truth out of people and the interviewee looks at them as if they've sprouted an extra head. The "ticking time bomb" scenario is always brought up and the reply is always "If there's a really little time left then I really don't want to waste any on the temper tantrum of torture." This unjustified glamorisation of torture as some kind of last resort to get results is dangerous: it is constantly used to justify unjustifiable behaviour and ends up making torturers out of people who would never otherwise consider it.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

The "ticking time bomb" scenario is always brought up

And I think someone's pointed out that it's a totally artificial scenario: in real life, if you've been able to find out that there *is* a time bomb and *when* it will go off, without yet having used torture, why change tactics?

I did think about the "glamourizing torture" as one of the additional icks of the interview, but I'm pretty sure the "interviewer" was more interested in torture-as-sex-fantasy anyway.

[donald hutton (from livejournal.com)]

I can see it happening. Someone phones in the bomb warning with the place to be blown up and the time and then you catch them. Possibly you were already following them around on general principles. But then you've got some warning for an evacuation so all you're talking about it property damage so aspects are always going to be improbable.