Ways To Get Information

In 1792 during the first General Conference in the Methodist church, James O'Kelly and several other ministers walked out of the meeting and left the church after the conference voted down two of their motions for reform in the church. Among those who left was William McKendree. Francis Asbury, one of the two bishops at the time, went down to Virginia and met with McKendree and asked him to ride with him for a while, which McKendree agreed to do.

Now O'Kelly had only had bad things to say about Asbury, and McKendree, who had never spent time with Asbury like O'Kelly had had no way to judge if they were true of not. But, he did like and trust O'Kelly and so he assumed they were true. In spending time with Asbury, however, what he found was different. McKendree ended up returning to the Methodist church because he became disillusioned with O’Kelly when he found that everything he had been telling him about Asbury and his leadership was not true. Instead of finding the tyrant he had heard about, McKendree was “astonished at the Bishop’s sweet simplicity and uncommon familiarity.” McKendree went on to become the first American born bishop, and the last "itinerating" bishop in the denomination.

I though of that story recently when reading The Looming Tower, which I highly recommend, and the story of the information provided to us by Abu Jandal. Jandal was Bin Laden's chief bodyguard. When he was being interrogated by the FBI, led by Ali Soufan the agent in charge, rather than being treated cruelly or being tortured, he was instead treated with respect. When Soufan saw that Jandal was not any of the sweets that were available, Soufan discovered that Jandal was diabetic. So Soufan made sugar free wafers available. This struck Jandal as being so different than anything he had heard about.

Everything he had been told about America and Americans was that we were terrible tyrants, much like everything that McKendree had heard about Asbury. But instead, in his first real interactions with Americans he found that they were not at all like what he had been told, and so he ended up changing his beliefs and became a major source of information to the FBI on Al Qaeda.

Compare that to those who are tortured, humiliated or otherwise treated cruelly. Are we helping ourselves or hurting ourselves? It seems that we are simply reinforcing everything that they have been told about who we are, that our rhetoric is simply that rhetoric and that we do not actually uphold any of the ideals that we claim to have. That we are, in short, hypocrites. Could we have gotten the same information out of Jandal that we did through other means? Possibly, but not likely. But what we would have also have done was to reinforced his opinions about us and further put him into the enemy camp. Instead he became a friend and provided invaluable assistance.

Perhaps we should be holding up Jandal and McKendree as examples of the right way to win people over and get information rather than the ways of Jack Bauer.