When the police fail: more on the Dugard case

The New Neo Posted on by

Word is that there were multiple and repeated failures of the law enforcement system in the Dugard case: police investigation, parole officers, prison system.

It turns out the Garrido was given a fifty year sentence for his earlier sex crimes but was inexplicably let out after only ten years. It turns out he was wearing an ankle bracelet for monitoring—but it seems to have done little good. It turns out he still had in his possession a car that matched the description of the abductor’s car given eighteen years ago by Jaycee’s stepfather. It turns out neighbors did complain to police that something shady was going on at the Garrido house, including the keeping of girls in tents in the yard, but the officer who came to investigate did not go beyond the front porch of the home.

And all this despite the fact that the man involved was a convicted sex offender of a serious and violent type. It’s enough to make your blood boil. A spokesperson says:

“We missed an opportunity to bring earlier closure to this situation,” Contra Costa County Sheriff Warren E. Rupf said. “I cannot change the course of events but we are beating ourselves up over this and continue to do so.”

“We should have been more inquisitive, more curious and turned over a rock or two.”

I wonder why they weren’t, actually. Police are ordinarily pretty keen on catching child rapists.

The return of the lost: Jaycee Lee Dugard

The New Neo Posted on by

By now you have probably read the remarkable story of Jaycee Lee Dugard, a twenty-nine-year-old woman who was kidnapped eighteen years ago by a couple named Phillip and Nancy Garrido. Jaycee was eleven at the time, and has been held in captivity ever since.

Dugard is another in a line of children abducted by strangers at a young age, sexually abused and co-opted into a perverse “family” situation, and held in various degrees of captivity (Jaycee’s appears to have been profound), then discovered by chance (or, in rare instances, through escape). I have written of the phenomenon before in some depth, but I will write about it again because it is so ghastly, and touches on fears so deep within us.

It is often said that there is nothing more awful to a parent than having a child die. And although that is generally true, there is something about these child abductions—in which the fate of the child remains unknown for a long time—that has an especially intense awfulness.

On the one hand, the child might still be alive. Although that would ordinarily be a good thing, the parents of a kidnapped child face the reality that, if true, that would mean that their precious child might be also suffering horrifically at the hands of an unknown but sadistic and perverted assailant.

Or the child’s suffering might have been intense but relatively quick, ending in brutal murder and burial somewhere in an unknown spot out in the wild world.

In any event, the parents of such a child face an extra measure of suffering at the hands of their own imaginations. And it doesn’t take an overactive one to imagine things that no parent should ever have to contemplate. Over the entire experience arches the element of the unknown; at any moment the child could be found relatively unharmed (although they are never truly unharmed) and returned to the family fold. As the case of Jaycee Dugard proves, even the passage of eighteen years does not preclude this possibility.

In the meantime, though, it’s necessary to figure out a way to get through the day. I hope that none of us ever has to experience anything remotely like what this torment entails for such parents. Spouses often cannot help each other; the marital separation that Jaycee’s mother and her stepfather Carl Probyn experienced is completely typical. If there are other children in the family, they are never unscathed, either.

Of course, Jaycee’s discovery is good news. She’s alive, for starters. She seems to be well physically. Now her abductor and his cooperative wife will be tried and sentenced. These are all good things. But, as Probyn says, there’s a lot ahead for this family. In the following video, he mentions that everyone will need therapy. That’s an excellent guess, but therapy is hardly a cure-all for the sort of deeply destructive experience all of them have undergone.

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For Jaycee, her chance at a normal childhood and young adulthood was snatched away. Instead, she was raped and imprisoned, in addition to having borne her abductor/rapist’s children while she was still a child. They are now eleven and fifteen themselves, and have never been to school; the Garrido’s backyard tents are the only homes they have known. Now they will also learn (if they didn’t know already) that they were the product of a criminal kidnapping and subsequent rapes.

Jaycee’s parents will have to face hearing things about her captivity that will shock them beyond belief—but at least that’s better than the state of not knowing (and imagining the worst) for all those long and terrifying years. Now Jaycee’s stepfather Carl can finally throw off the extra added burden of having been under suspicion himself all this time; until her return, he was the last one to see Jaycee alive, and had actually witnessed her abduction by a man and a woman who threw her into a car and sped away.

Jaycee Dugard not only was abducted, raped, and held prisoner—she was (and probably still is to some degree) a prisoner of the mind as well. As Probyn said, she bonded to a certain extent with the Garridos. How could she not? In my previous post on the subject of kidnapped children who return, I reflected on the case of Steven Stayner:

I am reminded of another story, that of Steven Stayner, who was kidnapped in the early ’70s at the age of seven…by a pedophile, and kept for over seven years.

Stayner’s captor used sophisticated methods of “re-education” on him, convincing the boy that his parents had forgotten about him and didn’t want him back, sexually abusing him, and encouraging him to regard him as his new father. Stayner was only found when his kidnapper hauled in new prey, a young child for whom Stayner developed a feeling of compassionate protectiveness. He planned to guide the boy to a police station, but the child was fearful and wanted Stayner to go in with him. In doing so, Stayner himself was detained, and the entire story ended up spilling out.

But Stayner’s re-entry into his joyful family was fraught with psychological problems for all concerned, some of them detailed in an unusually fine made-for-TV film entitled, “I Know My First Name Is Steven” (the words Stayner voiced to the police when he was first being interrogated.) There was a book, as well.

The problems were not surprising considering the dreadful trauma and dislocation all had endured–the fact that they had lost a young child and yet a teenager was returned to them, one who’d seen and endured things no child should ever have to face.

Stayner married young and had two children, but tragically, was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was only twenty-four.

Another kidnap victim, Elizabeth Smart, appear to be doing well these days (if you can believe articles in People magazine). But Elizabeth was “only” in captivity for nine months.

Nine months! For Elizabeth and her parents, that time may have seemed an eternity, each minute a slow agony of anxiety and pain. Jaycee and her family endured eighteen years of that hard school.

Now comes another hard part: Jaycee’s re-entry into the world and the family that was torn apart. I wish them luck; they’ll need it.

[NOTE: As for the Garridos and their punishment, as a previous sex offender Garrido ought to get the maximum in California, whatever that is (I couldn’t find the information).

In the video featuring Probyn, there is a part at the end that quotes Garrido as saying that this will end up being a “powerful, heartwarming story.” He’d not talking about the family reunion, either—he’s speaking of his own supposed redemption after the kidnapping/rape of the child. This sort of statement is hardly surprising; perpetrators such as Garrido are very good at coming up with self-serving stories of how the child “wanted it” and how they’re all happy as clams now. My opinion is that, although in some sense Garrido is probably mentally ill, his mental problems should not stop him from getting the maximum sentence allowable by law. What he did was, quite simply, evil.

The law seems to have been remiss, however, in not noting the backyard arrangement by which the Garridos kept Dugard and the children confined. Garrido’s parole officer apparently visited the home, but never investigated the rather odd setup there.

I also want to mention a terrible and grisly footnote to the Stayner case. His older brother Cary was convicted of the 1999 murder of four women in Yosemite. Although at one point Cary Stayner said he felt neglected by his parents after his brother’s abduction, he also said that he had fantasized about murdering women while still a very young child, even before his brother’s kidnapping. My best guess is that Cary Stayner’s problems very much predated his brother’s kidnapping, but that they may have been exacerbated by the family’s travails.]

Jelloburger

The New Neo Posted on by

Mmmm good!

jelloburger.jpg

Jell-O Mold Cheeseburger

Vanilla and walnut flavored Jell-O bun, pistachio flavored lettuce, cherry and cherry cream Jell-O tomatoes, chocolate and chocolate mousse flavored Jell-O burger, orange-lemon Jell-O cheese, lemon-lime Jell-O pickles and coconut flavored Jell-O onions.

[Hat tip: commenter “kcom”]

Private insurance isn’t perfect—but I’ll take it over the public option any day

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been experiencing a tiny health care crisis myself. Sunday night, something or other happened to my knee—one of the body parts of mine that had always been A-OK till now.

I woke up in significant pain, and the pain increased day by day instead of decreasing, even though I was being very very careful. I’ve not been able to sit or exercise, and I limp rather badly. Steps are a nightmare.

Yesterday I went to the doctor, a knee specialist who fortunately had an opening so I didn’t have to wait. He initially thought I had sustained the most common knee injury of all, a tear of the medial meniscus cartilage. But when he examined me he said he wasn’t certain. It might be that; I had some signs and symptoms that indicated as much. But perhaps I had partially torn the medial collateral ligament, which can produce similar symptoms. Even though the latter is a less common injury, and usually the result of noticeable trauma (which I hadn’t experienced), he was leaning ever-so-slightly towards the ligament diagnosis. The exquisite pain I felt on the inside of the knee could be from either injury, but the location was somewhat higher than you’d expect if it was a cartilage tear.

But the only way to be certain which one it is would be an MRI. So he ordered the test, because cartilage tears almost always require arthroscopic surgery. Ligament tears, except for very major ones, almost always heal on their own, although it takes quite a few weeks. So the treatment of the two injuries would be very different.

I found out today, though, that my health insurance denied the request for an MRI. I just finished filing an oral appeal with them.

Despite the frustration of their initial refusal, I must say that my experience with the woman I spoke to for the appeal was extremely positive. First of all, she was kind and respectful. She even kept apologizing for a series of times she had to put me on hold for very brief waits. I dictated to her all the extenuating circumstances and details of why I thought an MRI was warranted, and she copied it all down and read it back to me accurately—these days, that’s a feat in and of itself. She even took the liberty of voicing her own (completely unofficial and completely meaningless, except in human terms) opinion that my reasoning made sense to her and that she thought they ought to grant my request.

Now I wait. It will take some time before they hear my plea and decide. Perhaps in those days I’ll get so much better the whole thing will be moot. Or perhaps they’ll say yes to the MRI. But perhaps not. If not, and I’m still feeling as lousy as I have been, I’ll have to decide whether to pay for it out of pocket, despite the fact that I already fork over so much money to my insurance company that they could give me a bevy of MRIs a year (perish the thought!) and still come out ahead.

But during this whole process, I’ve never for a single moment thought, “Oh, it all would have been so much better if the government were in charge!” At least with private insurance I have the threat/leverage of changing to another company. They have some sort of reason to think they must be at least a little nice to me (and millions like me) or lose my (our) business.

I can only imagine how a government employee would have handled that same phone call. I’ve had enough experience with those twin monuments to pleasantry and respect and efficiency, the IRS and the DMV, to know that it could have been far, far worse. Then there’s the passport office and the post office and various licensing boards, and almost any contact I’ve ever had with government when I want something from them and they don’t want to give it. Not good.

And I’m afraid that anyone who thinks the government would have been more likely to have allowed me to have that MRI more easily and more quickly is a dreamer. Likewise for Obama’s empty promises that of course, a public option won’t threaten private health insurance in any way. I’ve read far too much—that’s far too convincing—indicating just the opposite.

Leon Panetta: how does it feel under the bus?

The New Neo Posted on by

When Leon Panetta was nominated as head of the CIA, I objected on the grounds of his inexperience in the field of intelligence. The speculation was that Obama chose him for that very reason:

The real problem that seems to have led to the appointment of such a complete outsider was that everyone with any sort of background in intelligence was considered tainted by ties to the supposedly nefarious Bush-era CIA, which approved controversial techniques such as waterboarding.

So Obama decided to throw out the baby (intelligence) with the bathwater (coercive interrogation techniques). To find a CIA head with the properly squeaky clean hands, Obama had to find one with no hands-on experience at all. Panetta fit the bill, since he not only had the requisite lack of background, but he had also been outspoken in his condemnation of all CIA practices that could conjure up any suggestion that they might arguably represent torture.

Now it all makes perfect sense. Given Panetta’s background, Obama and Holder would have had every reason to imagine that he wouldn’t object when they decided to reopen the already-investigated-and-dismissed charges from the Bush administration and see what they could pin on the CIA.

But Panetta appears to have surprised them by defending his agency and crying “foul.” Don’t be too surprised if he quits his post—or is “encouraged” to leave and is then replaced with a more compliant public servant.

In the meantime, we have these observations on the CIA investigation report:

Although often discomfiting reading (one incident involved a power drill), the report also outlines the CIA’s nearly obsessive quest for legal guidance and its intolerance for unauthorized methods as piddling as blowing cigar smoke at detainees.

Consider the fate of the CIA officer who used a gun to frighten Abd al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing.

He did it in 2002. The agency immediately called him back to headquarters. He faced an internal accountability board, suffered a reprimand and eventually resigned.

The Justice Department looked into the case because threatening a detainee with “imminent death” is torture, but declined to prosecute.

Proving torture in a court of law is much harder than braying about it on op-ed pages.

The CIA certainly didn’t act like an agency with a guilty conscience. It didn’t try to cover up any abuses, but undertook the inspector general investigation and forwarded the report to Congress and the Justice Department.

In one case, Justice got a conviction against a contractor who — in an obvious crime — beat a detainee to death.

But what possible public interest can be served in reopening murkier cases years after the fact, when the CIA already took internal action and [nonpartisan] career prosecutors already examined them?

Answer? No public interest at all. But Obama and Holder (I don’t for a minute buy the idea that they are really acting at cross-purposes) think there might be a political interest that could be served: theirs.

Ted Kennedy gone

The New Neo Posted on by

I may have a different perspective on Ted Kennedy than many of my readers. After all, I remember him as a slim young thing (both him and me), the most junior of the charismatic band of brothers Kennedy, they of the golden lives and the supercharged vigor.

Ted was the lightweight, the least serious and least likely to succeed of the group. But he ended up as Senator For Life from Massachusetts, a role he seemed to relish. And unlike his brothers, he managed to live out his days and die a natural death as an elderly man.

I don’t agree with his politics, although I once did. I thought his conduct in the Kopechne affair suspicious and disgraceful. But I remember his face at the funerals of brother John and then brother Bobby, whom he memorably eulogized, voice breaking at times with grief and pain. Then there were his own struggles when his son lost a leg to cancer, the same disease to which he has now succumbed.

That’s all I have to say except: RIP, brothers.

kennedybrothers.jpg

Obama and the CIA investigation: when in doubt, go after Bush

The New Neo Posted on by

John Hindraker of Powerline has read the lengthy CIA report on which claims of terrorist interrogator misconduct are based. He writes a devastating piece on how very minor the infractions appear to have been, and how most of them are mere allegations (some based on hearsay).

Read his article and understand just how low the Obama administration and its Attorney General Eric Holder have sunk in making much ado about virtually nothing. As the WSJ says, “We suspect millions of Americans will be shocked to learn that these unshocking details are all that the uproar over ‘torture’ is about.” The administration seems to have lost all sense of proportion in its attempt to make the previous administration look as bad as possible, as well as compromising our security along the way.

Here—as in so many other things—Obama attempts to play it both ways. To the Left, angry at him for not ramming the public option through before the American people had time to realize what was happening, he throws the tasty fish of more breast-beating about pretend torture and the possible prosecution of evil CIA interrogators (actually, it appears to be mostly a single CIA debriefer—not even an interrogator—who was most clearly at fault, but the MSM isn’t reporting that). For moderates, Obama mouths words that indicate it’s actually rogue Attorney General Holder who is pursuing this against the President’s will, and that Obama himself would just as soon let bygones be bygones.

Yeah, right.

But that’s the way the story is being reported in much of the MSM. Tom Raum of the AP is fairly typical—poor pitiful Obama “caught in the crosswinds” between his own desire to move on and the vengeance of the out-of-control Holder [emphasis mine, for sarcasm]:

After declaring he would rather look forward, President Barack Obama is delving instead into the past to deal with lingering assertions of CIA mistreatment of terror suspects during the Bush administration…

Obama’s approval of a new elite interrogation unit ”” to operate within the FBI but under supervision of an interagency group to be chaired by the White House national security adviser ”” allowed him to get out in front of the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a government prosecutor and the administration’s release of a newly declassified report detailing harsh Bush-era interrogation practices…

White House officials said the disclosure of Obama’s decision on the new interrogation team on the same day as the release of the report and the prosecutor announcement was coincidental.

Even so, Obama’s role in creating the new unit may help keep the controversies alive despite his hopes of putting the Bush administration’s controversial interrogation policies behind him and moving on…

See how it’s shaping up?

Mandate? What mandate?

The New Neo Posted on by

Clive Crook writes in the Financial Times that Obama has squandered his overwhelming mandate for health care reform:

The paradox is that the White House has tripped up over healthcare reform—an initiative that the country both wants and needs, and which was at the centre of Mr Obama’s stunningly successful election campaign. For this, the administration has no one to blame but itself. Its own mistakes have brought it to this perilous point.

Crook is correct that the administration has itself to blame for its failures. But he is incorrect about the reasons behind Obama’s “stunningly successful election campaign.”

It is certainly the case that Obama spoke of wanting to reform health care, among other plans. But Obama’s appeal was never really based on policy, except for the liberals and Leftists who would have voted for him (or almost any other Democrat) anyway.

The specifics of exactly what programs Obama would put into place as president were less important, and certainly far less clear, to many moderate voters—the ones who put him over the top and were responsible in large part for his election—than what and who he seemed to be as a person. The perception was that whatever successes he was going to have in terms of policy would stem from qualities inherent in the man himself and his ability to bring people together, inspire confidence, and persuade. If most of his moderate supporters had been asked to predict the course of an Obama presidency prior to his inauguration, my guess is that the majority would have said he that would govern as a temperate, moderate, and bipartisan leader. And that would include his plans around health care reform.

So there’s no reason to believe that the 52% of the vote that Obama received in the election ever represented a powerful majority groundswell of popular demand for RADICAL AND SWEEPING HEALTH CARE REFORM, NOW!

It’s also instructive to remember that the financial climate during most of the run-up to the 2008 election was very different than the climate at the time of the election and beyond. When the economy went belly-up very late in the game, it’s pretty clear that most non-Leftists who voted for Obama assumed that he would put the financial state of the economy above other considerations, and place large and destabilizing policy changes on hold until it had recovered.

What Obama did instead was the exact opposite. He attempted to push through a major overhaul of health care at lightning speed, minus an explanation of the details, and assured us that we should trust him that it would not impact negatively on the economy. What’s more, he branded those who objected as being insincere and having bad motives. This combination of factors seems to have stunned a substantial segment of his moderate supporters, and caused them to view him more negatively.

One of Obama’s many errors may have been to assume that his election meant he had a strong mandate for the policy changes he had in mind. But my guess is that he was well aware that this was not the case. I think he believed, however, that he could be successful in pushing his agenda through despite its unpopularity, if he managed to do so fast enough and furiously enough.

That, or course, has not happened. And it has exposed the fact that there was never any mandate to begin with for the sort of changes Obama envisioned.

I wrote this post before I saw Fouad Ajami’s excellent piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. But Ajami makes a similar point, and expands on it as follows:

American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the “mandate of heaven” is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.

Ajami believes that the American public has reasserted its American-ness, and is now talking back to Obama and telling him just what it doesn’t like about what he’s doing. Let’s hope so. But my guess is that he won’t be listening, except to make some strategic adjustments. There’s too much at stake. As Press Secretary Gibbs said recently, Obama is “quite comfortable” being a one-term president:

I have heard the president say that if making tough decisions in getting important things done that Washington has failed to do for decades means that he only lives in this house and makes those decisions for four years, he’s quite comfortable…The way he approaches this issue…is not in a mode of self preservation, but in a mode of how best — given all the information out there– how best to make decisions that he thinks is in the best interest of the American people, not what’s in the best interest of his personal career.

Every president must follow his own conscience and do what he thinks best. Obama is no different that respect. I fervently hope, however, that Americans will keep asserting their American-ness, and will let their legislative representatives know that there will be consequences to them and to their re-election chances if they pass bills that go against the will of the people.

Mandate or not, Obama can do a great deal of damage in his four years as president. But Congress can stop some of the bleeding—especially if enough of its members see such action as in their own self-interest.

Inglorious basterds: fiction and non

The New Neo Posted on by

One of my pet peeves is how movies that draw on history often misrepresent it.

The phenomenon is at its worst with Oliver Stone epics that purport to be biopics and are mainly a figment of the director’s imagination. It wouldn’t matter so much if history were properly taught in the schools. But in the absence of basic historical grounding, for way too many viewers (especially youthful ones) the fiction replaces fact and becomes the stuff of history itself.

Now comes the Quentin Tarantino World War II film “Inglorious Basterds.” It’s fiction and presented as such, so that should get Tarantino off the hook.

And to a certain extent it does. Anyone stupid enough to imagine that a Tarantino film has any sort of historical truth to it is probably stupid enough to believe anything.

But I’m still disturbed by the plot point described in the following; I’m utterly convinced that many viewers will come away thinking it’s based on historic fact:

The film tracks the separate attempts to kill Hitler by two disparate forces, one being the “Basterds”, a motley crew of Jewish American soldiers out for revenge against the Nazis. The Basterds have a modus operandi whereby each man must cut off the scalp of a dead Nazi soldier, with orders to get 100 scalps each. The Basterds allow one German soldier to survive each incident so as to spread the news of the terror of their attacks. However, the Basterds carve a swastika into the forehead of that German.

This idea sprang full-blown from the head of Tarantino himself, who conceptualized Aldo, the leader of the Basterds (played by Brad Pitt) as a part Native American non-Jewish Southerner. In a recent interview Tarantino explained:

Basically, Aldo’s this character I’ve had in my mind for a very, very long time…[T]he fact that he’s part Native American is significant, because what he’s doing against the Nazi’s is similar to the Apache resistance, the ambushing of soldiers, desecrating their bodies and leaving them there for other Germans to find. Aldo’s idea is to find Jewish soldiers because he should be able to motivate them more easily because they are essentially warriors in a holy war against an enemy that’s trying to wipe their race off the face of the Earth.

Tarantino is either ignorant of the fact (or doesn’t much care; take your pick) that his fictional unit of scalping and body-carving Jews commit acts that go utterly against Jewish teachings and philosophy. The desecration and/or mutilation of the living or dead human body is strictly forbidden by Judaism—with the single exception of the act of ritual circumcision for Jewish males.

For example, those who follow Jewish law are not allowed to tattoo themselves or even to use cremation instead of burial (so that, in addition to all the other atrocities committed on Jews during the Holocaust, the tattooing of numbers on the arm and the crematoriums for burning the bodies were extra added offenses).

Here’s a fuller explanation:

In Jewish law, the human body belongs to its Creator. It is merely on loan to the person, who is the guardian of the body, but he or she has no right to deface it in any way. The body must be “returned” in its entirety, just as it was given.

Additionally, Man was created in “G”‘d’s image and likeness.”Any violation of the human body is considered, therefore, to be a violation of G”‘d Himself.

This general principle and law governs many [Jewish] laws, like those prohibiting self-mutilation or tattoos…This principle applies after death, too; any mutilation of the dead is prohibited…This is also one of the reasons why Jewish law does not permit autopsies other than in the most extenuating of circumstances.

Many secular Jews obviously violate some of these rules. But the guidelines indicate a very deeply-held and basic cultural and religious attitude of Jews, and Tarantino’s notion that Jews would be especially amenable to Aldo’s scalping and carving orders could not be more incorrect. In fact, respect for the integrity of the body is enshrined in Jewish law for the treatment of the corpse of the stranger and even the criminal (see this).

If you’re interested in historical accuracy, there actually was a secret commando unit composed partly of Jewish refugees from the Nazis during World War II, but it was a British enterprise. Kim Masters, whose father was one of these men, describes their exploits here. She writes:

…[O]ne day a notice was posted seeking anyone “wishing to volunteer for special and hazardous duty.” When my father reported for an interview, he was asked why he wanted to serve. “I think part of this war belongs to me, sir,” he replied.

All the soldiers accepted for the outfit that Winston Churchill called “X Troop” had to have false British identities. Obviously the hazards to them as men in the field would be greatly multiplied if the Germans knew that some of the commandos were European Jews. My father, Peter Arany, became Pvt. Peter Masters, who had been born in London, was a member of the Church of England, and had volunteered for the commandos from the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment.

Kim’s father is deceased. But she quotes some of the surviving Jewish-British commandos on the subject of the Tarantino movie:

Of course they haven’t seen the film, which opens later this month, but what they hate is the premise that Jewish soldiers would hunt for scalps or bludgeon prisoners with a baseball bat.

“We killed people elegantly, without that sort of thing,” said Tony Firth, now 90.

“Shocking!” said my father’s friend, Peter Terry, now 85. “I mean””really!”…

He never saw anyone abuse prisoners, whom he describes as a dispirited lot for the most part.

Another Jewish former commando named Manfred Ganz (whose cover name during the war was Freddy Gray), isn’t pleased with Tarantino either:

Ganz…doesn’t seem likely to be engaged by Tarantino’s comic-book violence. “To me, the reality was brutal enough,” he says. Ganz allows that Tarantino “has the right to express his fantasies.” But he would much prefer that the real story be told.

I’d much prefer it as well.

[ADDENDUM: Just now I happened to read a spoiler that gave away the end of the film. The ending is clearly fictional, at least to anyone with even a glancing knowledge of history. Perhaps that will help make more viewers consider the whole idea of the Jewish commando unit scalping and carving swastikas into Nazis as fiction, as well. But I wouldn’t bank on it.]

[ADDENDUM II: Here’s someone who seems to agree with me.]