THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

INTERROGATOR | 2005-06-11

I have been a professional interrogator for decades. If you want to know what that does to you, listen to a routine conversation any experienced cop will have with another experienced cop

"He's lying. What do you think he's lying ABOUT?"

They know a person is lying. It may be the fluid, unhesitating lying that anyone in prison learns to do, or it may be the opposite. A normally honest person hesitates and averts his eyes. There is no formula, there's simply experience.

My doctor brother said to me, "It is incredible what people who take the Minnesota Personality Inventory (MPI) tell me." He went on, "if they knew what those harmless questions told me, they wouldn't do it even anonymously."

When you talk to me, I hear every word, or I make you repeat it. I know exactly when you didn't hear what I said.

I know where your statements are coming from, your memory or your thought.

When a black "leader" speaks and you watch his eyes, the lights go out. Watch him. Every word comes straight from the script he has repeated hundreds of times.

That was the problem the Democratic debaters faced with Jesse Jackson.

Every professional politician is an interrogator, and the liberals were worried about what they knew about Jesse Jackson.

They didn't embarrass little Jesse, and every word Jesse said was straight out of his memorized play book.

I remember a black man who was part of a public discussion of Thomas Jefferson's alleged relationship with Sally Hemings, the mulatto woman who was supposed to have borne his child. All the DNA tests proved about this was that Jefferson or a member of his family had fathered her child. It was probably one of his cousins.

But the black guy did not know a thing about this. When someone asked him if he had read the report, he was very indignant.

Of course he hadn't read the report. That was not why he was there.

He was there because he was black. He was there to make a point. He was there to make the point that when the child was fathered Hemings was underage so Jefferson was a child molester.

No one expected him to read the report. He was black. NO one expected him to read the report. At the end of the program he said Jefferson was a child molester. That's what he was there for and that's what he did.

If a white man had done exactly the same thing, he would have been ridiculed.

But black is not white. Everybody understood the Democrats' dilemma when Jesse Jackson showed up in the debate. They were dying to prove that the other white candidates were repeating the same old crap mindlessly. But they were terrified of even hinting that the black guy, the guy they knew was going to repeat the same old crap endlessly, was doing just that.

You know that. I know that. The media knew that. We also know no one is allowed to say it.

Except for me, of course.