Just plain dumb

re: "Autopsy shows drug suspect died of suffocation" (BP, August 30, 2021)

 
Dear editor,

When we read that "According to Pol Col Thitisant, multiple plastic bags were put on Jeerapong’s head because he did not want him to see his face," a couple of questions arise.

First, every school child knows that putting plastic bags over your head and sealing them around the neck leads to death. How comes it that senior officers of the Royal Thai Police, a station commander no less, are so grossly ignorant of basic biology as to not know this? To achieve the goal of knowing less than primary school children, do officers rising in the ranks undergo special training to deepen their ignorance?

Related to having, or not having, useful knowledge is the matter of critical thinking, or plain common sense. Anyone who has played childhood games or watched a kidnap movie knows that in order to prevent the victim seeing the faces of the torturer or kidnapper, it is sufficient to use a blind fold. Those fatal plastic bags could easily have served as a makeshift blindfold. Apparently we are to believe that the level of intelligence, the basic thinking competence, of ranking officers of the Royal Thai Police is in the range that might generously be described as seriously retarded.

Do the alleged torturers and murderers really want to base their defence on a presumption of ignorance and retarded mental ability that so strains credibility? Is the RTP really in the habit of hiring and promoting officers who are capable of the intellectual depths now being claimed by these killers?

 Felix Qui
 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

 
The text as edited was published in PostBag on September 2, 2021, under the title "Just plain dumb" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2175099/just-plain-dumb