wednesday, june 22. 2005 Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill) apologized yesterday for his remarks concerning a classified FBI report on the conditions at Guantanamo Bay, where our government is holding some terror suspects, as basically indistinguishable from reports of prison conditions in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Gulag, or under Cambodia's Pol Pot regime.
He was roundly attacked for those remarks by the Republicans in Congress, because -- they said -- he was comparing "our troops" to the worst sadists and dictators of the 20th century.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is spin ... and there is "spin". In some cases, spin seems to go widdershins instead of deosil, anti-clockwise instead of clockwise. The spin in this case is purely satanic, and most Americans are not paying enough attention to how opinion is being manipulated.
Durbin was precise in his remarks. He said that anyone reading the FBI report and not knowing the context would assume it was a report on conditions in those totalitarian regimes. And he is correct. Those of you who do not believe this need only read the books that have been published in the last fifty years or so on the Soviet prison system, the interrogation of prisoners at Gestapo headquarters, or the reports by observers like Lifton and others on Chinese interrogation and brainwashing. At the time, our government officials hailed those publications as accurate descriptions of how godless Communists behaved. Their data was never questioned.
Can you say "deja vu"?
So does that mean that Senator Durbin is anti-American? Does that mean he has equated our troops to Hitler's SS? Of course not. But in our new, double-speak Brave New World anyone who questions what is going on -- what actions and policies are being underwritten, promoted, and legalized by our present government -- is unpatriotic, maligns our underpaid, undersupported troops in the field, and borders on the treasonous.
To fully support our men and women in military service, our Congress should be at the forefront of ensuring that they are not forced or encouraged to perform the type of bestial acts we have seen and heard about since the invasion of Iraq began. We are Americans. We are better than this. We have vast resources at our disposal for gathering intelligence and fighting our wars. Yet, we are brutalizing not only the prisoners but also our own troops by these antiquated interrogation methods and psychotic psychological techniques. Because America is getting tired of this endless campaign, a campaign without clear goals, based on bad intelligence and outright deception, and with no identifiable exit strategy, the administration is turning on anyone who raises a question, demands accountability, or is just plain exhausted by years of institutionalized lying. We have been through all of this before. It was called Vietnam then.
Republican leaders are insisting that in this "war on terror" we need to take a no-holds barred approach to interrogation. That the Geneva Convention does not apply, since the terrorists are not combatants in the ordinary sense. That laws of human decency be abrogated in the name of American security. As you know, those laws are being abrogated at home as well as abroad, with the Patriot Act among other developments.
Yet, the more we become like the terrorists, the more we lose to the terrorists. Our interrogation methods -- however extreme -- are not yielding the intelligence we need. They are not raising our security levels here at home or abroad, because our actions paint us as sadistic, blood-thirsty criminals in the eyes of the rest of the world. We are busy curtailing our freedoms here at home even as we trample like a wounded elephant abroad.
The events of September 11, 2001 have become our Reichstag fire.
The spectacle of Senator Durbin being forced (presumably by his own party) to apologize, even obliquely, for his remarks is a sickening example of what has happened to informed dissent in the United States. The Republicans insist that Durbin's remarks give aid and comfort to the enemy. As a wiser man than I once said, in war the first casualty is Truth.
Truth. Yesterday, Senator Durbin intoned its eulogy.
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"Tell the truth and shame the devil"--so the old saying goes. There's little doubt that informed dissent is slated to be a casualty in the war on terror, with commercial media eagerly enlisting to reduce the most complex issues to 10-second sound bites.
Would love for you to elaborate on what exactly you mean by "satanic." Somehow, I doubt you mean the Miltonian Satan rebelling against an all-powerful Deity or similar "traditional" concepts. But rather than second-guess, I'd like to hear your further thoughts.
By the way, what do you consider the best sources of "unspun" news? (if any such still exist!)
erika It's not only a question of reducing complex issues to sound bites; a sound bite is as subject to spin as anything else. The issue with the Senator and his apology is not only a question of the simple versus the complex, but outright misrepresentation of a fairly straightforward and unambiguous statement: that the FBI report on prison abuse looked like something out of the Third Reich. He never stated that our troops were Nazis, yet he was made to appear to have said that by an administration intent on characterizing dissent as treason.
As for "satanic", I was not thinking of Milton so much as I was contemplating the New Testament. Satan asks Jesus to worship him; if he does so, then all creation would be his. With an administration intent on conquering all of creation, is it any wonder that I worry America has taken the bait?
As for unspun news ... it is our duty as Americans, I believe, to acquaint ourselves with both sides of every issue and to accept that sometimes there are more than two sides. There could be ten, or twenty, or a hundred. There is no way to avoid spin; news networks are composed of human beings, after all, with hidden agendas and political allegiances.
We should avoid, as much as possible, the type of confrontational news programs that pit one side against another, that award points based more on bon mots and shouting than on clear thinking and careful presentation of facts.
We should avail ourselves of the unprecedented access to the media of other nations that we have via cable and Internet, and hear what they have to say. Quite often, they reveal data that our own networks avoid. We should support our Public Access stations as much as possible, to insure that they are responsive to the people and not to political administrations or large corporate sponsors.
But most of all, we have to educate ourselves. We have to resist manipulation, "psychological warfare", as much as possible. We have to look beyond the easy answers and the pat solutions to complex issues. We have to be suspicious without being cynical, cautious without being paranoid, and judge every argument on its own merits and to the degree to which it is reflective of the facts as we know them.
If you read the New York Times, then read the New York Post as well. See how the same news story can be twisted out of all proportion; but don't just get angry, get specific: look at each version of the "truth" and determine how much fact is present in any given story and argue --mentally, not aloud! -- with the point of view with which you disagree. See if you can make a case for or against the story you don't like. Learn to discern. Learn to sense "spin" when you see it, hear it, taste it. None of the news organs of today represents the unvarnished truth; the truth is for us to discover. Although we are safer with PBS programming than any of the commercial networks, there is still not enough air time to present any complex case in detail.
We live in a world where it is no longer safe to win an argument based on the debate point system you learned in school. When lives are at stake, we need to be right as well as to win. I feel that it was the ten second representation of Durbin's comments that lead to the 'twisting out of proportion,' because any attempt to draw parallel between the 660 captives in Guantanamo, and the millions that died in Nazi concentration camps and/or at the hands of the Kamer Rouge is destined to inflame the American public. It was a selective sound bite, wasn't it? That's what I mean about the science of spin. Anything you or I say can be made to seem heinous if it is taken out of context.
It's not a question of quantity, however. One cannot compare the Gitmo 660 to the Holocaust's 6 million ... but if Americans are encouraged or expected or instructed to brutalize even one prisoner, there is something wrong taking place. And while we may have fewer than 1000 prisoners at Guantanamo, we have many thousands more scattered in prisons throughout the world where local laws permit brutalization of prisoners; we did that deliberately, so that we wouldn't be breaking any laws at home. That cynical approach to torture and interrogation is nothing less than evil. No one is questioning the legality of this "outsourcing of torture". What we should be questioning is its morality, specifically in light of what it means to be an American, an inheritor of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence which themselves can be seen as moral documents.
During the 1950s and 1960s, our own CIA conducted psychological experiments on unwilling, unwitting subjects outside the United States for the same reason. The infamous Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal under Dr Ewen Cameron is one example: persons presenting with minor psychological complaints were subjected to severe sensory deprivation and brainwashing experimentation in an effort to erase their personalities. This story is told in Sinister Forces. What was wrong then, is wrong today. It is nothing less than the rebirth of MK-ULTRA. | 