Here in the year 2007 I have to cling to the hope that the past six years, the first six years of the American Experiment in the Third Millennium, are some kind of aberration instead of a period that has really set the tone that's going to persist throughout my adult life.
We're talking about a period in which the favorite for the Republican Party's presidential nomination can say something like this little gem and have it be reported in subsequent days in this fashion, as a kind of gentlemanly disagreement about the rules of cricket.
In a question about torture, he ridiculed the way newspapers portray controversial interrogation techniques like water-boarding and sleep deprivation.
If the media think sleep deprivation constitutes torture, Giuliani said, "On that theory, I'm being tortured running for president of the United States."
McCain, whatever his recent failings, is a veteran and a former POW who knows what he's talking about. He was tortured regularly for an extended period! Giuliani is a plastic man, a cipher, who shrouds his egotistical will to power in a thin veneer of tough-guy posturing. Why does the New York Times pretend that these two people have anything approaching equivalency in a discussion about torture?
There's some kind of deep-seated sickness in the media with respect to the sin of taking sides, which we've seen not just on subjects like torture, but also with respect to Global Warming, the justification for the war in Iraq (and now a new conflict with Iran), the theory of evolution, and more. The American media is at best (and I mean discounting the kind of corruption and inbreeding that Glenn Greenwald spends most of his blog carping about) a huge forum for the expression of the Golden Mean fallacy. Forget that the facts don't take sides. Report the poles and decide that the truth falls somewhere in the middle.
When I read things like that article in the NYT I feel very angry but also very small, because there is nothing that I can do about something so stupid. This is the message going out to America: "The issue of torture is mainly concerned with politicians and representatives of the justice department discussing amongst themselves what actually constitutes torture, and whether or not torture yields useful information to stop terrorism. None of the assertions made by either side can be assigned any kind of value with regard to truthfulness."
But we're not talking about an abstruse political debate! We're talking about Khaled El-Masri, an innocent man abducted and renditioned to Afghanistan to be tortured for months. We're talking about real people, being waterboarded and deprived of sleep for extended periods right now, in secret CIA prisons.
Evan
1 comment:
Good post. I am appalled by the increasing tolerance for and insensitivity to surveillance, arrest, rendition, torture, private mercenaries, pre-emptive war, and empire. I can hardly believe this is the same country I grew up in. Few even pay lip service to moral and ethical ideals once considered essential to any idea of the USA. Peace through endless war, once an Orwellian exaggeration if not a total fiction, is now a reality. Viable candidates for president promise that there are no limits, no restrictions, on what they may do to oppose enemies and defend the national interest. Now that the strategic military base in northern Iraq has been established, neither the Republican nor the Democratic party will ever relinquish it, given the universal belief in the imminent precipitous decline of the supply of petroleum. Adding fuel to the war is the fact that no presidential or senatorial candidate who expresses even the very slightest of doubts about the absolute truth of the bible, the second coming of Christ, or the existence of a parent-type god has even the ghost of a chance of election. How does this all add up? Hard to see much but catastrophe and great suffering in the near future. -- Bob
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