Category Archives: Essays

On today’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, conservative pundit George Will correctly pointed out the absurdity in the notion that Guantanamo detainees are too dangerous to try in the U.S.

The supermax prisons in our country are full of Americans who have killed Americans and are perfectly safe, so the idea that we cannot find a place to house these few people who are very dangerous strikes me as preposterous.

Agree with him or not on policy, Mr. Will (along with maybe David Brooks) is one of only a handful of conservative commentators who are intellectually curious and consistently stick to their political principles regardless of the politics of the day.

I have recently complained about the poor state of professionalism of the establishment media in America and how embedded journalists have contributed to the former administration’s propaganda campaigns. At the same time, though, I have become a big fan of Glen Greenwald who, though one may disagree with his politics, is playing the formidable role at Salon.com as a journalistic watch dog.

For example, in three recent pieces — “UAE ‘torture’ scandal and cover-up sparks outrage in the U.S.“, “The NYT’s definition of blinding American exceptionalism” and “Roxana Saberi’s plight and American media propaganda” — Greenwald calls out the media big wigs on their double standard in decrying the activities of foreign actors while practically ignoring similar behavior by the U.S. government. In the latter piece, he compares the hypocritical press’s attention to the American journalist’s imprisonment in Iran with their unwillingness to cover any of the U.S. government’s detentions without trial of journalists as part of the “War on Terror”. Greenwald writes,

Many people scoff at the notion that the American media propagandizes the American citizenry, but here one sees the vivid essence of that process.   Our establishment media loves to point to and loudly condemn the behavior of other governments as proof of how tyrannical and evil they are — look at those Iranian mullah-fanatics imprisoning journalists/look at those primitive, corrupt, lawless Iraqis and their “culture of impunity“/look at the UAE and their tolerance of torture — while completely ignoring, when they aren’t justifying, identical behavior by our own government.

In Iran, at least Saberi received the pretense of an actual trial and appeal (one that resulted in her rather rapid release, a mere three weeks after she was convicted), as compared to the journalists put in cages for years by the U.S. Government with no charges of any kind, or as compared to the individuals whom we continue to abduct, transport to Bagram, and insist on the right to imprison indefinitely with no charges of any kind.  Who was treated better and more consistently with ostensible Western precepts of justice and press freedoms:  Roxana Saberi or Sami al-Haj?  Saberi or Bilal Hussein?  Saberi or Ibrahim Jassam?  Saberi or the Bagram detainees shipped to Afghanistan and held in a dank prison, away from the sight of the entire world, without even a pretense of judicial review, a power the Obama administration continues to insist it possesses?

Pointing to other governments and highlighting their oppressive behavior can be cathartic, fun and gratifying in a self-justifying sort of way.  Ask Fred Hiatt; it’s virtually all he ever does.  But the first duty of the American media — like the first duty of American citizens — is to oppose oppressive behavior by our own government.  That’s not as fun or as easy, but it is far more important.  Moreover, obsessively complaining about the rights-abridging behavior of other countries while ignoring the same behavior from our own government is worse than a mere failure of duty.  It is propagandistic and deceitful, as it paints a misleading picture that it is other governments — but not our own — which engage in such conduct.

I recommend that you read these articles.

Many moderate and even liberal journalists are calling for a free pass to all former government officials, especially top-ranking White Housers (aka, Dick, W. and Donald). The problem, I believe, is that if we have an honest investigation into the enhanced interrogation program we are bound to learn the disgusting truth behind torture and about the “Wag the Dog” activism key members of the establishment press played in promoting disinformation in furtherance of the government’s illegal activities.

One thing that has bothered me over recent weeks has been the extent to which the mainstream press has promoted or even allowed to be promoted two notions: first, that torture could be a vital and necessary means for protecting our national security; and second, that White House and government officials may at times be above the law. The sum of these two, as attempts to rationalize or even exculpate torture, equate to an outright admission that the government did in fact engage in torture. Continue reading →

Today I was listening to an excellent interview podcast from the Leonard Lopate Show with Reza Aslan, author of the recent book How to Win a Cosmic War. If you have the time, I definitely recommend you listen to it in its entirety.

Mr. Aslan’s fundamental argument mirrors something that I have been repeating over and over again recently — mainly that the language and actions of the “War on Terror” have essentially created a fanatic religious and ideological war by the Christian West that mimics that of the so-called Islamist terrorists.

Later in explaining why Muslims have greater difficulty integrating into European society than in American society, Mr. Aslan argues, as I have in the past, that Europeans do not distinguish ethnicity from nationality. Thus, the only way to truly integrate into most European nations is by abandoning one’s previous culture and fully adopting the local one. In other words, one must become indistinct in Europe in order to belong.

On the other hand, American identity was founded on a political ideology (as articulated in The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution), not prefaced on an ethnicity or culture. Thus, one becomes “American”, not by assuming a language, religion, or way of life, but by buying into the American Dream, no matter how illusive that may be.

The immediate result is that there is a greater sense of alienation and disenfranchisement amongst Muslims in Europe, thus making Europe a more likely breeding ground for those so-called terror threats.

A recent story in TIME magazine tells the extent to which the Rumsfeld Department of Defense had knowingly used torture to interrogate terrorist suspects in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Time story also explains that

Opponents of last week’s release of memos detailing CIA interrogation techniques argue that they will provide enemies of the United States with a training manual to prepare their operatives for capture. The irony is that the U.S. military appears to have done the exact opposite, taking a training program that had been designed to prepare American soldiers to withstand torture by communist regimes seeking to extract false confessions and twisting it into a highly controversial interrogation manual.

I recently wrote about the absurdity of these opponents’ argument in that the presumption of anyone, whether inside or outside the U.S., should be that they will not be mistreated when in U.S. custody. Thus no one should ever have to prepare for questioning by U.S. authorities.

And guess what? The Bush Government did not only borrow money to finance its tax cuts and wars from the Chinese. It also borrowed heavily from a Chinese handbook on torturing Americans as the basis for U.S. interrogation training program.

The final irony: the torture techniques around which the [torture] training was devised were used by Chinese interrogators during the Korean War, not to gather actionable intelligence but to force false confessions from captured U.S. soldiers — confessions that could then be used in anti-American propaganda.

Former Vice President Cheney, in reaction to the recent declassification of the torture memos, has defended the previous administration’s actions by claiming that the CIA interrogations provided the government and the Vice President with essential information. Because that information has not been revealed to the public, for obvious national security reasons, we’re just going to have to take Dick’s word for it.

That must be the Cheney Doctrine. We’re just going to have to trust the government. From everything from WMDs to domestic surveillance, Dick thinks we should just believe him. Sorry, but the truth has to remain classified.

But what we have learned since 9/11 is that prior to the attacks, we already had all of the actionable intelligence needed to stop the attacks. It was institutional inefficiency, not the absence of torture or the Patriot Act, that kept us from being safe. Thanks to Dick, though, each and any of my communications (phone calls, emails, letters), as a U.S. citizen living abroad, are subject to warrantless searches by the government.

And if I were a non-citizen, according to the Dick Doctrine, the U.S. government should be able to kidnap me from anywhere in the world, hold me incommunicado indefinitely, and interrogate me as harshly as his lawyers deem necessary. The information, fruit of the interrogations, will be invaluable to our national security, in Dick we trust. How do we know that the non-citizen isn’t some ordinary Joe? We can’t tell you that either, but in Dick we trust.

All I know is that there were no WMDs in Iraq, the great majority of those held in Guantanamo were released without being charged of anything, and Exxon Mobile is now the most profitable company in the country.