Doesn´t Rank Up – Moon of Alabama

September 12, 2004

Doesn´t Rank Up

In his new book Seymore Hersh claims that in late 2002 a CIA analyst, FBI agents and a military lawyer at Guantánamo reported to the Defense Department about prisoner abuses. The reports went up to the level of Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld. Nothing was done. In late 2003 a military officer in Iraq reported abuses in Abu Ghraib directly to General Abizaid and his deputy. Again, nothing was done.

Meanwhile the Department of Defense preemptivly issues a statement claiming that:

Mr. Seymor Hersh’s upcoming book apparently contains many of the numerous unsubstantiated allegations and inaccuracies which he has made in the past based upon unnamed sources.

But that’s just the sideshow. To Rumsfeld it is more important to look at the differences between various abuses and killings. He does so when he says:

Does it rank up there with chopping off someone’s head on television? It doesn’t. It doesn’t.

Chopping off someone’s head or struck[ing the detainee] in the head with the butt of a gun so he dies seem to have similar outcomes. Why do they differ in ranking?

The difference in Rumsfeld´s mind must be in the words “on television“. Showing the first murder recorded on TV rather then to just take fun pictures of the dead like after the second is the nuance that ranks the incidents. It is not deeds, it’s the type of reporting done on them that makes them harmful.

Thanks to Mr. Rumsfeld we can now see the difference between defined terrorism (PDF), politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets, and the firing from helicopters into civilian crowds. Whatever is reported on TV ranks up.

Dear Seymore Hersh, dear Aljazerra, please the reports coming.

Posted by b on September 12, 2004 at 11:40 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Why redneck America loves Bush
Every customer at Burt’s loves George Bush. Worships George Bush. One reason is because George Bush doesn’t give a shit. When his detractors point out the complete fraud of WMDs, he doesn’t give a shit. When newspapers worldwide suggest Bush may be the biggest international threat today, Bush does not give a shit. This gives him street cred among these people who for better or worse, I must call my own. Why should they give a shit about international opinion? After all, as presented by the media, the world outside is altogether nasty terrain*a news hour nether region from whence child suicide bombers swarm toward us in a tide that will only be stopped by a good old goddam American pounding with the biggest ball busting bombs we can muster. So Bush “sounds right” when he says, “We will not cut and run.” And when George Bush sneers “Bring’em on!” he sounds even more right.
[…]
These are the skilled and semi-skilled workers, people without a college degree, (in this town, nearly two fifths of working adults without even a high school degree) some thoughtful and self-educating, others not. They represent 55% of all voters. Many are the inexplicable self-screwing working folks who voted neo-conservative Republican in 2000. Never mind that Bush economic policies are why so many of them are drinking short beers tonight, or that his tax plan made them poorer and the rich much richer. They approved of it simply because it was called a tax “cut,” and because many of them needed their $200 rebate scrap of that federal hog to pay off last winter’s heating bill. By any realistic assessment, nearly everyone in Burt’s is working poor. They would never admit it. Nor do government guidelines acknowledge them as such. But so long as the current administration infers that people like them are heroes (they identify heavily with the firemen, policemen of 911 and the soldiers in Iraq) they don’t need no steenking economic justice. According to a recent Roper poll, 49% of Americans in this economic class will vote for George Bush in ’04. Here in Burt’s it is probably 100%.
[…]
What these folks really need is for someone to say out loud: “Now lookee here dammit! You are dumber than a sack of hammers and should’a got an education so you would have half a notion of what’s going on.” Someone once told me that and, along with the advice never to mix Mad Dog 20-20 with whiskey, it is the best I ever received. But no one in America is about to say such a thing out loud because it sounds elitist. It sounds un-American and undemocratic. It also might get your nose broken in certain venues. In an ersatz democracy maintaining the popular national fiction that everyone is equal, it is impermissible to say that, although we may all have equal constitutional rights, we are not equal. It takes at least some effort toward self-improvement just to get to the starting line of socioeconomic equality, plus an ongoing effort at being informed, if you want to function in America nowadays.
Sometimes I think the GOP emits a special pheromone that attracts fools and money.
Pooty, how did we git so dumb?
Despite how it appears, our mama’s did not drop us on their heads. What I watch in Burt’s with such mixed feelings of humor and outrage is America’s unacknowledged class system at work. Saying that our system and its GOP helmsmen skin the poor and working classes out of all opportunity is like saying a $40 hooker will nearly always steal your wallet on the way out of the motel room. Everybody knows that. However, no one but the so-called “far left” ever talks about the extremely localized and not so nice ways in which small and middle-sized towns such as Dickville are important to American capitalism’s machinery. They are where the first rip-offs are pulled, where the first muggings take place. Where the first dollars and opportunities are wrung from the basic needs of the machines human components, otherwise known as working stiffs.
The lives and intellectual cultures of the hardest working people in these towns are not just stunted by the smallness of the society into which they were born. They are purposefully held in bondage by a local network of moneyed families, bankers, developers, lawyers, and business people in whose interests it is to a have cheap, unquestioning and compliant labor force. They invest in developing such a force by not investing (how’s that for making money out of thin air!) in the education and quality of life for anyone but their own. These places are, as they say, “investment paradise.” That means low taxes, few or no local regulations, no unions, and a Chamber of Commerce tricked out like a gaggle of hookers, welcoming the new nonunion, air poisoning battery acid factory. “To hell with pollution. We gonna sell some propity, move some real’state today fellas!” Big contractors, realtors, lawyers, everybody gets a slice, except the poorly educated nonunion mooks who will be employed at the acid plant at discount rates.
At the same time, and more importantly, this business cartel*and you have to call it that*controls most elected offices and municipal boards.
Anyone who actually believes that all these poor working puds can beat this system, lift themselves up by their bootstraps, is either a neo-con ideologue or the child of advantage. Most readers of this article probably have a college education. Because only 25% of Americans get a college degree, we are the children of advantage, even if we got it the hard way. It may not feel like having one up on the majority, but if we get off the Internet for a while and spend just one day driving around the unpleasant towns and neighborhoods we avoid, those where the check cashing businesses and the pawn shops flourish, it becomes obvious. And I am not talking about ghettoes either. I’m talking about the heartland of America where it’s supposed to be all lightning bug summers and hotdogs on the grill.
DAMN, TOO MUCH GOOD SHIT TO COPY. READ IT ALL THERE.
Why redneck America loves Bush

Posted by: MarcinGomulka | Sep 12 2004 13:00 utc | 1

The above is essentially a reply to the Bush-Warhol metaphore. Here is a short epilogue:
Then Wright made the mistake of asking the seventeen-year-old white youth with whom he worked to tell him more about the business. The youth viewed this sign of curiosity and ambition as an unpardonable affront. Wright narrated the confrontation that followed:
“What yuh tryin’ t’ do, nigger, git smart?” he asked.
“Naw; I ain’ tryin’ t’ git smart,” I said.
“Well, don’t, if yuh know what’s good for yuh! . . . Nigger, you think you’re white, don’t you?”
“No sir!”
“This is white man’s work around here, and you better watch yourself.”
==========
I’d say, a lot of people need to get smart before they change how they vote in the Bible Belt.

Posted by: MarcinGomulka | Sep 12 2004 13:12 utc | 2

Marcin,
A long time ago in college, that I paid for as a grown adult – not my parents, I had an amazing course that was poorly named: Intercultural Socialization Patterns. Go figure. Anyway it was my introduction to the elephant in the room, the unmentioned class/caste system in the US. I’ve not looked at life in the US in the same way since, thank goodness. The last 20 years have only heightened my sensitivity to the subject and the images in the link you posted.

Posted by: Kate_Storm | Sep 12 2004 14:55 utc | 3

Seymore Hersh at “NBC: Meet The Press” (Transcript

MR. HERSH: [October] 2002. And there was a wonderful general [in the NSC], just retired from the Air Force, named John Gordon, who’d been a deputy director of the CIA. And he pushed it. He did the unthinkable in the Nixon White House, you know–in the Bush White House, because he pushed stuff that they didn’t want to hear. He forced a series of meetings. To her credit, Miss Rice had a series of meetings about the issue. It was discussed. They brought in Rumsfeld: “I’ll look at it. I’ll take care of it.” He detailed it to a 31-year-old aide and it disappeared. One of the things that everybody remembered is when the man from the CIA, the analyst, went down to Guantanamo; one of the first things he saw were 80-year- old men, men at least that old, he said, living in their own excrement in cells, chained. And this kind of behavior, this kind of treatment, was just unacceptable to a military man.

On Kerry

He doesn’t have a solution. This is–by the way, I would also say, this White House doesn’t have an exit policy. None of us do. But what he’s saying right now just doesn’t meet the credibility test. He’s going to go to foreign leaders and say, “Excuse us, would you mind changing the color of the corpses over there?” You know, are the French and Germans, because there’s a new president, going to send their boys to die there? There’s no way out right now of this war. We’re looking at five more years, 10 more years of the war–of a guerrilla war that we probably will not win, like we didn’t win in Vietnam.

Posted by: b | Sep 12 2004 19:33 utc | 4

Anyone see the Ann Telnaes op-ed cartoon showing a Coke can (cambells soup can?) labled Dub-Ya Image next to te phrase “It’s not the real thing”?
( Will try to bring some more to this later)
cartoon showed in sept 11 Seattle Post Intelligencer

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 12 2004 20:02 utc | 5

@marcin and Kate:
Now ole Joe’s on a truth tear and that’s for sure.I might even have been through Dickville once or twice in my life. It might even be that people up to 35 miles south and west of Dickville drive their each day for the “job” opportunities.
It might even surprise foreigners that north-western Virginia is 85-95% white.
But the saddest truth of all is that Dickville’s exist in all the 50 states of the good old US of A.

Posted by: NorthSouthEastWest | Sep 13 2004 1:53 utc | 6

Dickville’s exist in all the 50 states of the good old US of A.
Posted by: NorthSouthEastWest | September 12, 2004 09:53 PM
They sure do.
My relatives on my mother’s side of the family all hail from Dickville, Illinois – in an area where, once upon a time anyway, Caterpillar and hogs were king. The hogs have moved on and Cat never quite recovered from the ill fortunes of the Seventies and Eighties, but it’s still a region of factories and farms. It’s working-poor, it’s Protestant, it’s white, it’s bigoted, it’s small-minded, it’s heavily unionized; the schools are as bad as ever – a crime no one’s been able to solve lo these many generations. Political corruption is taken for granted and the sordid relationship between commercial, civic, and political interests is the stuff of everyday life. Like the local high school graduates with no place to go and nothing to do but maybe pay a visit to the Navy recruiter and hope they can pass the ASVAB, it goes with the landscape.
Dickville, Illinois, is in Democrat country, and has been for as long as I can remember.
It’s easy to say that poorly-educated, unskilled and semi-skilled, low-rent rural folks vote Republican because they’re too mean and stupid to do otherwise.
It’s also easy to say that poorly-educated, unskilled and semi-skilled, low-rent urban folks vote Democrat because they haven’t the good sense to know when they’re being taken advantage of or taken for granted.
It’s naive – not to mention a crass conceit – to think that either party has a lock on the ignorant, the intolerant, the irrational – the fleeced and the fearful. I’d say they’ve divvied them up between them.

Posted by: Pat | Sep 13 2004 3:30 utc | 7

@Pat
I like the idea of a literate citzenry. Think everyone here does. Be nice too, if everybody who took it could pass the ASFAB, at the very least.
I think most of us here are realistic enough to understand that we do not have a “lock” on political wisdom.
I’m just concerned that we as a nation are headed down the road to some kind of imperial, bread-and-circus bananna republic.
No one in government seems to be willing to deal with the issues.
And it’s a hell of a thingto leave to the children.
America is better than this–or should be.

Posted by: NorthEastSouthWest | Sep 13 2004 4:11 utc | 8

Well since we’re talking about the new Hirsh book, I’ll start by saying that the people in Dickville (as Marcins post points out) could give a rats ass about this or any book by Hersh. Pat would say a Democratic Dickville is just as corrupt and misguided as a Republican Dickville, that Dems cant see that there being taken for granted, and the Repubs are just mean and stupid (I know you’re being facetious here).
I would maintain that any reflection on US politics worth its salt should take into some account the notion of individualism. Or the myth of individualism? Both parties have spent more energy casting themselves as the purveyors of individualism than they have in wrapping themselves in the stars and stripes, or illuminating their true agendas.
The prism of the left right debate in America is always colored to cast the spotlight on the supposed rights of the individual, in contrast to the government. The supposed political left in this country, with the exception of CIO inspired Roosevelt reforms, have never really made an embrace of true collectivism, be it socialism, or communism (as has been done in Europe) even the labor movements of the IWW and the AFL remained grounded in anarchism, and thus syndicalist, and at this point largely irrelevant. The Democratic party for it’s part has shown its complicity in the eshewment of collectivism by standing idilly by through the decline of worker representation, the dismantlement of New Deal legislation, not to mention pushing the pro business agenda of privatization, deregulation, NAFTA, and the rest.They have enshrined the individual but have left him powerless.
The Republicans, always the party of laissez-faire capitalism, have never had the problem of rejecting collectivism in favor of the individual, their problem (historically) has been getting elected. For most of the 20th century, the individual was so busy just staying alive, ie WWI, 2o year depression,WWII,Korea,Vietnam,etc, that the individual could see his physical/economic survival in a more graphic and lucid manner, that is, the individual was, at least in part, if not dependent on the other, at least part of the other. With the (late20th cent) decline of the Democratic party, and the disengagement of the “other”, the Republicans have engineered a new and effective (getting elected) method of reasserting the individual, as the common man, heroically fending off the general decline of the culture itself. Ironically, the endless flood of garbage emanating from the media, the unrelenting violence, porno, and general degradation of “old fashion family values” has been cast as the work of the left, those secret collectivists, always toiling, to undermine the values held dear to individualism America. Those Democrats, are now elitists, above the individual, and seeking the power to control the individual through their secular and sexual and un- American propaganda. This is ironic, because it simply is not true, ie it’s a business interest that drives the media, but this belies the fact that politically it works – the Republicans have found a mechanism that drives their laissez-faire agenda from those most likely to suffer it’s consequence – the individual unwittingly turned upon itself.

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 13 2004 7:54 utc | 9

@Anna Missed:
The problem, as I see it, is that the Republican Party, since the days of Reagan, has been the tool of ultra laissez-faire types. The Dems, at least the DNC types, are the laissez-faire leftists. Today, both parties are heavily into the virtues of finance capitalism as the cure for all the world’s ills.
No wonder, for the finance capitalists are paying both parties bills. And in my opinion, the country is going down the tubes for this reason.
B. Sorry, I got OT a bit. MarcinGomulka made me do it.

Posted by: NESW | Sep 13 2004 12:29 utc | 10

Excerps from Hersh´s new book at the Guardian

Posted by: b | Sep 13 2004 20:18 utc | 11

“The new thing this time was ordering us to shout, ‘Long live the United States’. We were also made to shout obscenities (sentences that had the word ‘fuck’ in them).”
Mr al-Mallah says the next day, he saw “a young man of 14 years of age bleeding from his anus and lying on the floor.
“He was Kurdish and his name was Hama. I heard the soldiers talking to each other about this guy, they mentioned that the reason for this bleeding was inserting a metal object in his anus.”
Mr al-Qutaji, who was detained in March, says he and other Iraqi lawyers have been unable to stop abuses because US forces have been given immunity from prosecution.

US troops face new torture claims

Posted by: b | Sep 14 2004 8:02 utc | 12

It’s naive – not to mention a crass conceit – to think that either party has a lock on the ignorant, the intolerant, the irrational – the fleeced and the fearful. I’d say they’ve divvied them up between them.
There is a relevant theory.
The propagation of false information can be simulated by a simple two state Markov Chain. The chain starts with 100% of people believing one thing. Even when a tiny percentage of all people would lie (twist, reverse the truth), the chain will arrive at a 50/50 state asymptotically.

Posted by: MarcinGomulka | Sep 14 2004 19:32 utc | 13

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