THIS MODERN WORLD

The context behind that endlessly recycled sound bite:

“I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday did anybody else see or hear him? He was on FOX News, this is a white man, and he was upsetting the FOX News commentators to no end, he pointed out, a white man, an ambassador, he pointed out that what Malcolm X said when he was silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true, he said Americas chickens, are coming home to roost.”

“We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism.

“We took Africans away from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism.

“We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel.

“We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenage and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard working fathers.

“We bombed Qaddafi’s home, and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against the rock.

“We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hard working people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they’d never get back home.

“We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye.

“Kids playing in the playground. Mothers picking up children after school. Civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

“Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y’all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.”

Jeff Cohen:

In the fall of 2002, week after week, I argued vigorously against invading Iraq in debates televised on MSNBC. I used every possible argument that might sway mainstream viewers — no real threat, cost, instability. But as the war neared, my debates were terminated.

In my 2006 book Cable News Confidential, I explained why I lost my airtime:

There was no room for me after MSNBC launched Countdown: Iraq — a daily one-hour show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. Countdown: Iraq featured retired colonels and generals, sometimes resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pre-game analysis and diagramming plays. It was excruciating to be sidelined at MSNBC, watching so many non-debates in which myth and misinformation were served up unchallenged.

It was bad enough to be silenced. Much worse to see that these ex-generals — many working for military corporations — were never in debates, nor asked a tough question by an anchor. (I wasn’t allowed on MSNBC unless balanced by at least one truculent right-winger.)

Except for the brazenness and scope of the Pentagon spin program, I wasn’t shocked by the recent New York Times report exposing how the Pentagon junketed and coached the retired military brass into being “message-force multipliers” and “surrogates” for Donald Rumsfeld’s lethal propaganda.

The biggest villain here is not Rumsfeld or the Pentagon. It’s the TV networks. In the land of the First Amendment, it was their choice to shut down debate and journalism.

No government agency forced MSNBC to repeatedly feature the hawkish generals unopposed. Or fire Phil Donahue. Or smear weapons expert Scott Ritter…

The rest.

Looking back at it now, I see that in McCain’s October 11, 2002 Senate speech supporting the Iraq war resolution, he quoted Jeffrey Goldberg:

This is not just another Arab despot, not one of many tyrants who repress their people from within the confines of their countries. As New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who recently traveled across northern Iraq, recently wrote in Slate:

There are, of course, many repugnant dictators in the world; a dozen or so in the Middle East alone. But Saddam Hussein is a figure of singular repugnance, and singular danger. To review: there is no dictator in power anywhere in the world who has, so far in his career, invaded two neighboring countries; fired ballistic missiles at the civilians of two other neighboring countries; tried to have assassinated an ex-president of the United States; harbored al Qaeda fugitives…; attacked civilians with chemical weapons; attacked the soldiers of an enemy with chemical weapons; conducted biological weapons experiments on human subjects; committed genocide; and… [weaponized] aflotoxin, a tool of mass murder and nothing else. I do not know how any thinking person could believe that Saddam Hussein is a run-of-the-mill dictator. No one else comes close… to matching his extraordinary and variegated record of malevolence.’

Here’s more of what Goldberg wrote in that specific Slate article:

There is not sufficient space…for me to refute some of the arguments made in Slate over the past week against intervention, arguments made, I have noticed, by people with limited experience in the Middle East (Their lack of experience causes them to reach the naive conclusion that an invasion of Iraq will cause America to be loathed in the Middle East, rather than respected)…

The administration is planning today to launch what many people would undoubtedly call a short-sighted and inexcusable act of aggression. In five years, however, I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.

Too bad McCain didn’t use that.

(Goldberg aficionados may also want to read a recent article by Spencer Ackerman about Goldberg and Stephen Hayes.)

After seeing this cartoon, Errol Morris was kind enough to send a screener of his new film, which Andrew O’Hehir discusses in Salon today:

Tony Diaz, a former military-police sergeant who served at Abu Ghraib, stares into Errol Morris’ camera and speaks in baffled tones about being called into a shower room at that notorious Baghdad prison where CIA interrogators were beating an Iraqi detainee to death. Diaz says he did not participate in the man’s interrogation and did not beat him; he was ordered to hold the man up and help secure his arms, and he followed those orders. While he was doing that, drops of blood fell from the detainee’s battered face onto Diaz’s uniform, and that troubled him. He hadn’t done anything wrong, he told Morris, yet the blood made him feel responsible.

I don’t mean to demonize Tony Diaz. Virtually alone among the interviewees in Morris’ new film “Standard Operating Procedure,” an artful, meditative investigation of the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs and the circumstances that produced them, Diaz seems to be wrestling with his conscience, after his own bewildered and evasive fashion. (Morris has also co-authored a book of the same title with New Yorker staff writer and Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch, to be published next month.)

Everybody else who was there, from former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the M.P.’s at Abu Ghraib, down to the specialists and privates who took the fall for the abuses committed there — including Megan Ambuhl, Sabrina Harman and Abu Ghraib poster-child Lynndie England — enthusiastically points fingers and passes the buck: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld did it; I fell in love with the wrong guy; there were black-hat government agents I couldn’t control; I was just following orders.

As Morris said to me in our recent interview, welcome to the human species. But at the risk of sounding like a terrorist-coddling America-hater, the human species in our country, circa 2008, has some issues with moral clarity. If I believed that there was any public appetite for a movie like “Standard Operating Procedure,” I might also believe that it would spark a public conversation about responsibility for the crimes and abuses committed in our name — some we know about and a great many more, one suspects, that we don’t. If we’re honest with ourselves, which is a pretty tall order, we might find ourselves in Tony Diaz’s position: We didn’t do anything wrong, so how did that blood get on our clothes?

But it’s evident, as Morris has observed elsewhere, that the American people don’t care about torture. We don’t mind it, in fact, as long as we don’t have to see it or think about it. If it’s called something else, like “harsh treatment” or “stress positions” or “special tactics,” so much the better, although I doubt the euphemisms are fooling anybody. Morris’ mission in “Standard Operating Procedure,” in part, is to restore human dimensions to people like Ambuhl and England and Harman who have arguably committed evil and contemptible acts. Some critics have suggested that Morris is justifying their conduct by placing it in the broader context of the paranoia, conformity and oppression that afflicted the military campaign in Iraq and Abu Ghraib in particular.

I don’t see it that way. Intentionally or not, Morris’ interviews with these confused, vacuous and morally rudderless people felt to me like a sweeping indictment of those of us who are their fellow citizens and who share the culture that produced them. Lynndie England, in particular, is pretty hard to take. Out on parole after three years in prison, she looks battered and puffy, closer to 40 than 25, and remains completely without insight into how her affair with former Cpl. Charles Graner (the alleged mastermind of many of the abusive acts shown in the photos) led her to collaborate in the sexual humiliation and ritual degradation of Iraqi detainees.

Listening to her talk, I felt only contempt and disgust — contempt for this beaten-down, dull-witted woman for the things she has done and disgust with myself for being unable to muster more than a faint flicker of compassion. Unfortunately, the people who really deserve our compassion, the Iraqi men brutalized at Abu Ghraib and other places, are absent from Morris’ film. He says he tried to find the men in the photographs, but many remain unidentified and others have disappeared. (As for Charles Graner, he remains in prison, and Morris’ requests to interview him were refused.)

The rest.

I have to say, Limbaugh’s had some really strange rants lately, even for him. Like this:

“Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats,” Limbaugh said during Wednesday’s radio broadcast. He then went on to say that’s the best thing that could happen to the country.
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Limbaugh cited Al Sharpton, saying the Barack Obama supporter threatened to superdelegates that “there’s going to be trouble” if the presidency is taken from Obama.

Several callers called in to the radio show to denounce Limbaugh’s comments, when he later stated, “I am not inspiring or inciting riots, I am dreaming of riots in Denver.”

Limbaugh said with massive riots in Denver, which he called “Operation Chaos,” the people on the far left would look bad.

“There won’t be riots at our convention,” Limbaugh said of the Republican National Convention. “We don’t riot. We don’t burn our cars. We don’t burn down our houses. We don’t kill our children. We don’t do half the things the American left does.”

Accusing liberals of burning down houses and cars and killing their own children — remember, this is what conservatives consider “balance” to the alleged liberal bias of the news media.

…adding, I thought the dog-whistle components of Limbaugh’s statement were probably obvious, but a reader’s note reminds me that I probably spend more time listening to this guy than a lot of you. “Killing their own children” is clearly an abortion reference, while the rest is probably trying to invoke the LA riots, and by extension, a general sense of racial divisiveness.

And C&L has this:

Lisa: You were saying that you were hoping for a White Christmas if the Democrats choose Hillary over Obama and you even kind of sang your statement to the tune of White Christmas or did you mean a white country? What exactly did you mean by that statement yesterday?

Rush: Ho ho ho.

Lisa: Because I feel like all Americans, the American people want is what’s best for this country.

Rush: No, they don’t.

Lisa: Why does this have to be a hate-filled comment from you and other radio hosts?

Rush: Lisa, there’s nothing but love for people, care and concern for people.

Lisa: It didn’t sound that way yesterday.

Rush: Well, you’re picking a selective moment. How often do you listen to the show?

Lisa: I listen almost every day.

Rush: You do?

Lisa: Yes I do. So I was a bit surprised should I say shocked that you were so blatant with that comment.

Rush: I’ve made the comment before.

Lisa: Who wishes for riots, who wants that to happen in this country?

Rush: Who wishes for riots? I didn’t get the ball rolling, it is Democrats like Al Sharpton that there will be….

Lisa: Rush.

Rush: You need to be calling Rev. Sharpton…

Lisa: I’m calling the gentlemen who made the comment yesterday and sang to the tune of I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas. What, what was that about?

Rush: It was about nothing. You are, you are taking…

Lisa: You are an intelligent man and I don’t think anything you do is about nothing…

Rush: Lisa.

Lisa: Everything you say and do on your radio show has a purpose. I’ve been listening long enough to pick up on that, Rush.

Keep in mind one of Limbaugh’s own catchphrases: “words mean things.”