Glenn Greenwald makes a key point about what gave Bush the power to torture people in American custody with impunity:
George Orwell mistakenly assumed that obfuscating language designed to glorify criminal acts would be invented and normalized by government. At least in the U.S., that function is outsourced to government’s most loyal and eager servants: establishment journalists. A principal reason why the government has been able to engage with impunity in the extremism and lawlessness of the last decade is because most journalists refuse even to describe it as what it is.Bush wouldn’t have been able to get away with it if the media (and all of us) hadn’t aided and abetted him by shrouding what he did with phrases like “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
As E.D. Kain says:
[C]ertainly in these recent decades the press has been a major part of this collapse of liberty – and we are all to some degree complicit.Update: Ta-Nahesi Coates is exactly right on this:
What really disturbs me about all of this, is that most Americans still don’t think torture is a big deal. I think in the case of Bush, particularly after 2004, we–the American people–got the government we deserved. I think Bush said a lot about who we were post-9/11. I’d like to see some exploration into how to make this torture argument directly to the people. Maybe we can’t. Maybe people really don’t care that much. But if we’re wondering why Obama isn’t willing to press forward, I think it’s fair to also wonder why the people aren’t pressing him to press forward.
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[Embiggen]
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(THE GRAPEVINE
Ross Douthat's Thinking about Torture from back in December remains my favorite post on the subject.
It's a good example of why I'm excited to see him moving to the Times. I don't often agree with him on social conservative/religious issues, but his intellectual honesty is prodigious.
intellectual honesty is the rarest quality on the conservative right these days. all that's left for most of them is fear, rigidity and ideology
In Canada, the law says that any "credibly suspected" war criminal is to be barred entry to Canada or arrested and prosecuted. Unfortunately political considerations have overpowered legal process. So when George Bush visited Calgary, it was left to a citizen to attempt an arrest. That citizen will go on trial in May, when Condi Rice also visits Calgary for a $500 a plate dinner at the University of Calgary. Most do not want these US war criminals here. The scope and breadth of their war crimes is outrageous. They must be held accountable. And so likely there will again be protests and attempts to arrest the latest monster to come here. On both sides of the border it is time for the people to rise and sweep this evil away along with the impunity and power that prevents the rule of law functioning to try them.
This inability to tell the truth by the US media, coupled with the inability to face the truth by the US citizenry may not have begun on 9/11, but it certainly includes 9/11.
We still, as a people, do not know what happened that day. The 9/11 Commission report was delayed for two years, stonewalled by the Bush Administration and hamstrung by having a Bush loyalist as the executive director (who could decide what commissioners could and couldn't see). It has now been discredited by it's own directors and Max Cleland as a commissioner called the commission, 'a scam'.
Please see History Commons Complete 9/11 Timeline: http://www.historycommons.org/project.jsp?project… as well as the documentary 9/11 Press for Truth http://www.pressfortruth.com (the story of the Jersey Girls), because the most we can say about that day is that we don't really know what happened.