Spinning Our Minds
By Mathew Maavak
A few months before those eye-grabbing photos from Abu Ghraib were broadcast by CBS 60 Minutes II, here is what Brig Gen Janis Karpinski proudly declared to the same network. “This is international standards...It's the best care available in a prison facility.” (Interview with 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft in October 2003).
She also suggested that the prisoners didn’t want to leave Saddam Hussein’s former torture chambers, as it was like home sweet home. If these were international standards, then Guantanamo is a VIP facility, and ethnically selective airport security constituting a VVIP treatment.
This is enough to make your heads spins, but there is more.
President George W. Bush insists Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will remain in his post despite the obvious tortures. He has support.
“At this point in time I do not have any loss of confidence in Secretary Rumsfeld,” Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (AP, May 7).
Warner is from Virginia and has some powerful oversight role over the US army. He will remain in his post as well? He is not alone.
“We need to get all the facts. We need everybody to just take a deep breath and get all the facts,” added Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a senior member of the same panel and himself a former prisoner of war.
The world is holding its breath, and it’s being doing so for some time. It’s getting hypoxic; it’s spinning round and round. I hope to check how McCain described his halcyon POW R&R one day, and whether he was subjected to similar homosexual abuse. Did he get his “facts” right about Iraq as well before that illegal invasion was launched?
Attorney General John Ashcroft “confirms” that there is “ample jurisdiction to move against civilian contractors and others, including laws that forbid torture.” (AP, May 7) The much bigger picture here is whether this is the tip of the sadistic iceberg, whether it is lawful to hire civilian thugs for interrogation, and how the Geneva Conventions regards civilian torturers hired by an invading (US) army. How is that army's government accountable? How long were mercenaries like these used to torture and interrogate prisoners?
Torture-for-profit maniacs play one other important role as well. They can extract financial and economic secrets for the profiteers of a plundering nation. It is trickier to expect a professional soldier to sell out on his/her dead comrades. Soldiers, though, can be used to “soften” things up.
Nothing was helped by Bush’s remarks. Whenever he opens his mouth, or attempts to think, you know where it leads.
Rumsfeld “is a really good secretary of defense. Secretary Rumsfeld has served our nation well. Secretary Rumsfeld has been the secretary during two wars. He's an important part of my Cabinet and he'll stay in my Cabinet," the president said during a Rose Garden appearance with Jordan's King Abdullah II.
Yes, he had served his nation well. There was an equally scandalous photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983, in Baghdad, just far enough from a lethal fumigation exercise being conducted on neighboring Iran's soldiers. He is “good secretary of defense” too, planning a war on Iraq long before 9/11 and lying consistently to an American public.
At Rose Garden, Bush said “I told him (Abdullah) I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families… I told him I was equally sorry that people who have been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America."
No need to apologize, I think. After all, Saddam Hussein was the “guy who tried to kill my dad.” (Sept 27, 2002). Lots of American males will understand this macho lust for revenge, all for daddy. As for the rest, show clips of 9/11, dead husbands, children and women, and they’d believe Saddam was the culprit.
As for the “true nature and heart of America”, surely he is not referring to the Bible belt? How many out there actually thinks that the president may be a little innocent, that he knows nothing beyond American football and baseball? Even heavily spliced shots of personal interviews can’t hide his infantile grasp of anything serious.
I remember watching a rare interview of his with British ITV journalist Sir Trevor McDonald where his prescription for terror was to “love somebody, be a good neighbor; help some kid who just wonders whether the American experience is meant for them, or teach somebody how to read.” His soldiers are sure doing that in Iraq.
Significantly, when Bush “apologized” before the “Arab media”, he chickened out from facing Al Jazeera. One of the two Arab stations involved was the American-funded Al Hurra, which broadcasts into Iraq. The other was the Dubai-based Al- Arabiya. He can't handle real questions.
His presidential opponent’s remarks would spin any mind anywhere.
“It's the way it was handled," Kerry said on a campaign stop in California. “The lack of information to the Congress, the lack of information to the country, not managing it, not dealing with it, recognizing it as an issue.” – Sen John Kerry (AP, May 7)
Is there a nice way to “handle” torture? Is this guy really running for the presidency or merely making an appearance to lose? He seems to have battled his fellow democrat contenders with greater vigor. Another chance lost.
This regime has no credibility whatsoever. Bush is feeling “sorry,” after having raped the truth repeatedly till now, so effectively that many Americans still believe that Saddam was responsible for 9/11.
He might lose his presidency, and there is only one reason for this. Americans may get poorer and more desperate by November. Partial statistics, like the following, will be of no help.
“U.S. employment surged for a second straight month during April, adding another 288,000 to payrolls as jobs were created in nearly every sector at a pace that handily outstripped expectations. In addition to the surprisingly robust job growth, the unemployment rate dipped to 5.6 percent. Wall Street economists had forecast 173,000 new jobs would be created in April and the unemployment rate would be unchanged at 5.7 percent. (Reuters, May 7)
No mention here of the number of jobs lost. Why doesn’t the rate of unemployment change if things look so rosy? Sure, new jobs are being created. When I was in Seattle recently, many cashiers and sales assistants, many of them immigrants at retail outlets like Wal-Mart, didn’t know where certain items were stored. They were too new to the job.
Over at the high end of immigrant labor, many Indian software professionals are leaving, sick of the paranoia they generate and no longer enamored of all things American. When these people take their much-needed expertise with them, they need to be replaced, not by Americans who increasingly can’t afford a quality education. Many poor Americans can join the army for free healthcare, food, accommodation and a future college education until something bad happens.
Something bad has really happened. We have yet to know what it is. It is not easy to get any concession from a man like Rumsfeld. He has offered his “deepest apology,” but warned “it's going to get a good deal more terrible, I'm afraid.”
What exactly is going to get more “terrible”? I am curious. He admitted there were more photos, though he “had not seen the videos, and did not describe them.” Are we in for a nastier jolt?
Rumsfeld says the treatment was “inconsistent with the values of our nation. It was inconsistent with the teachings of the military.” ,
Truth is, it doesn’t apply to this Mesopotamian “real estate.”
"I would not resign simply because people try to make a political issue out of it." He is right. He need not resign, as the people did not elect him, or President Bush, in the first place! Both of them apparently got “blindsided’ by the CBS photos. The flash used was too strong though the International Committee of the Red Cross saw things clearly for more than a year. It warned American officials of prisoner abuse in Iraq more than a year ago and that the mistreatment were “not individual acts.” (AP, May 7).
“There was a pattern and a system,” Pierre Kraehenbuehl, the ICRC's director of operations, said in Geneva. Some of the actions were “tantamount to torture,” he said. The ICRC findings were “discussed at different moments between March and November 2003, either in direct face-to-face conversations or in written interventions,” Kraehenbuehl said. “Some of the earlier discussions were” with the very “Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade overseeing the prison.” (AP, May 7).
Claiming ignorance in the face of a Red Cross allegation is inexcusable. “The Swiss-based ICRC is” after all “designated by the Geneva Conventions on warfare to visit prisoners of war and other people detained by an occupying power to ensure that countries respect obligations under the 1949 accords.” (AP, May 7).
Editorials were not abuzz with this story until CBS broke the belated news. This has been happening for one full year, indicating the enormous power wielded by rogue cliques in the sole superpower.
As a sideshow, it’s de rigueur to find oneself comparing George Bush’s innumerable failings with the War on Terror.
An audio recording attributed to Osama bin Laden predictably surfaced.
He offered, “rewards in gold…for the killing of top US and UN officials in Iraq or of the citizens of any nation fighting there…”
“You know that America promised big rewards for those who kill Mujahedeen (holy warriors),” the speaker said. “We in al-Qaida organization will guarantee, God willing, 10,000 grams of gold to whoever kills the occupier (L. Paul) Bremer, or the American chief commander or his deputy in Iraq.” (AP, May 7)
Every time something serious happens, Bin Laden appears on our media radars, momentarily, to petrify American citizens and remind them there is greater evil lurking. How many people have actually confessed to seeing the terrorist in person, with irrefutable evidence, after Sept 11? Or even slightly before that? This was the guy who was responsible for Sept 11, and who later inadvertently rewarded US soldiers with opportunities for prison-made porn flicks. The question is WHERE, WHERE, WHERE is Bin laden?
This is the million-dollar question Kerry should ask! And he could ask more than 50 of them if he wanted.
“The price on bin Laden's head now stands at $50 million — far more than the nearly $125,000 that 10,000 grams of gold is worth.” (AP, May 7)
If he is what he is, where is Bin Laden getting his money from?
“With gold selling Thursday on London exchanges for $387.60 a troy ounce, 10,000 grams of gold was valued at $124,630, 1,000 grams at $12,463, and 500 grams at $6,231. However, a U.S. joint congressional intelligence panel said in a report two years ago that bin Laden had agreed in 1998 to allocate $9 million in reward money for the assassination of top U.S. intelligence agency officers.” (AP, May 7)
Yeah, this escaped the attention of America’s intelligence agencies, not to mention, more capable allies, when Ramzi Youssef tried to blow up the WTC and US planes during the decade, and later on, when there was a suicide bombing on the USS Cole. The IRS must be a more competent agency in money-tracking.
The money factor is pivotal in this whole drama all right, but in a context yet to be debated.
Here is a Reuters report that shows how desperate things are becoming.
"World oil prices simmered close to 13-year highs on Friday, on the brink of $40 a barrel for U.S. crude and prompting warnings from the United States that higher fuel costs could stunt economic growth. Analysts and traders said a move above $40 looked inevitable….
Last weekend's shootings at a Saudi Arabian chemicals plant and attempts a week earlier to bomb Iraq's Basra oil export terminal have fostered fears of a bigger attack on oil facilities in the Middle East, which pumps about a third of the world's oil."
"People are watching events in the Middle East very closely. The explosive cocktail created by OPEC actions, Saudi oil policy, US managing logistical bottlenecks and US foreign policy are set to keep oil prices on fire this summer," Washington-based PFC Energy said in a research note. (Reuters, May 7)
This indeed may be the real reason behind dredging the depths for fall guys. When the American electorate digs into their pockets in days to come, they will realize that the dwindling coins in their hands will not tally with the mammoth lies shown on TV. That’s when “reality” sinks in. They will be switching to other networks for more cutting news and CBS is a forerunner, having quite literally stolen the show. Frankly, they are a lot better than Fox News or CNN. Advertisers, already feeling the pinch of diminishing consumer demands, will be forced to pit their resources against this President’s electoral war chest. Unless things change, for the better.
Rumsfeld has dismissed that. Things will “get more terrible.” He knew it all along. Violence will be the promise of our immediate future.
Ask yourself this:
What if things get so terrible that a new leader emerges promising peace and security, and proves it through his benevolent strong-arm methods? Someone acceptable, one who can resolve the Middle East’s violence, contradictions and animosity? Almost half our world’s powder kegs would be defused. Correct? We will all be pleased? What do you do when faced with the inevitable, gently stirred on by a master orator? Hear this:
Whatever can still be done, will be done. Your devotion to duty will strengthen our people in their fight for existence. !”*
Enter the Man of Violence! You think anything good can come forth from this system? Ask any sociologist if conditions such as these make it ripe, and the theory plausible, sooner or later. I’d say later…
May 8, 2004, Kuala Lumpur
Copyright@ Mathew Maavak, 2004
* Part of Adolph Hitler’s last words to the partly Jewish Admiral Gunther Lütjens, commander of the German Battleship Bismarck, hours before its imminent sinking on May 27, 1941. Bismarck was the greatest battleship of its day.
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