So, one of the voices of the Establishment has finally found that it’s safe to point out that America tortures, and that torture is a bad thing. Well, at least it makes it harder for us to get the Arab World to like us. And that’s what they Establishment is very concerned about – we’re very likable, why don’t they like us? What did we ever do wrong?
Kristoff, who is considered a good liberal by the Establishment, writes in re Gitmo:
Most Americans, including myself, originally gave President Bush the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the inmates truly were “the worst of the worst.” But evidence has grown that many are simply the unluckiest of the unluckiest.
This firmly placing oneself on the side of popular opinion, when it was popular to have that opinion, in order to excuse oneself from whatever mess one may have on one’s hands is a cheap little Establishment trick. The prison at Gitmo was built in 2002, and already pictures of prisoners, hooded and their ears covered in complete violation of the Geneva Convetion had been easy to view on television. Kristoff had to have seen them. What did he think was going on?
The gap between word and deed, and the disregard for empirical reality, were already a demonstrated fact of the Bush presidency. Thinking citizens who could read and had a bit of curiousit and interest in affairs could see the big lies, and see through them. The tissue lies about Gitmo, terrorism and Iraq were in plain sight. It just wasn’t popular to point this out, it took a bit of courage. And of course, no one in the Establishment has the courage to speak out against that mix of conventional wisdom and received opinion, since they’d be kicked out of their sinecures writing for the newspapers and appearing on news shows.
The worst of the worst? There was a bounty offered for ‘terrorists,’ and no one cashed in on that, grabbing someone in the wrong place at the wrong time? Is the liberal conception of humanity as inherently good that separated from reality? The worst of the worst? When our ally in the GWOT, Pakistan, was allowed to airlift 4,000 Pakistani Taliban out of Afghanistan with the silent okay of the Bush administration? The worst of the worst? I’ve seen the video of the Al-Qaeda supermen training, it didn’t make me shit my pants, but then I’m no Christopher Hitchens.
The Establishment fearful and trusting, looking for daddy to protect them. Then daddy turns out to be crazy, scary and cruel, which was obvious all along but he promised not to do mean things! So now, the Establishment finds its outrage. Face it, America tortures, it tortures people who are completely innocent, and it does so only to be powerful and cruel. Torture has no other purpose than cruelty, and as such is inherently evil.
But the Establishment doesn’t want to know too much about it, and would rather be safe and not feel scared. So a clean-cut man in a suit sits down in front of the Establishment and tells them that although we do a lot of stuff, not pretty stuff, it’s not torture, because we say it isn’t. And the Establishment says okay. Even John McCain, who was tortured, says it’s okay.
The odds that one of those guys o the monkey-bars will come to America and rub out Kristoff are so low as to be non-existent. It doesn’t take much courage to live without being in fear of that. Most Americans walk the streets everyday free of that fear. If only the Establishment could have summoned the slightest bit of courage, we may never have seen America disappear.
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