Blah Blah Blah
President Bush calls Amnesty International’s report on our deliberate, systemic employment of torture, direct or outsourced, against prisoners either in our various bolt holes or the dungeons of cooperative tyrannies “absurd.” Vice-President Cheney avers that he is “offended” by the report. The Washington Post and two million warbloggers think the biggest scandal is that Amnesty used a Bad Word (”gulag”) and therefore, according to a secret codicil to the rules they make up as they go along, they don’t have to pay attention to anything else the report says.
Cry me a river and stock it with trout already. President Bush complains that Amnesty talked to detainees, “who hated America and were trained to lie.” Unlike President Bush, who comes by the skill naturally. In talking to detainees, Amnesty simply did what it has done everywhere else on the earth where it has investigated official mistreatment of prisoners, which is everywhere else on earth. (One of the annoying memes squirming throughout the Apologist Right is that Amnesty has somehow singled out the US and ignored a whole bunch of countries on which, in fact, it has published regular reports. Cuba: 130 search results on their website. Iran: 288 results. Your ignorance, jingos, is not their flaw.) It talked to prisoners, the ones it could talk to anyway. This method was good enough for the Bush Administration to cite Amnesty’s work five times in a single pre-invasion white paper on Iraqi human rights violations. One passage is particularly rich:
In August 2001 Amnesty International released a report entitled Iraq — Systematic Torture of Political Prisoners, which detailed the systematic and routine use of torture against suspected political opponents and, occasionally, other prisoners.
At this point, the apologists start talking about woodchippers. At that point, I start to suspect that what they mean is not, Saddam was worse because he threw his prisoners into woodchippers (maybe) , but rather Throwing people into woodchippers is bad because we haven’t done it. Should that change, so will their tune.
Trackback by 100 monkeys typing. —
May 31, 2005 @ 10:18 pm
Highlights magazine reviews blogworld reaction to the Amnesty International report
Goofus. Gallant….
Comment by marklatham —
June 1, 2005 @ 5:42 am
The woodchipper was a lie-but it was certainly a very good story.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
June 1, 2005 @ 7:32 am
In the runup to the war, the jingoes accused Saddam of doing everything that we subsequently did. Let’s go down the list — torture of prisoners, check, hostage taking of family members, check, rape rooms, check, use of chemical weapons on civilians, check. Clearly we must have already set up our own woodchippers to dispose of the bodies of those prisoners that disappear inside our new Gulag.
Comment by Hesiod —
June 1, 2005 @ 3:08 pm
Look. We aren’t as bad, qualitatively or quantitatively as Saddam. But, hardly anybody is. Kim Jong Il being a distinct exception.
The warfloggers’ favorite game is to invoke the old “but Saddam was worse” argument, as though so long as the United States is just a smidgeon LESS a hideous abuser of human rights, then it’s all OK.
one should ask these clowns how much torture, prisnoer abuse, civil liberties depredations and other affronts to freedom they will regard as “too much already.”
Get them to commit ahead of time, so that we can enlist them in our anti-Fascist league when the appropriate time comes.
Unless, of course, they move the goalposts yet again.
I’d also like to ask what progress is being made with all thsoie pseudo-libertarians who for some crazy-ass reason support this war.
I mean, at some point, don’t they have to turn in their offical Rand/Hayek (and I don’t mean Selma) Fan club membership cards?
Comment by Avram —
June 2, 2005 @ 12:22 pm
Wow, there’s an uphill movie pitch: “Salma Hayek’s Road to Serfdom”, with Hope and Crosby digitally inserted.
Pingback by Omar’s Blog - Bush says Amnesty report ‘absurd’ —
June 5, 2005 @ 3:39 am
[...] ‘absurd’ – i really don’t like him. More on Bush being a plonker/divvy here; apparently Amnesty’s reports acceptable when they are on other countries&# [...]