Where is the Outrage?

By Bill Fisher

Last week, a federal judge ruled that the families of two men who died in detention at Guantanamo couldn’t sue the government because their imprisonment as enemy combatants had been approved by a Combat Review Status Tribunal — a CRST.

The same CRSTs the Supreme Court found “inadequate.”

Following a two-year investigation, the military concluded that the men – the two whose families were the plaintiffs in last week’s court case, plus another — had committed suicide. But recent first-hand accounts by four soldiers stationed at the base at the time of the deaths have raised serious questions about the cause and circumstances of the deaths, including the possibility that the men died as the result of torture.

The deaths of the three men at Guantanamo were the subject of a jaw-dropping article in Harper’s Magazine by Scott Horton, an attorney who has written extensively on US detention policy and practice. Horton wrote, “The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report — a reconstruction of the events — was simply unbelievable.” None of these men had any links to terrorism and two of them had already been cleared for release.

Horton went on to explain that, “According to Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.”

To which Dahlia Lithwick responded in Slate: “The NCIS report failed to question why it took two hours for these suicides to be discovered despite the fact that guards checked on prisoners at 10-minute intervals. Horton, reporting on interviews with four members of the military intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, suggests that the men died at “Camp No” (as in, “No, it doesn’t exist”), an alleged black site at Gitmo, and were then moved to the clinic. A massive cover-up followed. Official stories hastily changed from claims that the three men had stuffed rags down their own throats to the elaborate hanging plot.”

“Rear Adm. Harry Harris, then the commander at Guantanamo, not only declared the deaths “suicides,” but blamed the victims for “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” And every piece of paper belonging to every last prisoner in Camp America was then seized, amounting to some 1,065 pounds of material, much of it privileged attorney-client correspondence.”

“The bodies of the three alleged suicide victims were returned home to their families, who requested independent autopsies, which then revealed “the removal of the structure that would have been the natural focus of the autopsy: the throat.”

If all that sounds believable, I have a lovely bridge to sell you.

But when Scott Horton’s article appeared, in January, there was virtually no coverage by the media. Nor was there much press or TV coverage of the court’s decision last week.

And the media silence was equaled by the White House and the Defense
Department, leaving the public largely in the dark.

Being charitable, maybe that accounts for the deafening public silence that greeted these two events. We should have been outraged when the Defense Department issued its bizarre and totally non-credible report of the three “suicides.” But we weren’t. We were silent.

We should have been outraged when Scott Horton produced four eyewitness whistle-blowers who debunked the DOD’s report. But we weren’t. We were silent.

And we should have been outraged at the federal judge who threw out the survivors’ court case against the government. But we weren’t. We were silent.

Should we blame the media?

Well, yes, in part. These stories should have been page-one or primetime news. But the media was busy with other things. For example, while they weren’t reporting on the military’s Kafkaesque report, or Scott Horton’s expose, or the judge who threw out the case against the government, they were devoting maximum space and time to the Tea Party phenomenon.

That’s because the inchoate and irrational anger of the Tea Baggers produces conflict. And conflict is what the media thrives on. If it bleeds it leads!

But the media is not the only culprit here. We, the electorate, deserve a substantial part of the blame. Because most of us don’t pay serious attention to much of anything that’s going on in the world or in our country. If something piques our fancy, chances are it’s because we’ve seen it on TV.

Which may account for our interest in the Tea Baggers.

The Tea Baggers have surely been on TV. They have virtually monopolized cable news for weeks. This band of bloviators may have no policy prescriptions, not even any rational analysis of what they’re railing against, nor any coherent message beyond anger, but anger is apparently enough — that’s what seems to be resonating with so many Americans. The delicious irony is that most of them are too uninformed to understand that the people they’re railing against are the very people who are trying to help them!

It was fascinating to watch the leaders of the Republican Party going through their ritual gyrations at CPAC – the annual conservative jamboree – last week to woo the support of the Tea Baggers. The party that spent us into historic deficits now attempting to join hands with the newest proponents of fiscal restraint!

But then I learned that the darling of the Tea Baggers, Glenn Beck, was to deliver CPAC’s keynote speech. This is the same crazy-like-a-fox money-machine who said of Obama, “This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture…I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”

The same guy who said, after Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court, “I think she is a racist. I think she decided things based on race. I think she says that a Hispanic woman, with the experience of being a Hispanic woman can make decisions that a white man can’t make. I can’t imagine saying that. That’s like saying Hispanics can’t make money decisions like them Jews.”

As I thought of Glenn Beck keynoting CPAC, my mind wandered back to the days of Bill Buckley. How he would have loathed Glenn Beck! Agree with Buckley or not, he was a man of the mind. One could not but respect – nay, admire – his grasp of history, his no-nonsense rhetoric, his reason and logic. If Buckley were with us today, it’s arguable that the demagogues who are now hijacking the American Conservative movement might never have reached their current pinnacles.

As some wise observer wrote, “Today’s trumpeters of Buckley’s fusionism are angry, loud, and shrill. They’ll betray their positions and their principles to score short-term televised victories. They’re driven by ratings and by vanity. They want to make it to the top by securing notoriety instead of respect. They’ve abandoned meaningful persuasion and have instead opted to fulfill the Postman prophecy that we’ll amuse ourselves to death–and that’s not funny.”

Yet those who now rail against government are too ill-informed and too self-centered to recognize that there are wider issues to be railed against – and confusing suicide and murder is one of them.

So where is the outrage?

It isn’t.

For the moment, I have to console myself with the knowledge that “Movements” like the Tea Baggers are not new in American history. Witness the Know Nothing movement in the mid-19th century. Like the Tea Baggers, the Know Nothings were nativists empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by Irish Catholic immigrants, who were often regarded as hostile to U.S. values and controlled by the Pope in Rome. The Know-Nothings tried to curb immigration and naturalization; like the Tea Baggers they had few prominent leaders. Most ended up joining the Republican Party by the time of the 1860 presidential election. And the “movement” just vanished into the dustbin of history.

(The origin of the term “Know Nothing?” When a member was asked about
its activities, he or she was supposed to reply, “I know nothing.”)

As for CPAC, I like the words of Mickey Edwards, who was a Republican congressman who chaired CPAC for five years as head of the American Conservative movement. He explained why he wasn’t going to CPAC this year:

He wrote, “I’m not at CPAC because I believe in America. I believe in liberty. I believe that governments should be held in check. I believe people matter. I believe in the flag not because of its shape or color but because of the principles it stands for–the principles in the Constitution, the principles repeated and underlined and highlighted and boldfaced and italicized in the Bill of Rights. The George W. whose presidency and precedents I admire was the first president, not the 43d. It is James Madison I admire, not John Yoo. Thomas Paine, not Glenn Beck. Jefferson, not Limbaugh. Ronald Reagan would not have been welcome at today’s CPAC or a tea party rally, but he would not have wanted to be there, either. Neither do I.”

And neither do I.

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SHOW 7 COMMENTS

7 Comments

  1. I think you are making a serious mistake here. There is a difference between the tea party people, and the anger that animates them and the leadership who puts on these events. The anger of these people is real, even if they don’t know exactly where to direct it, or how to articulate it.

    We’ve all heard the watery headed interviewees revealing their dim grasp of reality. But, I wonder if anyone would show you a nuanced critique of the Pentagon, our foreign policy, coupled if you like some skepticism of the 9/11 narrative and doubts about the assertions of climate change. All these are rational. Even the consensus on climate change is far from settled, they don’t have a model that is accurate, hence they don’t know diddly yet. There’s flatly too many variables. Like it or not, there is a conversation to be had.

    But, I go on because expressing doubts about climate change, 9/11, the terrorism narrative are all considered beyond the pale, especially in the Media. There is historical reason to doubt these assessments, or at least our solutions to them.

    We are insular in so many ways. We’ve cordoned ourselves apart based on how we see these issues, “limited gov’t,” the Israel/Palestine Issue, Religion, Race, Defense spending, Habeas Corpus/Torture, Left/Right. It’s all so silly as there is ample middle ground, yet those who discuss this in the media, from political or commercial background tend to discuss issues in a sophistic, misleading manner.

    Where is the outrage? We’ve all been spun too much to have any bearings. Where is the earnest critique? Glenn Greenwald, you guys, Lew Rockwell, CounterPunch, have all been consistent, informative sources. But this caliber of discussion isn’t even available on NPR, NYTimes, MSNBC or CNN.

    We are democracy and sadly, we are dependent upon informed voters. Since we don’t have that, we are at the mercy of our elected representatives. The fact of the matter is that our elected representatives have to forgo $millions$ personally to do the right thing. We’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers.

  2. “Should we blame the media? … Well, yes, in part. These stories should have been page-one or primetime news. But the media was busy with other things.”

    How often I have heard this sentiment repeated. Americans seem to have an unshakable faith in the major media outlets as truth-seeking activist organizations.

    The major media outlets ignore outrage-causing news quite consistently, however. That is, except for a sprinkling of items that can be propped up to disprove this.

    Even this sprinkling, however, is chosen as carefully as the rest of the news. It keeps us entertained mildly enough for corporate sponsors and advertisers to rest easy. They know our attention will never be so far away that we won’t their messages. And therein lies the true news.

  3. Scott — I did NOT say the anger of the Tea Baggers was not real. I believ it is, to them, very real. But that makes it neither coherent nor right.Better they should use their energy to correct some of the real flaws in our society.

  4. Fisher is spot on re Buckley. Let’s face it, Beck is a moron. But it’s not just the Right. The Left today is also adrift. It’s programmatic responses to problems are for the most part stuck in the Sixties. What we are experiencing today is the collapse of the ideological paradigms that defined the politics and economics of the past eighty or so years. Paul Krugman is not a moron, but he’s not a very good economist, despite his Nobel. Barney Frank is very glib, but totally out of his depth on serious issues (witness his fatuity re Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). Bernie Sanders is a moron. The leader of the Democratic Party, our president, is a swell guy that I’d love to shoot some hoops with, but despite being “cerebral” he hasn’t a clue about how to handle the current crisis. He allows Pelosi and Reid to craft major legislation along LBJ-ish lines, a recipe so outmoded that even the voters of Massachusetts rejected it. He projects trillion-dollar deficits into the far future (let’s face it, forever) — an economic impossibility. At the same time he lacks the guts to really confront the big banks. He and his administration are at sea, grasping at expedients to keep from slipping under the waves.

    The American Right gave up any pretense of representing conservatism after 2000, as Bush II ran up record deficits, passed big government initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D, and launched a “Democrat war” in Iraq. And now we have, in place of Buckley and Reagan, Beck and Palin.

    We are witnessing the disintegration of American politics.

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