Truth and Consequences
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Billmon - Whiskey Bar
June 16, 2005
billmon.org
By an unexpected turn of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignificant part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in reconciliation: "No, don't! Don't dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye."
But the proverb goes on to say: "Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago
1973
Sometimes the truth is so damning you have to speak it for its own sake -- not to convince or condemn or even because you think it might right the wrong, but to make it clear you will not consent to a lie by remaining silent.
However, this is not the kind of behavior you normally expect from a politician. Even the good ones -- or rather, the less bad ones -- tend to treat the truth like a scarce commodity, one that has to be strictly rationed in order to avoid running out all together. Evasion, on the other hand, is plentiful, and used as freely as a Hummer burns gasoline.
Which is why I did a double take when I saw what Sen. Durban of Illinois said on the Senate floor yesterday:
When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:
"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."
If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners. (link courtesy of Talk Left)
I don't know much about Dick Durbin -- he's a solid, dependable Democrat, but definitely not one of the Senate's show horses. I also don't recall him playing the role of human rights champion before. So God help me, when I read what he said I immediately began to wonder what kind of political advantage he hoped to gain from such extravagant use of the truth.
(You know you're a cynic when you automatically suspect a politician is telling the truth for dishonest reasons.)
But as far as I can tell, Durbin had absolutely nothing to gain from this, other than the predictable smears from the GOP propaganda machine and the cave dwellers of the Neanderthal right. (Actually, in Limbaugh's case, I think even homo erectus would be ashamed to have to claim such an ape as a distant cousin.)
I have no idea what motivated Durbin to let it all hang out, except perhaps personal moral outrage and a clear understanding of the practical risks raised by the Bush regime's debasement of the American military.
The quote former Vietnam POW Pete Peterson that Durban included in his floor speech said just about everything that needs to be said about the latter:
"From my 6 1/2 years of captivity in Vietnam, I know what life in a foreign prison is like. To a large degree, I credit the Geneva Conventions for my survival . . . This is one reason the United States has led the world in upholding treaties governing the status and care of enemy prisoners: because these standards also protect us . . . We need absolute clarity that America will continue to set the gold standard in the treatment of prisoners in wartime."
As for morality . . . Well, if you can't see the evil in locking prisoners of war -- some of them held by mistake, others only foot soldiers in the Taliban's army -- in 100 plus degree rooms for 24 hours without food or water, until they shit or piss all over themselves -- then you're truly beyond redemption. Once you've reached that point, you can probably justify anything, up to and including murder.
Unfortunately, according to the polls, that category may include a sizable fraction of the American people. I've speculated on the reasons for this before, I won't rehash them here. Maybe it's just human nature to ignore evil when it takes place outside of immediate eye or ear shot. Solzhenitsyn also wrote about this trait, and how the Cheka learned to use it to its advantage:
There's an advantage to night arrests in that neither the people in the neighboring apartment houses nor those on the city streets can see how many have been taken away. Arrests which frighten the closest neighbors are not an event at all to those farther away. It's as if they had not taken place. Along that same asphalt ribbon on which the Black Marias scurry at night, a tribe of youngsters strides by day with banners, flowers and gay, untroubled songs.
Easier still to look the other way when the arrests take place half a world away, the archipelago is entirely offshore and the prisoners aren't driven through the streets in trucks but whisked through the sky by the CIA's own private airline. Add in the facts that those arrested are foreign, non-Christian and non-white -- and that some of them almost certainly are guilty of terrorist atrocities -- and you have the perfect excuse for a nation of Sergeant Schultzes to stick to its "We know nothing" line.
And why not? If the inhabitants of greater Dachau could ignore the smoke billowing from the chimneys of the invisible, unmentionable camp up on the hill, why shouldn't we expect most Americans to ignore what's going on in Guantanamo, or Bagram or Abu Ghraib -- or any of the other islands in the archipelago?
Conservatives, of course, froth at the use of such terms, which is why the propaganda machine immediately zeroed in on Durbin's reference to an extreme nationalist party that flourished in a certain central European country in the 1930s and early 1940s. Just as they popped a vein over Amnesty International's use of a Russian word for forced labor camp.
Strictly on the facts of the case, they are correct: The American archipelago is just a series of flyspecks compared to its Soviet predecessor. At its peak, the Soviet gulags held an estimated 2.5 million prisoners. The number of deaths -- by torture, execution, disease or deliberate starvation -- has to be counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The KGB, meanwhile, set a record for the assembly-line murder of political prisoners that I don't think has been matched since, not even by that wannabe Saddam.
As for the central European extremist leader, well, we all know what he did.
I guess that's enough to satisify most conservatives. (Maybe they should print up some bumper stickers: "America: Still better than Stalin.") But some of us have slightly higher expectations of a modern parliamentary democracy. Quantitatively, the case against moral equivalence may be open and shut, but qualitatively . . . well, it's getting a little more dicey. Compare, for example, the FBI's account of interrogation methods at Guantanamo -- the one cited above by Durbin -- with this scene from the Solzhenitsyn:
In this "kennel" there was neither ventilation nor a window, and the prisoners' body heat and breathing raised the temperature to 40 or 45 degrees Centigrade (104 to 113 degrees Farhenheit) -- and everyone sat there in undershorts . . . They sat like that for weeks at a time, and were given neither fresh air nor water -- except for gruel and tea in the mornings.
Or this passage from Peter Maass's visit to an Iraqi-run, American-advised interrogation center in Samarra:
One of Falah’s captains began beating the detainee. Instead of a quick hit or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of blows. We heard the sound of the captain’s fists and boots on the detainee’s body, and we heard the detainee’s pained grunts as he received his punishment without resistance. It was a dockyard mugging. Bennett turned his back to face away from the violence, joining his soldiers in staring uncomfortably at the ground in silence.
With this anecdote from The Gulag Archipelago:
In the silence we could hear someone in the corridor protesting. They took him from the cell and into a box . . . They left the door of the box open, and they kept beating him a long time. In the suspended silence every blow on his soft and choking mouth could be heard clearly.
And these are just the things we know about. What happens on the remoter flyspecks in the American archipelago (much less the affiliated islands of our Saudi or Egyptian or Pakistani "allies" in the war against terrorism) remains largely a closed book. We know prisoners have died in American custody, some appear to have been brutalized before they died. We don't know how many were murdered. We don't know how many were subjected to outright torture, not just conditions "tantamount" to torture. We're asked by the Pentagon and the CIA to accept it on faith -- blind faith -- that crimes will be investigated and the guilty punished. But we already know that faith has been terribly abused.
On the other hand, we do know that. We have at least partial knowledge of life and death in the archipelago. There are still journalists willing to do stories and news organizations willing to run them -- Guantanamo even made the cover of this week's Time. Politicians gutsy enough to defy the right-wing slime machine can still get up in the Senate and protest. The security services won't drag them (or us) away.
Exaggerating for political effect is a technique at least as old as Jonathan Swift. (And it's not always for effect: When G. Gordon Liddy compared the BATF to the Gestapo, you knew he really meant it.) Still, quantitatively and qualitatively, we're not even in the same universe as Stalin's paranoid empire.
But if Durban had wanted to be completely honest, he would have skipped the rhetorical flourish about the Soviets, the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, and instead pointed out that if we didn't know better, we might think today's horror stories out of Guantanamo and Abu Graib and Baghram were tales told about prisons in El Salvador, Honduras and Argentina thirty years ago -- or South Vietnam, forty years ago.
And if he really wanted to get reckless with the truth, he could have explained the reasons for that resemblance.
But that's probably more truth than even Dick Durban can afford. |
