Truth - Al Franken [111]
There were some exceptions to what seemed to be a line in the sand. Among those who live in tyranny and hopelessness with whom we have been somewhat reluctant to stand are those who live in countries that have been kind enough to grant basing rights to our military.
On my first USO tour to Iraq and Afghanistan, our group flew to southern Uzbekistan to entertain the troops at an airbase that served as a staging ground for combat operations in Afghanistan. There, I fell into conversation with two scruffy PSYOPS guys (Psychological Operations—you know, unconventional warfare, demoralizing the enemy, winning the hearts and minds). It was my experience at every base I visited that the PSYOPS guys were the chattiest. So I asked one of them, “What do you think of the Uzbek regime?”
“They’re great!” he said enthusiastically. “They’re incredibly cooperative. They’ll do whatever we ask.”
“Really?” I said. “Because I heard that they were the most repressive of all the former Soviet Republics.”
He understood instantly. “Oh, yeah—they’re horrible! They boil people.”
I happened to tell this story on my radio show, but got it slightly wrong. I recalled that the PSYOPS guy had said the Uzbek regime boils people in oil. That sounded fishy to my cohost, Katherine Lanpher, who is always eager to take me down a peg. She Googled “Uzbekistan,” “boil,” and “oil,” and found nothing about torture in that country. She did, however, find what sounded like a delicious recipe for one of my favorite dishes, rice pilaf.
Other than injustice, nothing makes me madder than when I make a factual error on my show and I am unable to immediately blame it on someone else. But I was reluctant to cede my point, which, by the way, is that our ally Uzbekistan is not even a model dictatorship, let alone a model democracy. Perhaps I had gotten it wrong. Perhaps they boil their prisoners in some sort of bouillon. I asked Katherine to remove “oil” from the search.
“Oh,” said Katherine, “here it is. Yup. They boil people.”
In 2002, the Bush administration gave Uzbekistan $500 million for the use of the airbase I visited. In the interest of fairness, I should point out that not all of that went for torture. Only $79 million was given to the police and intelligence service, which, according to the State Department, uses “torture as a routine investigation technique.” An intelligence official estimated that from early 2002 to late 2003, the Bush administration “rendered” dozens of terrorist suspects to Uzbekistan. President Bush has even received the country’s psycho president Islam Karimov in the White House, where they signed a declaration agreeing to “strengthen the material and technical base of [their] law enforcement agencies.” In other words, bigger, better man-boiling pots.
Torture has been something of a sore point in the War on Terror.
When the photos of the abuse at Abu Ghraib first surfaced on Saturday, May 1, 2004, most people around the world were appalled. Not Rush Limbaugh. Over the course of the next week, Limbaugh would come down squarely on the pro-torture side. On Monday, May 3:
LIMBAUGH: I thought, as I’ve said, it looked like anything you could see at a Madonna or Britney Spears concert.
I’ve never been to either, and if this is true, I’m staying away. The idea of listening to Madonna or Britney sing while dogs attack naked men—well, it’s just not my idea of a fun evening out.
The next day, Rush drew a different parallel:
LIMBAUGH: This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it, and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we’re going to really hammer ’em because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day—I’m talking about the people having a good time. You ever hear of emotional release? You ever hear of “need to blow some steam off”?
By then we had learned from the Taguba Report, an internal military