Truth - Al Franken [112]
On Wednesday, Rush offered to take a more formal role in the developing scandal:
LIMBAUGH: If they need an apologist, I’m going to be their apologist.
By Thursday, Rush had clearly given the issue a lot more thought:
LIMBAUGH: All right, so we’re at war with these people. And they’re in a prison where they’re being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it’s pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation—and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world. And we’re sitting here, “Oh my God, they’re gonna hate us! Oh no! What are they gonna think of us?” I think maybe the other perspective needs to be at least considered. Maybe they’re gonna think we are serious. Maybe they’re gonna think we mean it this time. Maybe they’re gonna think we’re not gonna kowtow to them. Maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured. But boy there was a lot of humiliation of people who are trying to kill us—in ways they hold dear. Sounds pretty effective to me if you look at us in the right context.
Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured. Here, Rush was not just being obscene, he was being, as he so often is, factually incorrect. Two of the photos released from Abu Ghraib were of dead prisoners, one packed in ice and the other badly battered.
Brilliant maneuver. Pretty smart. Pretty thoughtful. Pretty effective. Remember, 22 percent of Americans gets their news from talk radio. And this is what they were hearing.
Also, Rush Limbaugh is broadcast in Iraq. On the American Forces Network operated by the Pentagon.
Why was the Abu Ghraib abuse such a bad idea, other than the fact that it was morally wrong? Let’s take a look at a cultural sensitivity pamphlet made by the U.S. military and given to our troops in Iraq:
Do not shame or humiliate a man in public. Shaming a man will cause him and his family to be anti-Coalition.
Pretty effective.
According to the International Red Cross, our own military intelligence had estimated that “between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.” There’s no justification for torture, but purely from a practical perspective, torturing innocent people is even worse than torturing enemies. And let me explain why. You see, innocent people could be your friends. Until you torture them. After that, they’re very likely to resent you. And not just them, but their families and pals.
That’s one of the reasons that while the Abu Ghraib photos were a shock to Americans, they weren’t so shocking to Iraqis. Word had already gotten around.
But Rush was right on one point. A tremendous amount of thought had gone into the torture at Abu Ghraib, and indeed the whole torture system that our civilian leadership had crafted since 9/11. Lawyers, including Bush’s top attorney Alberto Gonzales, Cheney’s counsel David Addington, and Rumsfeld’s general counsel William Haynes, had pored over anti-torture treaties and U.S. law to find loopholes that would allow interrogators to torture detainees with near impunity. These weren’t rogue lawyers trying to circumvent their bosses’ wishes. Many of the worst practices used at Abu Ghraib had been beta tested at Guantanamo, where a team of operational behavioral psychologists and goons had worked on innovative techniques to break the prisoners.
These practices, so at odds with American tradition going back to the Revolutionary War, ignited a firestorm within the military, law enforcement, and intelligence communities. According to witnesses, whenever Colin Powell tried to question detainee abuse with his colleagues in Bush’s war cabinet, he was subjected to “frat-boy