Continuing from last time and speaking of the value of a free press, has anyone out there reflected on the fact that CBS now plays an essential role in the briefing of the president?
If it weren't for 60 Minutes II, Bush wouldn't have known about the severity or the extent of Abu Ghraib abuses. Bush should publicly thank the 60 Minutes crew and invite them all to dinner at the White House. Bush should use the occasion to ask CBS to advise our military intelligence officers on how you actually learn things. For example they could explain to them that humiliating your sources doesn't work.
Or he could get Bob Woodward. Woodward got Bush and all sorts of administration officials under Bush to open up to him. I'm sure he didn't precede his interrogation of Bush by "softening him up" Pentagon style. He probably did it the way I would do it, by telling Bush what a great guy he is and what a cool president he's been, and "that tie looks absolutely fabulous on you, Sir," and "I'll bet you'll go down in history as the most compassionately conservative president we've ever had."
If I threw up during any of that I could blame it on something I had for lunch.
What we have here is a failure to communicate, on a scale so grand and epic it outdoes Hollywood. One hardly knows where to begin.
How about the fact that the Pentagon directed that some prisoners should receive "softening up" treatment prior to interrogations? Maybe that would be a good start.
So last October, when the Red Cross discovered that Iraqi prisoners were kept naked in dark barren cells for days at a time, and the interrogating officer said that the practice was just "part of the process," he was really describing a process that had been approved by the Pentagon.
Now to be fair where fair isn't deserved, the Pentagon's directive requires that such procedures only be used under orders from the top. But how does the Red Cross know who ordered what they saw? And how does the private who carries out the order in the prison to strip a prisoner know whether the original order came from a general or whether it came from the M. I. officer standing next to him telling him to do it?
The problem is, the description of what the Pentagon allows in the way of "softening up" (bad but not so bad) and the verbal descriptions of what was actually done are too easy to line up. I can easily imagine Rumsfeld, busy as he must be what with protecting the free world and expanding its borders by bombing the unfree world to bring freedom to it, would quickly skim a report of wrongdoing by prison guards at a military prison and not be alarmed.
He could have thought, "Oh, this isn't all that bad. They just got a little carried away doing what we told them to do. Hell, that's why we have a professional army, so we can expect our guys to have initiative."
Likewise it would have been easy to dismiss the Red Cross complaints. A general reviewing the complaints could easily convince him/herself that the Red Cross was misinterpreting the evidence. He/she could think that what they really saw was soldiers carrying out procedures that the Pentagon allows, procedures that would look similar to the abuse that was actually seen.
Meanwhile, Rumsfeld reminds us all that it's abuse, not torture. That is so true, Rummy, and we thank you all from deep in our hearts for pointing that out to us.
Torture is when I threaten to electrocute you if you don't tell me where you hid the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Abuse is when I threaten to electrocute you so you'll tell me an hour from now where you hid the nonexistent weapons. See the difference?
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