Led by none other than Karl Rove, the Republican spin machine has taken it to a whole other level with the assault on Dick Durbin. For those not familiar with this latest imbroglio, in the course of a long speech on the floor of the US Senate, Senator Durbin (Illinois) quoted a, by now, quite familiar passage from an FBI agent’s report about things witnessed at Guantanamo ( . . . . prisoners left naked, chained to the floor, exposed to severe extremes of temperature, lying in their own excrement . . .). Durbin then went on to make a quite unexceptionable observation that hearing such things, without being made aware of the source, would leave one believing one had heard something done by the Nazis, or in Stalin’s gulag, or in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, not something done by Americans to prisoner’s under their control. (Would anyone, and certainly any American, contend they would believe Americans capable of such acts, and the Nazis/Stalin/Pol Pot et al would not be capable of them?) Setting aside the profoundly discomforting reality that such acts, have been perpetrated against prisoners under American control after 9/11, the vast Right Wing spin machine turned on Durbin as if he had done nothing less than make a complete and absolute identification between America and Nazi Germany. The claim was breathlessly and insistently put forward, not only to berate Durbin, but, I strongly suspect, to draw attention away from Bush and Co.’s recent difficulties with Iraq – explicitly including the Downing Street Memo. It was all followed up with an “appropriately” indignant demand that Durbin apologize for making so heinous an identification. The game extended to “outrage” over the danger at which the identification(!) had placed our soldiers in the field. The suggestion of a congruence between the Nazis and Americans had of course been made not at all by Durbin, but was an exclusive conjuring of the spin machine. So great a firestorm did they whip up, and so genuinely affected were so many Americans at “the identification”, that Durbin tearfully apologized before the US Senate for giving an “impression” he had clearly in no way intended. It was, of course, an “impression” they had suggested and successfully saddled him with. It was all capped by Rove in a rare public appearance in NYC with some finely tuned lines: What Durbin SHOULD have done, with particular reference to our troops in the field, was to quote me: merest hint of these things should have caused the American government to react like it had been hit with a hot poker. The capacity of such matters to undermine everything we stand for as a nation, everything we are attempting to achieve in that area of the world, and to paint bulls-eyes on the backs of our serving men and women is so clearly apparent, that anything other than the most vigorous response is unconscionable. Yet, as the questions raised by the IRC began to emerge, all the administration could do was retreat into process. What it should have done, at that first glimmer of trouble, was to have gone before the American people and the world with a statement like the following: “Disturbing rumors have come to our attention that there have been violations of important agreements relating to the handling of prisoners. While we are investigating, and have no desire to institute kangaroo court proceedings against anyone, we want it understood that the American government and this administration unequivocally condemns any and all such violations in the most emphatic terms. Anyone participating in such actions as have been alleged, and anyone found to have been complicit, will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We understand the damage this could do to American interests in the Middle East and around the world, and the risks it presents to our serving men and women in the field, to be a National Security matter of the greatest importance. For those reasons, we urge anyone with any relevant knowledge to come forward with their evidence. It will be considered by this government and this administration to be an act of the highest patriotism, one urgently required by the safety and well-being of our troops in the field. Such behaviors as have been alleged are all too likely to render American serving men and women targets for acts of revenge and madness." Statements like as that by the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the Attorney General in the highest profile arenas, and repeated all along the chain of command were an absolute requirement for a responsible government. And what we got instead was process. Even as the first fruits of that process, the report of General Anthony M. Tuguba, began to circulate in official circles in January and February of 2004, there was no reaction by the administration. No reaction, despite the fact that Tuguba explicitly validated the rumors, and stated that the evidence supported a contention that the abuses were “systemic”. The inference is that what happened was not simply the result of a “few bad apples”, but of laxity and confusion all along the chain of command: laxity and confusion, sown from the top, and lethal to American interests, and the lives of our men and women in the field. All the subsequent investigatory evidence that has come to light validates Tuguba’s initial proposal that the failure was indeed “systemic”. [It is exactly what Colin Powell had feared when he wrote a memo opposing the administration’s proposal to back away from our historic commitment to strict adherence to the Geneva Accords.] Only when the photographs began to appear (Sy Hersh published a couple of them in the New Yorker with his initial article on Abu Ghraib), did the administration begin to address the question openly. Then it retreated right back into “process”. A Washington Post editorial pointed out, as the subsequent “process” began to detail “systemic” problems, the administration continued to try to sweep it all under the rug. And thus far, even through a Presidential election campaign, it has managed to be successful. The failure was nearly irredeemable after we failed to react immediately as proposed above, but such a reaction at any time could be presumed to allay at least some of the animosity directed at our troops, and perhaps some of the furies to which they have fallen prey. Process alone will not do, nor will sweeping the matter under rug, effectively punishing only the poor grunts down where the rubber met the road. Such statements as the administration has made have been few and far between, and of little impact. Combine that with no substantive deeds respecting laxity and confusion in the chain of command, now definitively documented, and you define failure, both practical and moral, beyond toleration.”> This business with Durbin is arguably the second installment of a new Conservative campaign - the first targeted the Newsweek/Koran episode. The all too obvious incitement “misbehaviors” in the treatment of Muslim prisoners and detainees, now widely documented, offers for violence against American personnel was studiously ignored by Conservatives ever since those first horrific Abu Ghraib photographs appeared. The main stream media proved all too complicit. Seeing now, at long last, an opportunity to pin a threat to our men and women in the field on Liberals and Lefty Media, Conservatives pounced. It is beyond cynicism. It is disgrace. [P.S. This is the third time I have posted the quoted material above on OpenDemocracy. I make no apologies, all things considered, since it has elicited no riposte from the administration’s apologists here in the past – at least beyond some trivial spluttering. Possibly they did not wish to draw attention to it, having nothing they can say.] Message was edited by: ronr327