Andrew Sullivan - Enter New Names, Copy, Paste, Publish...
Earlier, I wrote about Mr. Sullivan's deceptive comparison between the US govt and the Nazis. Now he's essentially written the same article again, only now he's changed the comparison to Communists.
His standard reply to critics like myself, is that we are somehow trying to excuse US crimes by saying: "but others are worse"!
I can't speak for others, but to apply that to me would be hogwash. I have never excused any wrongdoing the US has done at any time. I am glad, for example, that the idiot soldiers that abused prisoners at Abu Gharayb were prosecuted. I would support prosecuting CIA officers or any other Americans who had used torture, but I would need some real evidence of it, not the "anonymous sources" of the type that the Washington Post or the NYT relies on, just to give a couple of examples of many such articles.
But when I see the 1000th article on waterboarding, while much of the major media have still totally ignored the Al-Qaeda torture house story, then I know something is wrong. Some people try to counter this by saying that everyone already knows Al-Qaeda is evil, while we expect more from the United States. But here is the problem: Not everybody knows that.
I've noticed this in conversations with various groups of people, and the polls back me up on this. In a poll taken a few years ago, 61% of Muslims in various countries did not believe that Arabs conducted the 9/11 attacks, and in the US, a recent poll showed that 40% did not believe it. Forty percent! In another recent poll in Germany, 48% of Germans think the USA is a greater threat to world peace than Iran (with only 31% believing the opposite). These misperceptions have not happened by accident. One reason is that the world often follows the lead of the Western Media, and they have whipped up sensational stories like Abu Gharayb to such a point that they drown out much of the real, brutal torture going on in the rest of the world. How many more people have heard about Abu Gharayb than Evin Prison in Iran? Yet Evin is a thousand times worse, and still open today.
Additional thought: Since this blog is only about a month old, and I have mentioned Mr. Sullivan four times, maybe I am becoming obsessed. What do you think? He is a very easy target. It's not because he writes for a very successful blog. It's because he writes on a very successful blog subjects about which he has no job training or actual experience whatsoever. He has never served in any military, engaged in war, faced terrorists, or visited Iraq. He has never performed an interrogation, or worked with/assisted victims of torture (I have done all these things). Mr. Sullivan is also neither a lawyer or even a US citizen (He was born in the UK, and if he has become a US citizen, it is not mentioned in his bio or on his wiki page).
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7 comments:
I just have one question...
What in the world is "Abu *Gharayb*"?
"Abu Gharayb" is how my unit always spelled the name of the prison from the famous scandal in Iraq. I have seen it also spelled Abu Gharaib, or Abu Ghraib. That last one is how wikipedia prefers to spell it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_Prison
Since the real name of the prison is spelled with Arabic letters, there are often differences with English spellings.
"He has never served in any military, engaged in war, faced terrorists, or visited Iraq. He has never performed an interrogation, or worked with/assisted victims of torture (I have done all these things)."
Hey, I bet you've even tortured a few Iraqis! And how could anyone possibly know whether or not it is OK to slaughter Jews unless they have worked in a concentration camp?
Nope. Although I interrogated dozens on my first tour, it never went beyond questioning. Ever.
And you miss the point. I am not debating whether torture (or slaughtering Jews) is wrong. Mr. Sullivan and I both believe torture is wrong. But his inexperience means that he makes a lot of mistakes with important details of his coverage, and the amount of attention he continues to give to the old Abu Ghraib story is irresponsible.
What makes you think Sullivan is referring to Abu Ghraib? Much, maybe all of what he's referring to stretches well beyond that.
And I honestly can't tell what your disagreement with Sullivan is, since you agree with him that the horrific practices of al Qaeda don't excuse the ones committed by American.
All I can say is I explain my very specific problems in my article. But to summarize: He entirely distorts the type, intensity, and most importantly, the credibility (there is no proof other than anonymous sources) of the "torture" methods the US uses, and makes deliberate efforts to blur the distinctions with the tortures of Nazis, communists, and Al-Qaeda, all of which are well-documented and have solid evidence. This plays right into the hands of our enemies, and Mr. Sullivan loves every minute of it.
I'm familiar enough with Sullivan to think that, in his mind, it goes without saying that "we're better than" the Communists, or al Qaeda, or what have you. He's only speaking of particular tactics our government is using in the "war on terror."
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