This week we officially learned what we already knew: Bush and his posse authorized torture of terrorist suspects.
Last Friday, Bush told ABC News, "I'm aware our national security team met on this issue, and I approved." The following people signed off on the torture and, henceforth, can't pretend otherwise in an effort to airbrush their memoirs: Powell, Rice, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Tenet and Cheney.
These people conspired to approve behavior that constitutes a war crime under international law.
Sadly, this surprised no one. Americans, in fact, seemed to collectively shrug. Either we're inured to it or we no longer care what has become of our country.
Something about this episode was reminiscent of Arthur Koestler's reportage for the New York Times' Sunday magazine in January, 1944. Back then, Koestler was distraught over recent polls that showed nine out of 10 Americans believed Nazi atrocity stories were propaganda. "They don't believe in concentration camps, they don't believe in starved children of Greece, the shot hostages of France…"
To disabuse his adopted country's somnolence, Koestler wrote "On Disbelieving Atrocities" for the Times, clearly chronicling the already well-documented deaths of 3 million Jews (to that point), the Nazi concentration camps, forced labor of captured non-Jewish civilians, gas chambers, firing squads and death trains. Up until then, perhaps—though this is highly doubtful—most Americans could pretend such things were propaganda, intended to generate group hostility toward an enemy during wartime.
Koestler's was not the first account of extermination camps in the U.S. media. On Nov. 24, 1942 the Allied Command released details to the press about these camps, even providing names and locations of Belzic, Sobibor and Treblinka. The next day, the Washington Post buried the story on page 6; its front page contained a story about local traffic fatalities. The AP sent out two briefs on the deaths of two million European Jews.
The news, in other words, was out there.
Koestler, in his Times report (later included in The Yogi and the Commissar), divided the world into the "screamers" and the "dreamers." For 10 years, he had been among the screamers, detailing Nazi atrocities, and had himself been a victim of Nazi torture. He learned that those not directly touched were protected by an ability to "walk past laughing and chatting."
Atrocity propaganda, he concluded, was not nearly as effective as propaganda produced by dictators playing on nationalistic or ethnic prejudices.
"Clearly," he wrote, "we [screamers] must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal."
He then knocked this theory down: "Perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided; and those murdered within sight of your daydreaming eyes would still be alive."
If this could happen with all the events before and during World War II, then it is little wonder it has happened under George W. Bush, Mission Accomplished and Shock and Awe.
Indeed, never has this nation been taken to war under such flimsy pretexts, never have the people so timidly gone along, and never has the press been less skeptical and more eager to bang the war drums.
Now we are stuck in this atrocity with no end in sight and no one who wants to come to our aid.
Do we scream or walk past laughing and chatting?
What do you think?
