Media pro-torture campaign
“Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.” –Vice President Richard B. Cheney, May 26, 2007
Lately the notion that America is on the “moral high ground” no matter what it does to its “killer” enemies–who are always doing worse things–is making the rounds through wingnuttia. Glenn Greenwald dissects the phenomenon in a typically smashing post today. Here he studies how reactionary outlets like the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Professor Instapundit have picked up on the theme that weak-kneed liberal media is failing to properly position tales of “discovery” of al-Qaeda torture manuals.
GREENWALD: But now this “Al-Qaeda-does-it-too” song has become a little cause cèlèbre among our brave, pro-torture, right-wing warrior class. This “idea” — that something sinister is going on because the media reported America’s torture so extensively but is giving little coverage to Al Qaeda’s torture manuals — is now spreading rapidly among Bush followers….
Greenwald sarcastically questions the mentality of the “Epic, Existence-Threatening, Unprecedentedly-Dangerous” Islamophobic war where torture supporters are “resorting to the third-grader mentality that ‘Al Qaeda does it, too.’”
So far, the American public largely has been willing to accept “techniques such as hypothermia and waterboarding (for which some Gestapo defendants were convicted and sentenced to death at a 1948 war crimes trial).” It’s a truly disheartening situation. From Cheney on down, America has lost sight of what is supposed to make us different than the Gestapo, or al Qaeda for that matter. Instead, the wingnut justification that because they may not observe the Geneva Conventions, we don’t have to either seems to carry the day.