Category: Politics

Lies to truth: In today’s Miami Herald, Leonard Pitts takes Bushco to task for lying about its lying lies. He draws an eery parallel to George Orwell’s 1949 novel, “1984,” with this quote:

‘The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. `Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ ” — from 1984 by George Orwell

Pitts then lists five different occasions when George W. Bush used the term, “stay the course,” and then Bush’s latest lie from Oct. 22: “Listen, we’ve never been stay the course . . .”

In the world Orwell invented, words had no objective meaning beyond that assigned to them by the Party, whose slogans, not incidentally, were, ”War is Peace,” ”Freedom is Slavery” and ”Ignorance is Strength.” In that world, there was no past — or rather, the past was what the leaders said it was, and it was a waste of time to check for yourself, because all books, newspapers and other records were constantly being updated to reflect whatever the new reality was.

Thus, ‘Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia.’ Much as we now learn that the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq has ‘never been stay the course.’

Thus, ”Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia.” Much as we now learn that the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq has ”never been stay the course.” And never mind that the president and his henchmen have spent three years pounding that phrase like nails into the public consciousness.

”Stay the course” doesn’t work anymore, not with most of the nation united against the war, so the White House announced last week that the phrase would no longer be used. That’s their prerogative. But it’s quite a leap from won’t be used to never has been used.

So did we dream these last three years? Is ”stay the course” just something we mumbled in our collective sleep as we twisted in our collective sheets? Or do we learn something here about the administration’s level of respect for our collective intelligence?

It is not, by now, surprising that the president and his surrogates rewrite the past. We’ve seen that before, after all. Seen it with John Kerry the war hero ”traitor,” with John Murtha the Marine ”coward.” Saw it with WMD, which, it turned out, were not the reason we invaded Iraq. (Where’d we ever get that idea?) What’s painful, though, is that we see it so quietly, see it, as the citizens of 1984 did, with apparent acceptance.

If lying about sex is an impeachable offense, then what is lying about torturing prisoners?

In light of today’s revelations of the particulars of torture techniques used by American interrogators on terror suspects, I conducted a quick search to see how many times President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and their spokesmen have looked at a camera and said, “We do not torture.”

In a half hour, I found 18 instances over the past 18 months or so of senior Bush officials denying what we now know is true: The United States under George Bush does torture people:

[…]

Bush’s Amerika:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Suskind, the Red Cross recently visited all of the prisoners at Guantanamo who had been transferred from secret CIA prisons, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh. Do we know more about these CIA prisons, or “Black Sites” as a result of this visit?

[Ron] Suskind: We know that almost everything from the tool kit was tried: extraordinary techniques that included hot and cold water-boarding and threats of various kinds…

SPIEGEL ONLINE: And what happened to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed?

Suskind: He was really the prize. He is the 9/11 operational planner, a kind of general in the al-Qaida firmament. He was water-boarded, hot and cold, all matter of deprivations, beatings, threats. He told us some things, but frankly things that professional interrogators say could have been gotten otherwise.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: With waterboarding, the prisoner is made to feel as though he is drowing, even if he isn’t really at risk of dying. There are reports that Mohammed was a kind of unoffical record-holder when it came to waterboarding.

Suskind: With extraordinary minutes passing he earned a sort of grudging respect from interrogators. The thing they did with Mohammed is that we had captured his children, a boy and a girl, age 7 and 9. And at the darkest moment we threatened grievous injury to his children if he did not cooperate. His response was quite clear: “That’s fine. You can do what you want to my children, and they will find a better place with Allah.”