Hilarious. First, I read this, which invoked a similar comparison to that I made regarding the Nuremberg Trials and the International Criminal Court.
[quote=“Toronto Star”]When the waterboarding of a Sesame Street character named Gitmo can’t help but make you laugh, it’s clear a 9/11 milestone has been passed.
It’s the same cultural evolution that has allowed Harold and Kumar’s Escape From Guantanamo Bay to shoot to the top of box-office hits. The surprise success of the R-rated stoner flick that features the arrest of two hapless Americans carrying a bong on an airplane – not a bomb. There’s a pot-smoking and insecure U.S. President George W. Bush, sodomizing prison guards and a selection of xenophobic American stereotypes – all of which draw plenty of giggles.
But the growing popularity of post-9/11 satire is about more than laughs.
Political pop culture is also playing an important role in creating the legacy of the Bush administration’s Guantanamo Bay war-crimes trials. And that’s shaping up to be a far different picture than history paints of the World War II Nuremberg trials.
Guantanamo is largely being portrayed as a bad joke – especially on shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report.
[…]
Take for instance Stewart’s waterboarding last month of the supposedly long-forgotten Sesame Street character called “Gitmo,” who looks startlingly like Elmo, the red, fuzzy puppet known for his high-pitched giggle on the children’s TV program.
The Daily Show segment titled “Guantanamo Baywatch” also featured a captured photo of Gitmo made to look like the famous shot of a dishevelled Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks captured in Pakistan in 2003.[/quote]
Now I’m thinking that Bush is a pretty fit guy and could be around for a very long time after he’s out of office. The rate at which his asinine are being repudiated and rendered grist for the tragicomic already provides reason to laugh, but who knows, maybe when he’s in he’s in his dotage, like Pinochet, he’ll find himself in the dock.
The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, one of the country’s handful of truly excellent investigative journalists over the last seven years, has written a new book – “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals” – which reveals several extraordinary (though unsurprising) facts regarding America’s torture regime. According to the New York Times and Washington Post, both of which received an advanced copy, Mayer’s book reports the following:
* "Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners [b]constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes.[/b]"
* "A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that [b]up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake[/b], but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite incarceration."
* "[A] top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees' cases . . .
'There will be no review,' the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. 'The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.'"
* "[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that [b]an even higher percentage of detentions -- up to half -- were in error.[/b] Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda."
* [T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, [b]were 'categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law[/b]".
* "[T]he Red Cross document 'warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.'"[/quote]
I guess we need a Bush love thread. I am reminded of the Randy Newman lyrics.
[quote]I burn down your cities.
How blind you must be.
I take from you your children,
And you say 'how blessed are we."
You all must be crazy
To put your faith in me.[/quote]
Actually it is so widespread amongst all classes and across the partisan divide it needs a new name: either mass hysteria or…reality.
I supposed one could argue one is the only sane man in an insane world, but when that sanity supposedly endorses an executive that claims the right to imprison one without trial and torture you against the laws and customs of the land, well…the rest is relf-evident.
Well, as you are fond of gliby saying, works for some people.
And I’m wondering who has the lowest IQ. The tots watching Sesame Street, the liberal teens/adults from the suburbs watching the idiotic movie, or the readers of the Toronto Star. Seriously though, these critics need a dose of reality to break out from their sheltered lives. Perhaps they should go work on a kibbutz in Israel near the Lebanese border for a year. They might meet some socialists that still have chutzpah/balls, and realize that when your lives are constantly being touched by terrorism, some “massive retaliation” measures are definitely needed.
[quote=“Muzha Man”][quote=“TainanCowboy”]… BDS is BDS.[/quote]Actually it is so widespread amongst all classes and across the partisan divide it needs a new name: either mass hysteria or…reality.[/quote]One of the most skillfully polarizing election cycles I have ever witnessed so far.
Stage managed to perfection. See the link to the Karl Rove article O posted. He comments on the wizardry being displayed in the campaign.
Of course I am not referring to the McCain campaign.
[quote=“Muzha Man”]I supposed one could argue one is the only sane man in an insane world, but when that sanity supposedly endorses an executive that claims the right to imprison one without trial and torture you against the laws and customs of the land, well…the rest is relf-evident. [/quote]I suppose…one could claim to make an argument to support any allegation. Whether its a valid or even logical argument is a separate, but relevant issue.
[quote=“Muzha Man”]Well, as you are fond of gliby saying, works for some people.[/quote]Hmm…don’t remember tossing that one off…may have, strange you would remember it.
You’re not an ignorant person chewie, but you can only believe such a thing in the abstract. All evidence has shown that the torture program of the Bush admin (in addition to being illegal) has produced nothing but dead ends, false leads, and makes prosecution of true terrorists that much harder. Resistance to torture began with the military, with people dedicated to, and experienced in, protecting their country. I’ll take their word that it does’t work and is counter-productive over aging neocons looking to prove how tough they are.
What has happened to conservatives that they now embrace the executive’s right to torture and imprison anyone (including his own countrymen) without oversite and clearly against the laws and customs of the land?
Bush hate thread? I thought the whole internet was about Bush hate.
What’s the point anymore? Nobody likes him. I tried for several years to at least rationalize what he did but he’s managed to wear me out. It’s at the point where he’s better off doing things wrong, because nobody will ever purposely emulate him. It’s at the point that it’s not even funny anymore, it’s just beating a dead horse.
If the head don’t fit…you must…oh wait, no need to bring OJ into this.
Bush Derangement Syndrome
[i]"It has been 25 years since I discovered a psychiatric syndrome (for the record: ``Secondary Mania,‘’ Archives of General Psychiatry, November 1978), and in the interim I haven’t been looking for new ones. But it’s time to don the white coat again. A plague is abroad in the land.
Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency – nay – the very existence of George W. Bush."[/i]…(excerpt of the syndrome explanation)
If the head don’t fit…you must…oh wait, no need to bring OJ into this.
Bush Derangement Syndrome
[i]"It has been 25 years since I discovered a psychiatric syndrome (for the record: ``Secondary Mania,‘’ Archives of General Psychiatry, November 1978), and in the interim I haven’t been looking for new ones. But it’s time to don the white coat again. A plague is abroad in the land.
Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency – nay – the very existence of George W. Bush."[/i]…(excerpt of the syndrome explanation)
Surprisingly good articles no matter what side of the aisle one prefers.[/quote]
Do you you suffer from “ODS” (Obama Derangement Syndrome), TC, or would it be silly and immature to say that just because you criticize Obama and his policies that you “hate” him?
Andrew Sullivan remarked that he grew to despise Bush because of his torture program and not that he blames Bush for torture because he despises him.
It’s one thing to remain partisan when the other side is nitpicking. It’s another to pretend that all criticism in biased when faced with an executive engaging in war crimes. Sometimes you have to cross partisan lines for the sake of decency and morality and that little thing called the truth.
As for Bush, the very fact that he considers torture, spying on US citizens, and imprisonment without charge to be acceptable behavior for Americans does indeed tend to fill me with a sense of outrage.
Whatever happened to real conservatism, in which any policy that restricted freedom was to be opposed (see John W. Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience)? Oh yes, that’s called “liberalism” now.
And I’m wondering who has the lowest IQ. The tots watching Sesame Street, the liberal teens/adults from the suburbs watching the idiotic movie, or the readers of the Toronto Star. Seriously though, these critics need a dose of reality to break out from their sheltered lives. Perhaps they should go work on a kibbutz in Israel near the Lebanese border for a year. They might meet some socialists that still have chutzpah/balls, and realize that when your lives are constantly being touched by terrorism, some “massive retaliation” measures are definitely needed.[/quote]
Does “massive retaliation” from the air against a defenseless civilian population take balls? I’d be more inclined to attribute indiscriminate attacks against civilians in response to the terrorist acts of a few to a heart of stone and shit for brains.
[quote=“spook”]Do you you suffer from “ODS” (Obama Derangement Syndrome), TC, or would it be silly and immature to say that just because you criticize Obama and his policies that you “hate” him?[/quote]Spook -
We all know you’ve been grumpy since your political choice for this election cycle did a runner…but hope, like that bullfrog who trys to fly, springs eternal…
[quote=“Muzha Man”]
You’re not an ignorant person chewie, but you can only believe such a thing in the abstract. has shown that the torture program of the Bush admin (in addition to being illegal) has produced nothing but dead ends, false leads, and makes prosecution of true terrorists that much harder. Resistance to torture began with the military, with people dedicated to, and experienced in, protecting their country. I’ll take their word that it does’t work and is counter-productive over aging neocons looking to prove how tough they are.
What has happened to conservatives that they now embrace the executive’s right to torture and imprison anyone (including his own countrymen) without oversite and clearly against the laws and customs of the land?[/quote]
Restrictions have always been put on civil liberties in a time of war or perceived war. Happened during the Civil War (suspension of Habeas Corpus), World War I (against the Commies in the US), World War II (Against the Japanese Americans), in Canada under Trudeau during the FLQ Crisis (War Measures Act, which saw the arrest of hundreds of people but stopped Quebec seperatism from taking too violent a path) and during the War in Iraq. Personally, I think during any type of war againt a terrorist entity you have to define Habeaus Corpus and torture obligations narrowly. Again, when you are a world superpower engaged in a war against a fundamentalist enemy, you have to play on their level to a certain degree to be able to defeat them. I think most Israeli civilians must feel a lot safer at night knowing that their Mossad/Shin Bet services are doing a good job at what they do. Likewise, for the intelligence agencies in the US. I think they should have the power to use these interrogation techniques if they deem them necessary. And since America hasn’t been attacked in a major terrorist attack since 9-11, I think these methods have proven to be somewhat effective. Let’s give John Yoo a “Profiles in Courage Award.” :bravo: :bravo:
Seriously though, these critics need a dose of reality to break out from their sheltered lives. Perhaps they should go work on a kibbutz in Israel near the Lebanese border for a year. They might meet some socialists that still have chutzpah/balls, and realize that when your lives are constantly being touched by terrorism, some “massive retaliation” measures are definitely needed.
