The empire strikes back

The Christian Science Monitor for Monday says that

[t]he Bush administration appears to have opened a whole new front in its war on terror: a forceful, full-scale defense of the morality of its detention-camp policies.

First came harsh criticism of Newsweek magazine for its since-retracted charge of Koran abuse at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. More recently top officials have pushed back - hard - against Amnesty International's use of "gulag" to describe Guantánamo's conditions.

A week ago, when "The Big" Dick Cheney said of Amnesty International's criticism of Gitmo, "I don't take them seriously," I suggested this is exactly what the White House was up to:

[G]oing out of your way supposedly to dismiss something ... is actually to admit to its importance. Despite [Cheney's] attempt at an attitude of flip unconcern, it seems obvious that Amnesty's "scathing" criticism of the US has hit a nerve and the administration has given thought to how it will try to recover.

Thus, CSM rightly refers to "the intensity and coordination of administration remarks." This is a planned campaign, right down to the attempts to minimize the new revelations (something else I noted) by blaming the press for covering a few "isolated incidents." But the article is profoundly wrong to the extent it implies that the White House is trying to repair or even maintain the image of the US. This is about undermining and if possible discrediting opposition. For example, after noting that last week, Amnesty International called Guantánamo "the gulag of our times," CSM says

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took turns bashing this characterization. Clearly, the administration as a whole had decided that the comparison of US practices with those of the totalitarian Soviet Union was something it could not allow to pass unchallenged.

There was the gulag quote. But report also accused the US of "war crimes," of torture, of a "blatant disregard for international human rights and humanitarian law" that made "a mockery" of claims the US is a defender of human rights. Yet White House officials have fallen largely silent about those charges, focusing instead on the single world "gulag."

Why? Simple. Not because this is the central charge, not because they're particularly sensitive about a comparison to the Soviets (although, I admit, for the neocons among them the comparison could be stinging) - but because they decided this was a weak spot in AI's case, a bit of hyperbole that provided them with a point of attack. It's the classic right-wing tactic: Pluck a single phrase, even a single word, out of context and attack it as if you are thereby attacking the entire argument and as if by forcing a retreat on that sometimes exceedingly narrow point you have refuted the entire concept. It's a political variation on the lawyer's game of "false in one, false in all." Just consider a few recent unconnected examples:

- Dan Rather and CBS were denounced and defamed in the wake of the Bush-AWOL story. The method was to attack the documents, which seemingly were faked, to distract attention from their content, which was accurate - followed by claiming that because the documents were invalid, that proved that Bush was not AWOL. Of course that's nonsense; the most that could be rationally claimed is that CBS hadn't proved that he was AWOL, but irrationality is no bar for these people.

- Ward Churchill was condemned, verbally attacked, and threatened across two states because of an angry essay he wrote in reaction to 9/11. It's fair to estimate that 99% of the vituperation was directed at one two-word phrase - "little Eichmanns" - that occurs precisely once in the 5600-word essay and which could have been removed without affecting the argument one jot, but the attack on which was used to discredit the entire piece.

- Newsweek's story about a Qur'an being flushed down a toilet centered on the information that the military was about to admit to at least one case in an upcoming report. When the magazine retracted the story because the source said he couldn't be sure if the information he'd seen about such an incident had been in that report, the White House insisted - with a good deal of media acquiescence - that the retraction discredited the very idea that such a thing ever happened.

In each case, arguing a single point is used as a substitute for arguing the underlying concept. It's an effective, if dishonest, tactic, and therefore appealing to the reactionaries on two grounds. Going after AI over the word "gulag" is just another example.

Amnesty, for its part, has stepped back some from the word, Reuters reports. Such a climbdown is usually a serious tactical mistake; the right generally deals with such matters with a stubborn refusal to admit even the possibility of error combined with attacks on the credibility of their opponents. Still, if you're going to do it at all, sooner is better than later - and AI, in the person of the executive director of Amnesty International USA, didn't go so far as to retract the word:

Asked about the comparison, [William] Schulz said, "Clearly this is not an exact or a literal analogy."

"... But there are some similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared ... And in some cases, at least, we know that they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed."

The problem with his answer is that the lead on the story was, of course, that AI

doesn't "know for sure" that the military is running a "gulag,"

with his description of "similarities" buried some paragraphs down. Had it been me, I would have said "Yes, it's a gulag!" picked up from "the United States is maintaining" and then ended with

"Is it as big, as deadly, as the old Soviet system? Of course not. But gulags are not defined by their size but by their secrecy, their violations of international law, their denial of human rights. And I'm really astonished by the argument: Is the White House saying, are you saying, that Stalin's Soviet Union is our moral standard? That as long as we're not as bad as Stalin we're okay? That's an incredibly twisted way of thinking."

But, just like irrationality, that presents no problem for the WHS* and their minions.

Footnote, Another Question That Won't Be Asked Div.: The CSM quotes DefSec Rumpled as saying "I can't imagine anyone who has any understanding of what a gulag is ... using that."

Mister Secretary, are you saying that Amnesty International has no understanding of what a gulag is?

*WHS = White House Sociopaths