"Here’s a clip of Rep. Pete Hoekstra [R-MI] at the presser this morning explaining to a particularly thick reporter why the threat posed by al Qaeda detainees is different, and far more serious, that that posed by German prisoners of war. As Hoekstra explains, the Germans didn’t kill three thousand American civilians as they went to work."Conor deadpans:
I’ve never found myself arguing that Nazis were actually pretty harmless, let alone trying to prove my point by asserting that unlike the Nazis, really bad guys kill at least 3,000 innocent civilians. If I ever do, I’ll consider it a red flag signalling that perhaps my argument is absurd.How long 'til the pro-torture right earns a world record in flying leaps over the proverbial shark? Or do they have it already?
To the right's preposterous outrage over moving Guantanamo Bay prisoners to U.S. prisons, hilzoy's response video is well done.
Addendum: Metavirus comments...
the thing i find particularly abhorrent about GOP's current talking point du jour about guantanamo detainees somehow being super villains is, well, they're painting them as super villains! think about how that raises their stature around the world, especially in the yes of an adoring radical islamic population. if we simply treated them as nasty, antisocial thugs, that we catch, prosecute and then lock away to a life of nothingess in a supermax prison somewhere, they suddenly become all the less dramatic and look more and more like simple misguided murderers. we elevate these people to an exalted pedestal of evil at our perilYes, I think an essential part of defeating terrorism is to, uhm, not be ridiculously terrified and treat them like common criminals. Terrorist want us to overreact and do stupid things like invade an 'axis of evil'.
The right, however, would have us believe that they are exceptionally dangerous and we should spend vast amount of resources and abandon humane principles to combat something less dangerous than, say, driving your car to work in the morning. You're more likely to die in a car accident than from terrorism--yet the right despairs about national security.
Insane nationalist machismo is what it is--a lesser version of same kind of nuttery that prompts Islamists to kill innocents with the goal of restoring their caliphate. One difference is that here in the West it gets exploited for reasons that are more political than religious.
If you haven't read Stephen Walt's post on threat-mongering yet, you really should.
the thing i find particularly abhorrent about GOP's current talking point du jour about guantanamo detainees somehow being super villains is, well, they're painting them as super villains! think about how that raises their stature around the world, especially in the yes of an adoring radical islamic population. if we simply treated them as nasty, antisocial thugs, that we catch, prosecute and then lock away to a life of nothingess in a supermax prison somewhere, they suddenly become all the less dramatic and look more and more like simple misguided murderers. we elevate these people to an exalted pedestal of evil at our peril
ReplyDelete#later: right on, my friend. the rightwing's incessant "BE AFRAID", "WE'RE AT WAR", "YELLOW, no... DARK ORANGE THREAT LEVEL!", and "TERRORISTS WANT TO KILL YOUR BABIES" always reminds me of 1984. Are we at war with Asia or Eurasia...?
ReplyDeleteRuthless middle east dictatorships learned long ago that the way to keep yourself in power is to externalize all the fear and anger of the polity against some evil external threat.