Letters to the Editor
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Kovie
"I think that you need to read up on some American history, because I don't know where you get the idea that the US has, until recently been a paragon of virtue and human rights."
You are, of course, correct. I didn't mean to convey that I thought the US has been a paragon of virtue and human rights. I do feel that I grew up in a halcyon world, calm and peaceful, where people treated each other kindly, were polite and helpful. That camaraderie, in my opinion, has disappeared. Whenever I go out now, I wonder who is going to break in line in front of me, cut me off in my car and give me the finger, tailgate me because I am only going 20 miles an hour over the speed limit and on and on. Whatever I do, I anticipate a confrontation.
In 1956 I was in the Navy, a Korean war veteran, and my ship was in Gitmo for exercises, Castro was in the hills. We visited Havana and Santiago and I never saw a country more ready for a revolution. There were the very wealthy Battista-ites and the extremely poor. Battista was a puppet of the CIA. I still haven't figured out what Castro did that was so wrong except screw with the CIA.
In the '70s I lived in Tehran and the Shah's government was a client of the firm. The late 70s were no picnic. I lived for many years in the Middle East. It was easy good living after Tehran.
I lived last year in New Mexico near Las Cruces and studied the history of the Apache. After their fights they went to the same mineral baths that I went to. They were obliterated by the US. I never realized that Kit Carson and Fremont were so terrible. Back then, the US built forts in the southwest, in the same manner as we are doing in Iraq today.
After I retired, I lived in Costa Rica for 6 years and explored the Central American countries. To read the American press about the Contras, et al they are mean and cruel and blood-thirsty. Nothing could be further from the truth. I visited a village named San Diego, on Lake Atitlin in Guatemala. The Government army, under the direction of the CIA, came down on the village to persecute the poor Mayan Indians, who had no idea what was going on. They killed 10,000 of the clueless Mayans, trying to find the Che Guevera type guerrillas in the mountains. To this day, no one knows that there were any guerrillas in the mountains. The are memorials and crude statutes where the slaughter of the innocents took place.
What a legacy for the CIA. And we truly know very little about what the CIA does.
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Baldie McEagle
And even that won't lead to a restoration. I don't see the Constitution being restructured to be more modern/European, however obvious the advantages, without a civil war or occupation. Think the Marshall Plan in reverse.
Could it be that Iraq, Vietnam, Panama, etc (not including WW1 and WW2) are being used to forestall any type of internal civil war? The changes that happened to our government, are they worthy of a civil war? If so, do you think the external wars take the wind out of the local war/are a distraction? Do these "mini"-wars have connections to political change that may have caused people to stir up against the government if it would not have been for these wars?
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The only thing
that would cause mass action among mainstream Democrats in office, and probably such intense public outcry that even the Bush administration would be called to task, is if they started using these "extreme interrogation techniques" on white people. So far they have only (to my knowledge) tortured and disappeared brown Muslim people--in other words, expendable types whose lives are all but worthless. If they ever slipped up and it became common knowledge that they had water-boarded some blond, though, all Hell would break loose. Obviously Cheney, Bush & co. are much too savvy to let something like this occur, so we can pretty much count on them continuing to torture, mutilate and murder dozens of insignificant brown "insurgents" without the Dems lifting anything more than the feeblest finger in protest.
This is just the way it has been in the United States for decades. I know it's frowned upon to point out that, actually, things like extreme state brutality, etc. were not only not unheard of but actually fall-back tools of our great nation (both at home and in our foreign exploits), but come on, non-white people in the U.S. and around the world have known this for ages! What sets this administration's actions apart, in my opinion, is not their desire to use extreme violence and brutality to achieve their ends, but the fact that they have effectively codified it into law, and been helped along by the opposition party and mainstream media in all their endeavors.
My other thought is that, while the Democrats' inaction (and seeming inability to act in any meaningful way) is indeed utterly contemptible and baffling, it's the media's complicity in the Bush admin's designs on world domination and ultimate executive power that's really the most frightening thing about this entire debacle. I recommend Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason" to practically everybody, but if you still haven't read it, the first few chapters have some really great and important commentary on the role of media in our political discourse. The fact that our press has become dominated by television news, which is in turn completely owned and controlled by corporate interests, which are in turn almost exclusively beholden to the most conservative Republican ideologies, not only feeds into the supremity of the neo-conservative movement in dictating our laws, but (in my opinion) has been more detrimental to any attempt to rectify the Bush admin's excesses than simple Dem uselessness has been. I guess this isn't shocking or new to most people in the blogosphere... but it's important to remember and constantly try to change, anyway, I think.
As always, great post, Mr Greenwald!