Scientists develop technique to induce out-of-body experiences
· Breakthrough could be used in remote surgery
· Virtual reality games may also be improved
But, let not these happier, humanistic visions conjured by the Guardian for this new experimental technology deter us from our main objective, that of giving our very own, beleaguered Pentagon, CIA and [redacted] a new lease on [redacted] for the War on Terrorism.
Since George W. Bush was caught with his pants down on 9/11, the first thought that evidently came to his mind was "how can we torture these bastards". Now, this may not be literally true, but it's quite plausible considering Bush's Ming the Merciless role vis-a-vis the Texas death row inmates, some 131 of them, who perished on his watch. In one case, Bush parroted a condemned woman's pleas to live with derision. [Note the article linked to was written in 25 Oct 2000, and ends with the following prescient paragraph:
"Such confidence in the face of the evidence borders on the deranged. Three decades ago, a president [Johnson] refused to change course, and it cost thousands of American lives. In two weeks, the nation may elect a president [Bush] with a similar hubris. If Bush will not change course on the death penalty, there is no telling what he will not change course on if elected president."
Bush has done little to refute these notions, which were simply based on a common-sense reading of his character. Perhaps it's unfashionable to draw such conclusions (or listen to them), but this modest prediction certainly spades Bush at the roots.]Bush, was caught with his pants down a month earlier, when it was disclosed that on 09 Aug 2001 he essentially tabled a PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing) titled Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S, and then covered up its existence, then its title, then its content until 2004, based on an impaired notion of the public's right to know. But, this PDB was merely one of a many-months-long period of ignoring warnings, the first having been delivered on 24 Jan 2001 by to his terrorism tsar du jour, Richard Clarke.
One gets the impression that this August pants-down moment was largely motivated by the super-cool strategy that the Bush 43rds had to erase the lingering affection over half of the electorate still held for President Clinton, as evidenced by Gore's popular victory in 2000. This strategy was, simply ignore or reverse anything his antecedent had uncovered or stood for, paying attention to absolutely nothing but the baldly political gains to be had from doing so.
Now, given the President's desire to thrash the truth--or life--out of anyone who might pass for a "terrorist" in the eyes of admiring citizens scared to death by the prospect of further attacks, we can justifiably wonder how the Bush administration went about stirring up enthusiasm for these heretofore unsportsmanlike notions. I am not, of course, privy to the "Decider's" decision-making paraphernalia, but I have found an article that seems to show that The New York Times had some part in this. It was published on 05 Nov 2001 and was titled Torture Seeps Into Discussion By News Media, by Jim Rutenberg. [The link points to my saved Times Select copy, so I'm not sure it will be available on-line without a subscription. Happily, library copies of the Times are not subject to this policy of imprisoning information.]
The gist of this article/op-ed piece is that: Wow, all the sudden, everybody in the news media was, at the start of November 2001, discussing the possibility of using torture, very much in the manner described in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, or at least it seemed so to me at the time. Now, even though the mass media often seem to be a craven crowd of copy-cat cowards, it seems just a bit strange that Newsweek, CNN, Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and others, were all consumed with having a "serious debate" about a wholesale abandonment of the rule of law.
Now, you could argue that everybody was talking torture back then and that this justified an article, or even made it imperative to write about, in the interest of informing the readership. Yes, but. The article is little more than a group of sound-bites from people standing on one side or the other of the "torture issue". For instance, the following statement is attributed to Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter ("considered a liberal") and couched in the following way:
''In this autumn of anger,'' he wrote, ''even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to . . . torture.'' He added that he was not necessarily advocating the use of ''cattle prods or rubber hoses'' on men detained in the investigation into the terrorist attacks. Only, ''something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history.''
It is odd, because the whole discussion Alter is having with himself makes no specific reference to any man or men who are not giving information. That is, it seems entirely hypothetic. How is this "news"? In my opinion, it's not news at all. Instead, it, and the rest of the article, is a rhetorical slight-of-hand that describes nothing (no real thing), while at the same time making torture the subject of attention. That is, it is simply an example of "talking up" an idea, which functions to desensitize the reader, making it easier to propose the same or more drastic departures from traditional practice later on.
I believe that this sort of thing is employed all the time by news outlets that are large and respected enough to have a profound effect on the events of the day. It's not exactly propaganda, for no agenda is laid out explicitly and we're not told which "side" of the issue to take. However, bringing up the prospect of "serious doubts" by "respected journalists" about a taboo and illegal activity (torture) without some countervailing and weighty opinion is irresponsible, for the breezy tone seems to diminish the perils of altering the status quo.
This is illustrated later in the article by the following passage:
Mr. Alter said he was surprised that his column did not provoke a significant flood of e-mail messages or letters. And perhaps even more surprising, he said, was that he had been approached by ''people who might be described as being on the left whispering, 'I agree with you.' ''
So here we have the issue settled by an self-selected group of lefties, a kind of Object Lesson that implies that we readers, lefties by dint of reading the Times, shouldn't be embarrassed about our secret support of torture because others have already signed off on it, albeit in a whisper.
Surely, editors at the Times should resist the pressure or temptation to publish such subversive rubbish, and tighten up their journalistic standards when writing about such nebulous subjects. The importance of doing so is clear: The Bush Administration took the lack of a widespread outcry at articles such as these as an implicit go-ahead to pursue the matter to their liking.
Perhaps the country would have been better served by journalists wondering less about why the zeitgeist suddenly swirled around torture, and instead followed the scent back to the source(s) in the White House--and did some old-fashioned reporting to expose the calumnies being perpetrated there in 2001.
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