- "There is an odor to any press headquarters that
is unmistakable...the unavoidable smell of flesh burning quietly and slowly
in the service of a machine." -Norman Mailer
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- I keep telling myself to stop wasting time critiquing
Thomas L. Friedman. No one can possibly top the self-inflicted damage he
does merely by putting his laughable words on the New York Times op-ed
page. But then he goes and outdoes himself...and here I am, furiously typing
up an article.
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- In a March 28, 2004 op-ed entitled, "Awaking to
a Dream," Tommy Boy confesses that he "didn't listen to one second
of the 9/11 hearings and I didn't read one story in the paper about them.
Not one second. Not one story." He felt the need to make this public
because, as he reminds us: "I am the foreign affairs columnist for
The New York Times" (that's enough sin for any single confession,
but hey).
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- Tommy Boy explains his motivation for ignoring the hearings.
It's not indifference, mind you, but instead: "It's because I made
up my mind about that event a long time ago: It was not a failure of intelligence,
it was a failure of imagination. We could have had perfect intelligence
on all the key pieces of 9/11, but the fact is we lacked - for the very
best of reasons - people with evil enough imaginations to put those pieces
together." He goes on to declare that the "only people with imagination
in the world right now are the bad guys." Or as Middle East analyst
Stephen P. Cohen told Tommy Boy: "That is the characteristic of our
time - all the imagination is in the hands of the evildoers."
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- Let's not dwell on Cohen's acceptance of Bush's word.
(It's like all Fox News outlets adopting the term "homicide bomber"
because Dubya asked.) Rather let's consider the proposition that "we"
lack "people with evil enough imaginations."
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- Let's also forget the word "evil" (a term best
left to the realm of religion) for now and instead take a quick peek at
how America stacks up on the sinner's scoreboard.
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- Mr. Friedman, can you imagine a man who trained the Brazilian
police force in the 1960s whose techniques involved placing the end of
a reed in the anus of a naked man hanging suspended? The other end of the
reed is soaked in oil and lit. Imagine that, Tommy. In Uruguay, the same
American man taught techniques like electric shocks to the genitals, electric
needles under the fingernails, and use of "a wire so thin that it
could be fitted into the mouth between the teeth and by pressing against
the gum increase the electrical charge." Now imagine those tactics
were honed in the American's own soundproof basement room where, on one
particular occasion, four street beggars were used to demonstrate the effects
of different voltages on different parts of the body. All four men died.
That man, Tommy Boy, was Dan Mitrione, head of Orwellian-named US Office
of Public Safety. He wasn't the exception...not by a long shot. He was
the rule.
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- How much imagination was needed to come up with the post-Good
War plot to recruit Nazi war criminals to the United States? How lacking
in creativity is a nation where nuclear researchers studied the effects
of plutonium on the human body by targeting some 800 African-American prisoners,
mentally retarded children, and others who were induced, by money or by
verbal subterfuge, to submit to irradiation? How clever were the Americans
who figured out how to bomb Korean dams, defoliate Vietnam, and create
a fundamentalist Muslim army of fight the Soviets?
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- Here's another solid example of good old American ingenuity
at work for you, Tommy Boy: Journalist Thomas J. Nagy has explained how
a U.S. document, dated January 22, 1991, entitled, "Iraq Water Treatment
Vulnerabilities," spells out "how sanctions will prevent Iraq
from supplying clean water to its citizens."
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- "In cold language," Nagy says, "the document
spells out what is in store." Clearly, those uninspired decision makers
in the U.S. had an idea what war and sanctions could lead to. The document
reads, in part:
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- Iraq depends on importing specialized equipment and some
chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily mineralized
and frequently brackish to saline. With no domestic sources of both water
treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue
attempts to circumvent United Nations Sanctions to import these vital commodities.
Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water
for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if
not epidemics, of disease. Iraq will suffer increasing shortages of purified
water because of the lack of required chemicals and desalination membranes.
Incidences of disease, including possible epidemics, will become probable
unless the population were careful to boil water."
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- Those same sanctions were killing 300 Iraqi children
a day for over a decade. On the May 12, 1996 edition of 60 Minutes, then
U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright had the following exchange
about the effects of U.S.-enforced sanctions on Iraq:
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- Leslie Stahl: "We have heard that half a million
children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.
And-and you know, is the price worth it?" Albright: "I think
this is a very hard choice but the price-we think the price is worth it."
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- Shortly afterwards, Albright was rewarded for her imaginative
style and named U.S. Secretary of State.
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- Whether it was the inventive scheming used to exterminate
this continent's indigenous population or the artful choice of not saying
the word "genocide" until nearly a million Rwandans were dead,
the U.S. has cornered the market on deception in the name of butchery.
Coddled and dim-witted commissars like Tommy Boy Friedman are rewarded
nicely for not only looking the other way, but for being outraged when
any official enemy so much as sneers in our direction.
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- Will someone like Friedman ever really get it? In the
words of Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand
something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
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- Mickey Z. is the author of two upcoming books: "A
Gigantic Mistake: Articles and Essays for Your Intellectual Self-Defense"
(Prime Books/Library Empyreal) and "Seven Deadly Spins: Exposing the
Lies Behind War Propaganda" (Common Courage Press). He can be reached
at mzx2@earthlink.net.
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- http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=5229
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