Facing the Music

[johnc]

Exactly!

 

http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getmailfiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2005/06/20&ID=Ar00800

 

Facing the Music

Mark Steyn

 

Been following the latest horrifying stories from what Amnesty International calls the “gulag of our time”? John Kass of The Chicago Tribune was outraged by the news that records by Christina Aguilera had been played at Guantanamo at full volume in order to soften up detainees. He thought they should have used “Dance, Ballerina, Dance” by Vaughn Monroe, over and over and over.

 

Well, readers had plenty of suggestions of their own, and so the Tribune’s website put together a list of “Interro-Tunes” — the most effective songs for aural intimidation, mood music for jolting your jihadi. A lot were the usual suspects - like the Captain and Tennille’s blamelessly goofy “Muskrat Love”, which, as I recall, put the Queen to sleep at a White House gala, though the Duke of Edinburgh sat agog all the way to the end. Someone suggested Bob Dylan’s “Everybody Must Get Stoned”, which even on a single hearing sounds like it’s being played over and over. I don’t know what Mr Kass has against “Ballerina”, which is very pleasant in the Nat “King” Cole version. But he seems to think one burst of “Dance, ballerina, dance/And do your pirouette in rhythm with your aching heart” will have the Islamists howling for the off-switch and singing like canaries to the Feds. Who knows? I sang “Ballerina” myself once on the radio long ago, and, if it will discombobulate the inmates, I’m willing to dust off my arrangement and fly down to Guantanamo, if necessary dressed liked Christina Aguilera. If they want an encore, I’ll do my special culturally sensitive version of that Stevie Wonder classic, “My Sharia Amour”.

 

By now, one or two readers may be frothing indignantly, “That’s not funny! Bush’s torture camp at Guantanamo is the gulag of our time, if not of all time.” But that’s the point. The world divides into those who feel the atrocities at Gitmo “must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others” (in the widely quoted words of Senator Dick Durbin), and the rest of us, for whom the more we hear the specifics of the “atrocities” the funnier they are. They bear the same relation to the gulags (15-30 million dead), the Nazi camps (nine million dead) and the killing fields of Cambodia (two million dead) as Mel Brooks‚ “Springtime For Hitler” does to the original. Nobody complained at Auschwitz that the guards were playing the 78s of The Merry Widow (the Fuhrer’s favorite operetta) with the volume knob too high. When that old KGB hand Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev as the big guy in the Kremlin, he was reported in the western press to be a big Glenn Miller fan. But to the best of my knowledge no-one suggested he was in the basement of the Lubyanka torturing the inmates with “I Got A Gal In Kalamazoo”.

 

The first time the full-blast junk-pop treatment caught the eye of the media was a decade and a half back, when US troops bombarded the Panamanian strongman General Noriega with the Bobby Fuller Four’s “I Fought The Law (And The Law Won)”. In those days, nobody reckoned it was torture. But these days torture seems to be in the ear of the behearer. Because the jihadi find western culture depraved — and I’m not necessarily in disagreement on that, at least where Christina Aguilera’s concerned — we’re obliged to be extra-super-duper-sensitive with them.

 

Says who? Again, the more one hears the specifics of the “insensitivity” of the American regime at Guantanamo, the more many of us reckon we’re being way too sensitive. For example, camp guards are under instructions to handle copies of the Koran only when wearing gloves. The reason for this is that the detainees regard infidels as “unclean”. Fair enough, each to his own. But it’s one thing for the Islamists to think infidels are unclean, quite another for the infidels to agree with them. Far from being tortured, the prisoners are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The US military hand each jihadi his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship The Times of London. When I bought a Koran to bone up on Islam a couple of days after 9/11, I didn’t wear gloves to the bookstore. If that’s “disrespectful” to Muslims, tough. You should have thought about that before you allowed your holy book to become the central motivation for global jihad.

 

I’m not arguing the merits here so much as the politics. There’s certainly a discussion to be had about how to categorize these people. As things stand, they’re not covered by the Geneva Conventions — they’re unlawful combatants, captured fighting in civilian clothes rather than uniform, and, when it comes to name, rank and serial number, they lack at least two thereof, and even the first is often highly variable. As a point of “international law”, their fate is a matter entirely between Washington and the state of which they’re citizens (Saudi Arabia, mostly). I don’t think it’s a good idea to upgrade terrorists into lawful combatants. But if, like my namesake the British jurist Lord Steyn, you feel differently, fine, go ahead and make your case.

 

Where the anti-Gitmo crowd went wrong was in expanding its objections from the legal status of the prisoners to the treatment they‚re receiving. By any comparison — ie, not just with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot — they’re getting better than they deserve. It’s the first gulag in history where the torture victims put on weight. Each prisoner released from Guantanamo receives a new copy of the Koran plus a free pair of blue jeans in his new size: the average detainee puts on 13 pounds during his stay, thanks to the “mustard-baked dill fish”, “baked Tandoori chicken breast” and other delicacies. These and other recipes from the gulag’s kitchen have now been collected by some Internet wags and published as The Gitmo Cookbook.

 

Judging from the way he’s dug himself in, Dick Durbin, the Number Two Democrat in the US Senate, genuinely believes Gitmo is analogous to Belsen, the gulags and the killing fields. But he crossed a line, from anti-Bush to anti-American, and most Americans have no interest in following him down that path.You can’t claim (as Democrats do, incessantly) to “support our troops” and then dump them in the same category as the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge. In the hermetically sealed echo chamber between the Dem leadership, the mainstream US media, Hollywood, Ivy League “intellectuals” and European sophisticates, the gulag cracks are utterly unexceptional. But, for a political party that keeps losing elections because it has less and less appeal outside a few coastal enclaves, Durbin’s remarks are devastating. The Democrats flopped in 2002 and 2004 because they were seen as incoherent on national security issues. Explicitly branding themselves as the “terrorists’ rights” party is unlikely to improve their chances for 2006.

[Guest Battle Pope]

I agree. We are way too easy on them.

 

They want every American dead, and they get better treatment than 95% of our country's own citizens. It's just not right.

[katman]

How could Mark not have mentioned anything by Yoko Ono? Makes me want to confess to things I haven't even done!

 

The sad part of all this is the support, nee encouragement, given to Durbin from the left wing media. Unbelievable the lack of spine this country has developed.

[BillZ260]

How bout some Guar? Remember them? They are on tour again, maybe they'd do it live? That should scare just about anything out of em...

[2126]

I think we should give all those whinning bleading heart liberals a free one way ticket to GETMO and subject them to repeated recordings of themselves whinning about everything! That could certainly be viewed as torture...I know it's torturous to me!

[johnc]

And an opinion from someone who knows what a Gulag is:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/17/AR2005061701218.html

 

When I arrived in the United States after serving my term in Siberian exile, I met hundreds of dedicated Amnesty activists throughout the country who wrote letters to leaders of world governments demanding the release of prisoners of conscience. This activity created a special solidarity of human rights activists across national borders. Naturally, communist leaders denounced Amnesty as a CIA front, and right-wing dictators dismissed its members as communist plotters.

 

It was only natural that Amnesty flourished in the United States and in Western Europe, where human rights are taken seriously and their defense became an official part of U.S. foreign policy, largely due to the efforts of President Jimmy Carter. There were heroic attempts to create Amnesty groups in countries with dictatorial regimes, including the Soviet Union, but most of those attempts were crushed by arrests and forced emigration.

 

There is ample reason for Amnesty to be critical of certain U.S. actions. But by using hyperbole and muddling the difference between repressive regimes and the imperfections of democracy, Amnesty's spokesmen put its authority at risk. U.S. human rights violations seem almost trifling in comparison with those committed by Cuba, South Korea, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

[crazy280]

I think we should give all those whinning bleading heart liberals a free one way ticket to GETMO and subject them to repeated recordings of themselves whinning about everything! That could certainly be viewed as torture...I know it's torturous to me!

 

 

Now YOU'RE the one whining...

[crazy280]

Even though repetative Christina Aguilera would make me rip my own eyeballs out, I don't think what's going on at Guantanamo Bay is a big deal, as long as they're not cutting off fingers......but this guy Mark Steyn is an idiot.

 

QUOTE:

If that’s “disrespectful†to Muslims, tough. You should have thought about that before you allowed your holy book to become the central motivation for global jihad.

END QUOTE

 

This guy is retarded. Real Muslims don't give a damn if you touch the book without gloves. And who the hell does he think he is holding Muslims responsible for terrorist's actions? Sounds like run-of-the-mill, backwoods ignorance to me. And then he actually uses the word "delicacies" in describing prison food. Are you f*cking kidding me? Get real...

 

Who cares about this? Lets hear more about the mass corruption of Ohio Republicans, which is being investigated as we speak. Or the Downing Street Memo. Or the billions of dollars missing from the Iraq war funds...These things don't get any real coverage by the "MSM" which is why all that "liberal media" crap I hear from republicans is TOTAL BS.

 

Just my $.02

[2126]

Now YOU'RE the one whining...

 

NOT!!!

[johnc]

Gitmo FAQ: http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/lileks062205.html

 

Here's What You Need to Know About Gitmo

 

BY JAMES LILEKS

c.2005 Newhouse News Service

 

Gitmo is the gulag equivalent of a Ben Affleck movie: no one's seen it, but everyone has an opinion about it. Given all the rhetoric that's been spilled about this sorta-kinda-not-really Death Camp, it's time we re-examine the facts, and remind ourselves what's really at stake. Herewith a summation.

 

Q: What is Gitmo?

 

A: Contrary to what some suggest, it does not stand for "Git mo' Peking chicken for Muhammad, he wants a second portion." It stands for "Guantanamo," a facility the United States built to see if the left would ever care about human rights abuses in Cuba. The experiment has apparently been successful.

 

Q: Who's in Gitmo?

 

A: Operation Scoop Up The Little Lost Lambs plucked men from distant countries and brought them to Gitmo to beat them deaf for no apparent reason. There are between 400 and 30 million people at Gitmo, and somewhere between zero and 15 million people have died there.

 

Q: That's quite the range. Do we have precise figures?

 

A: Well, technically, no one has died at Gitmo. Metaphorically, millions have perished, since Gitmo is the spiritual heir to assorted thug regimes -- except Saddam's, of course. Think Nazi death camps. Did you know one of the Nazis' Middle East allies was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, a Hitler admirer who was a mentor to Yasser Arafat? Funny how history works. Not ha-ha funny, but Seinfeld-ironic funny.

 

Q: History is boring. C'mon. Why do they hate us?

 

A: Because our women wear thongs, our media are naughty, our homosexuals walk around unstoned, and we refuse to let them finish Hitler's plans for the Jews. Because we are the infidel sons of monkeys and pigs who do not believe that most holy of books, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Also because we had something to do with Afghanistan.

 

Q: Afghana-what?

 

A: Afghanistan is a large, mountainous country that suffered an unimaginable geographical calamity a few years ago, when the entire nation slid off the front pages of the newspapers. Poor country: not a single runaway Caucasian bride to interest the media.

 

Q: Why can't the prisoners be given trials?

 

A: Because civil libertarians might injure themselves as they race to defend the "terrorist suspects" and collide in the airport jetways. Because the left seems to think the detainees were arrested for the crime of "being swarthy in Afghanistan," and there are no such specific charges in the U.S. criminal code. Finally, if convicted, the "terrorists" would go into the U.S. federal pens, where the food is worse and they are subject to brutal rape. We reserve that for recidivist marijuana wholesalers.

 

Q: What forms of torture do they use in Gitmo?

 

A: The interrogators make a point of handling the Quran with gloves, to indicate they accept the prisoners' definition of infidels as "unclean." But the guards occasionally suggest that the gloves are not only washed with the general laundry that might include the socks of Jews, but that sometimes the anti-static cling sheets are deliberately left out.

 

Q: It might all be worth it if we learned something. Have we learned anything?

 

A: Who knows? We have to err on the side of self-castigating doubt, reflexive suspicion of the military, and a churlish institutional bias against reporting anything other than bad news that might sap the national will. So let's assume the interrogators learned nothing.

 

Q: Wow. This is bad.

 

A: It is. It's worse than Waco, because at least those people aren't suffering anymore.

 

Q: When did they build this place?

 

A: After Sept. 11, 2001.

 

Q: That date seems familiar for some reason. Did something happen?

 

A: Not really. You can roll over and go back to sleep.

 

Q: Isn't it our role as citizens to be wary of government?

 

A: Sure. But take this quote: "I call on those who question the motives of the president and his national security advisers to join with the rest of America in presenting a united front to our enemies abroad." That was Sen. Dick Durbin in 1998, when Bill Clinton attacked Iraq. But that was then, and this is George W. Bush.

 

June 22, 2005

[RB26240Z]

I think gitmo prisoners have been treated too nicely. They have nothing to complain about so they find the quran excuse to get some attention.

 

Maybe they should send some of them to a turkish prison so they'll come back and tell their friends what goes on over there.

[crazy280]

Now Lilek is much funnier, thanks John

[blueovalz]

I think gitmo prisoners have been treated too nicely. They have nothing to complain about so they find the quran excuse to get some attention.

 

Jeez Loueez! I suppose the innocent guy that was wrongfully sent to the gas chamber feels the same way. Have we forgotten to look at any situation from all sides and points of view instead of through a narrow straw call "my point of view"! Can you honestly claim that every single person in that (any) camp is quilty of crimes against the US? Not much critical thinking going on here. If we're going to roast folks over the coals for stupid statements lets include everybody (Rove). There is more than enough BS flowing to go around for everybody in these times.

[RB26240Z]

I respect your point of view, anything is possible.