Why Do They Hate Us So Much?
by digby
The United States of Kafka strikes again. Here’s yet another story of unspeakable horrors at the hands of Americans against some Algerian nobody who was the victim of a bad translation.
After being held for a week in a prison in the mountains of Malawi, Mr. Saidi said, a group of people arrived in a sport utility vehicle: a gray-haired Caucasian woman and five men dressed in black wearing black masks revealing only their eyes.
The Malawians blindfolded him, and his clothes were cut away, he said. He heard someone taking photographs. Then, he said, the blindfold was removed and the agents covered his eyes with cotton and tape, inserted a plug in his anus and put a disposable diaper on him before dressing him. He said they covered his ears, shackled his hands and feet and drove him to an airplane where they put him on the floor.
“It was a long trip, from Saturday night to Sunday morning, ” Mr. Saidi recalled. When the plane landed, he said, he was taken to what he described as a “dark prison” filled with deafening Western music. The lights were rarely turned on.
Men in black arrived, he said, and he remembers one shouting at him through an interpreter: “You are in a place that is out of the world. No one knows where you are, no one is going to defend you.”
He was chained by one hand to the wall in a windowless cell and left with a bucket and a bottle in lieu of a latrine. He remained there for nearly a week, he said, and then was blindfolded and bound again and taken to another prison. “There, they put me in a room, suspended me by my arms and attached my feet to the floor,” he recalled. “They cut off my clothes very fast and took off my blindfold.” An older man, graying at the temples, entered the room with a young woman with shoulder-length blond hair, he said. They spoke English, which Mr. Saidi understands a little, and they interrogated him for two hours through a Moroccan translator. At last, he said, he thought he would learn why he was there, but the questioning only confounded him.
He said the interrogators focused on a telephone conversation they said he had had with his wife’s family in Kenya about airplanes. But Mr. Saidi said he told them that he could not recall talking to anyone about planes.
He said the interrogators left him chained for five days without clothes or food. “They beat me and threw cold water on me, spat at me and sometimes gave me dirty water to drink,” he said. “The American man told me I would die there.”
[…]
In prison, Mr. Saidi said, he was interrogated daily, sometimes twice a day, for weeks. Eventually, he said, his interrogators produced an audiotape of the conversation in which he had allegedly talked about planes.
But Mr. Saidi said he was talking about tires, not planes, that his brother-in-law planned to sell from Kenya to Tanzania. He said he was mixing English and Arabic and used the word “tirat,” making “tire” plural by adding an Arabic “at” sound. Whoever was monitoring the conversation apparently understood the word as “tayarat,” Arabic for planes, Mr. Saidi said.
“When I heard it, I asked the Moroccan translator if he understood what we were saying in the recording,” Mr. Saidi said. After the Moroccan explained it to the interrogators, Mr. Saidi said, he was never asked about it again.
“Why did they bring me to Afghanistan to ask such questions?” he said in the interview. “Why didn’t they ask me in Tanzania? Why did they have to take me away from my family? Torture me?”
That’s an excellent question.
We are now a pariah nation and this is a primary reason why. I just finished the book “American Against the World” by Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes. More than 70% of the world now regards us dangerous. Almost as many would like to see another power emerge to check ours. We are disliked and mistrusted and becoming more disliked and mistrusted every day. It’s not getting better. It is incomprehensible that anyone can believe that this has not made our country less safe.
Kevin Drum quotes James Fallows describing a talk with Robert Dearlove today:
And — the point he stressed time and again, even in a bonus comment after the official program session had ended — the Western world, notably the United States, was doomed unless it reclaimed “the moral high ground.” By the end of the Cold War, he said, there was no dispute world wide about which side held the moral high ground. As a professional spy master, he said that reality made it so much easier for him to recruit operatives — they would volunteer to come to him, because they believed in the cause. Therefore, as a matter of pure strategic necessity, the United States needed to behave according to its best traditions, not the exigencies of an open-ended wartime emergency. (I’m paraphrasing a little, but not taking too many liberties.)
When American Democrats say things like this — as some of them occasionally screw up the courage to do — they are dismissed as pathetic one-worlders. The words are somehow more plausible coming from a man who would have been James Bond’s boss.
The words are plausible because they are plausible. It shouldn’t matter from whose mouth they emanate. Indeed, they have emanated from many, many mouths over the last few years, including mine. Aside from protesting the sheer irrationality of the invasion of Iraq and the extreme measures undertaken under the presidents wartime powers, one of the main liberal arguments has been this practical observation that crude thuggish behavior was counterproductive — that our strength lay in our technological mystique, our open society that would not succumb to threats and our ability to get allies to support us and work with us globally to shut down these terrorist operations. That argument has been given hardly a moment of consideration — helped mightily by the news media in the early days who were determined to play well-coiffed soldiers in the reality TV show called the GWOT.
The right has managed to dominate with an internally inconsistent argument that says in order to preserve our civilized values we must do unspeakable, uncivilized things, even to innocent people. (The constitution isn’t a suicide pact!) And the great thing about it is that if we were to suffer another terrorist attack, it wouldn’t disprove this thesis, it would make the case for redoubling it. (tristero takes this on, here, in case you missed it.)
The facts are that our actions have made more enemies, have made our allies mistrust us and have opened the door to the idea that because we are behaving like an unpredictable rogue superpower, the world needs other military powers to challenge us. The more this happens, the more the rightwing nuts insist that we should be tougher and stronger and meaner so that we can put these naysayers in their place. This taken to its logical ends is catastrophe for America.
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