Asymetrical PR

by digby

Hey, did you hear about the latest terrorist attack?

A Saudi Arabian detainee at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay apparently committed suicide Wednesday, the U.S. military said.

Lest you think I’ve gone nuts, recall that the US government considers prisoners committing suicide in Guantanamo an act of war. I’m serious. Remember this?

Rear Admiral Harris is adamant that the people in his care are well looked after and are enemies of the United States.

He told me they use any weapon they can – including their own urine and faeces – to continue to wage war on the United States.

The suicide of three detainees, he reaffirmed to me, amounted to “asymmetrical warfare.”

The state department disagreed. They saw the Gitmo suicides as a PR tactic:

“Taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good P.R. move,” Graffy said of the deaths. Drawing on knowledge gleaned from work “on improving the United States’ image abroad, especially in Islamic countries” (a detail The New York Times pulled from her State Department bio), Graffy elaborated on her remarks on the BBC show “Newshour”: “It does sound like this is part of a strategy–in that they don’t value their own lives, and they certainly don’t value ours; and they use suicide bombings as a tactic.”

Those evil terrorist bastards. All that bellyaching about torture and being innocent and locked up forever with no end in sight is just a fancy-pants marketing strategy. It’s ingenious. See, suicide bombings and committing suicide in prison are both acts of war against the US because they make us look bad. (Which would logically mean that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are committing terrorist attacks against the US every time they open their mouths.)

I’m jesting here, but it really isn’t funny. Guantanamo is indeed a PR disaster for the United States and it’s entirely self inflicted. And now we have presidential candidates talking about “doubling it” to wild applause by American citizens. I think somebody needs to stop these nutzoid Republicans from hurling their rhetorical feces as weapons and committing acts of asymetrical warfare against the rule of law as soon as possible.

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