Sunday, July 05, 2009

Hypocrisy As Official Policy

As I round the corner into my fifth year here (Five years? It seems like twenty)one of the things that has really grated my cheese has been hypocrisy. I know that everybody has a bit of it in themselves, it's only human. But when it becomes official policy, that's a different story.
Glenn Greenwald has a piece about how that bastion of all things media, the official paper of record won't use the term torture when describing US 'enhanced interrogation techniques'. However, in an article about Iran's use of torture to extract confessions about those attempting to topple that brutal theocracy under a 'velvet revolution', what term do they use for techniques milder than what we ourselves (well, not really us, just the people who have forgotten who they work for, our government)? Torture! And politicians and publishers wonder why newspaper circulation is dwindling. Maybe it's because the NYT has hypocrisy as an official editorial policy that has caused people to throw their collective hands in the air and say "They expect me to pay for this shit?"
One of the many changes not brought forth by the people who promised you lotta change is the official government policy of hypocrisy. Joe Biden, today on one of them Sunday mornin', nobody watchin' did-he-really-say-that talk shows:
the U.S. "cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do."

What he meant was that although the US can tell Iran to abandon it's nuclear power program, it cannot tell Israel not to attack Iran because of Israel's paranoia about Iran's alleged atomic weapons program. And, I'm fairly sure, that after Israel attacks Iran, the Us will probably tell Russia and China, who trade regularly with Iran, not to retaliate against Iran.

3 comments:

libhom said...

The NY Times refusal to use the word "torture" when referring to torture used by the government that misrepresents us in our country is a galling example of the far right bias of that paper.

Tom Harper said...

Of course it's only "torture" when swarthy third world goons do it, and "enhanced interrogation" when we do it. And when the U.S. trains and finances a guerrilla group to overthrow a government we don't like, these guerrillas are Freedom Fighters. When another country does the exact same thing, the guerrillas are Terrorists.

Kvatch said...

When there are no consequences to their actions, our leaders lower themselves accordingly.