“Our ‘American Sniper’ Sickness”: How American Exceptionalism Wrought Guantanamo
Let me begin with a disclosure: I have not yet had the chance to experience “American Sniper,” Clint Eastwood’s phenomenally successful new film starring Bradley Cooper as the late Chris Kyle, the Iraq War veteran and Navy SEAL who is supposedly the most lethal long-range sharpshooter in U.S. military history. Aside from 1992’s “Unforgiven,” Eastwood’s searing anti-Western masterpiece, I’m not a big fan of the Man With No Name’s work, which I often find kitschy and generic. Still, my not having seen the film yet is due less to my qualms with the Chairman than the fact that, until recently, no one seemed to care much about the movie one way or the other. Funny what a $100 million opening weekend, and the “liberal” media’s Pavlovian fear of conforming to the out-of-touch coastal elitist stereotype, can do.
So rather than engage in the questionable practice of reviewing a movie I have yet to see (and which has already been ably reviewed by Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir), I’d like to focus instead on an analogy established in “American Sniper” that those who have had the opportunity to see it say is among its central themes. Namely, that all 7 billion-plus humans in the world can be separated into three groups: wolves, sheepdogs and sheep. The wolves are the bad guys, the theory holds, while the sheep are most everyone else. And sheepdogs? They act like wolves, but only in order to protect the sheep.
The lecture from Kyle’s father that brings the schema into “American Sniper” is apparently a creation of the film’s screenwriter, who may have borrowed it from former U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, according to a piece from Slate. But whether or not Kyle actually held this mindset himself isn’t too important, at least not for my purposes. What matters, instead, is the fact that the “sheep, sheepdogs, wolves” breakdown resonates so powerfully with millions of Americans — and not just those who’ve seen Eastwood’s latest. It may sound nice, as formulas that promise to simplify our impossibly complex world often do; but it can take its adherents to some hideous extremes.
At heart, the sheepdog analogy, at least in the context of “American Sniper” and the Iraq War, is a kind of Aesopian repackaging of the hoary idea of American exceptionalism. Rather than view every human being as an individual, capable of making any number of decisions based off of their history and circumstance, the sheepdog worldview essentializes its targets, divorcing action from identity. It’s not that wolves are wolves because they kill; sheepdogs do that, too. Wolves are wolves because, well, they just are. They’re the “bad guys.” It’s as simple as that.
Similarly, the sheepdogs, who are the real protagonists in this morality play, also cannot be recognized as such by anything they’ve actually done. Sheepdogs coerce, they intimidate, they bribe, they maim, they kill. The difference, of course, is that the sheepdogs’ target is always a wolf. Except when it isn’t. To take an example from the “American Sniper” trailer (which, as something of a movie-theater junkie, I’ve seen more times than I can recount), there’s at least one moment in the film when Kyle and his fellow sheepdogs have to decide how to treat the Iraqi women and children being manipulated or forced into helping the wolves.
But, at least in the trailer, when Kyle’s got a prepubescent in his cross-hairs, there’s little question of whether the child, if left unharmed, will be making it more likely that violence will befall a sheep or sheepdog in the near future. He will. He’s carrying a weapon. Instead, the only question in that moment is whether Kyle has what it takes to assume the sheepdog’s burden, knowing that, as one of his fellow-soldiers whispers, “they” (presumably the sheep in Washington) will “fry [him] if [he’s] wrong.” Having not seen the film, I don’t know whether Bradley Cooper’s Kyle ultimately shoots the little boy; but in the real world, in Afghanistan, soldiers were told to take lethal action against “children with potential hostile intent.”
There’s something else that sheepdogs do, something arguably more wolflike than anything mentioned above. It’s been in the news a lot lately, and I’d hazard a guess that its recent prominence has more than a little to do with the American public’s enthusiasm for a film that makes their country’s fundamental goodness crystal clear. It’s torture — and as we were reminded last fall, with the limited release of the Senate’s so-called torture report, it’s something American sheepdogs did during the early years of the war on terror. And they did it a lot.
According to a thoughtful and insightful essay at Vulture by author and Iraq War veteran Brian Turner, “American Sniper,” like countless Hollywood war movies before it, pays essentially no attention to what the war years felt like to non-Americans. And, needless to say, we pay even less attention to those non-Americans we’ve labeled as wolves, the ones we’ve decided to leave at the sheepdogs’ mercy. Which is why “Guantanamo Diary,” the just-released and heavily redacted memoir from Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a 44-year-old Mauritanian and longtime Guantanamo Bay prisoner, is so vital and so stunning. Written by Slahi in the colloquial English he picked up after spending more than a decade in the custody of his tormenters, the diary is as close as most of us will ever get to understanding the living hell this man — who has never been charged with a crime, and whom a judge ordered released in 2010 — continues to suffer.
Slahi’s book, which has been covered repeatedly and expertly by the Guardian, is an historical watershed and a literary triumph. I won’t even attempt to do it justice here. But I do hope that even those who don’t have the time, wherewithal or stomach to read it at least take a moment to think about how the kind of American exceptionalism typified by the sheepdog analogy can often play out in the real world, and in the lives of real human beings. In perhaps the diary’s most chilling moment, Slahi, desperate to end one of his countless rounds of pointless torture, all but begs the men who are beating, freezing, sexually abusing and sleep-depriving him to just say what it is they want to hear. When he tells them that, in order to “confess” to their outlandish accusations, he’d have to indict other innocents, these American sheepdogs respond with a revealing and total lack of concern.
“So what?” Slahi quotes his torturer saying. “We know your friends are bad, so if they get arrested, even if you lie about [redacted], it doesn’t matter, because they’re bad.” Guilty, innocent; why bother with a distinction? Slahi’s a wolf, regardless. And despite all of the pronouncements over the years from Americans who swore the morally disastrous war on terror had taught them valuable lessons, the popularity of “American Sniper” testifies that there’s one conclusion many of us are still unwilling to reach: We can tell ourselves we’re sheepdogs who protect the vulnerable flock from bloodthirsty wolves. But a sheepdog and a wolf act much the same way, and in the dark of a Guantanamo torture chamber, it can be hard to tell the difference.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, January 24, 2015
“A Thin-Skinned Blue Line”: Civilian Authority Is The Essence Of Democracy
To the New York police officers who turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at a slain officer’s funeral: How dare you.
So a wave of grief met a mean-spirited blue wall of silence. And how did they know the slain officer, Rafael Ramos, would have wished for an ugly political stunt amid bagpipes and farewells in his memory?
The nation’s eyes watched conduct unbecoming and saw salt poured in an open wound over violent police practices toward black men. The staged insubordination was a gauntlet thrown down to de Blasio’s first place in the chain of command and to the citizens of New York who elected him in 2013.
Whether the mayor “turned his back on them” by speaking of his worry for his biracial son Dante has nothing to do with it. Whether he questioned a fatal chokehold of a nonviolent black man, Eric Garner, by a scrum of police officers has nothing to do with it. Personal opinions are not the point. The point is, the mayor is the mayor.
If the invective of Patrick Lynch, president of a large police union, incited the silent mob action, it does not justify it. To state there’s blood on the mayor’s hands, as Lynch claimed, is an outrage. It was too much for Republican Rudy Giuliani, the tough-talking former mayor.
Time-out for a hard-headed moment of truth. Civilian authority is the essence of democracy. A public uniformed police or military rebellion is absolutely un-American. The Pentagon tried to do the same thing to President Bill Clinton, when he was new to his job, led by Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who openly opposed Clinton’s gays in the military reform. At first, military leaders did not give Clinton the respect he was due as the elected commander in chief.
Both Democrats, Clinton and de Blasio came in on a tide that signalled social change in the military or the police department. De Blasio campaigned on making police contacts and tactics such as frisking less hostile. That’s what the majority of New Yorkers want from the police, more peace, and that’s what they should get.
On city streets, civilians have lost a lot of ground to police since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The trend is that police officers have become overly aggressive toward people of color as we (white) people act timid and deferential. In an age of homeland anxiety, many of us bought into the narrative that the police were, by definition, heroes. That’s just not so.
In New York, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Ferguson and so on, respect is the ideal, but let’s make it a two-way street. For his part, Police Commissioner William J. Bratton found the funeral spectacle “inappropriate,” as he put it on the Sunday shows. And so were the Puritan witch trials. Maybe Bratton fears a mutiny, as he walks a mighty fine blue line.
To recap, thousands of police officers flocked to the funeral of Officer Ramos, who died in the line of duty. Not all police officers turned their backs in protest at de Blasio’s eulogy for the fallen officer, fatally shot in his squad car. But hundreds of officers did, standing outside a church in Queens.
Maybe it’s time to rethink our collective view on a famed, beloved city police force in popular culture. Now all of America got to see a different, dark side of that police force, and it’s not true blue.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, December 29, 2014
“Where Have Ebola’s Fear-Mongers All Gone?”: The One Word You Haven’t Heard A Politician Say Since Election Day
Only two months ago, many Americans were gripped by fear of the uncontrollable spread of an apparently incurable disease that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projected could strike 1.4 million people in West Africa before it came under control.
Amid such reports, it took only one case to touch off near-panic inside the United States: that of Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan after he was misdiagnosed by a Dallas hospital.
In the weeks that followed Duncan’s death, state and local governments reacted — and sometimes overreacted. Several schools barred teachers and children who had visited African countries that were nowhere near the epidemic. In Maine, a teacher was put on leave because she had visited Dallas.
And then election-year politics kicked in.
Members of Congress, mostly Republicans, warned that Ebola could be carried into the country by illegal immigrants or even terrorists, and demanded a ban on travelers entering the United States from the affected countries. Governors scrambled to draft quarantine regulations, producing a showdown between Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and a nurse he tried to confine to a tent. (The nurse won.)
And now? The crisis is all but forgotten. We’ve moved on.
The epidemic is ebbing in Liberia, but still spreading in Sierra Leone. The World Health Organization estimates there have been about 18,000 cases, including more than 6,300 deaths: tragic numbers, but far below the apocalyptic scenario once predicted.
Only four cases of the disease have been diagnosed in the United States, two of them in people who contracted the disease in West Africa. And we’ve learned that when Ebola is identified early, in a country with a functioning healthcare system, the disease is treatable after all.
“What’s the one word you haven’t heard a politician say since Election Day?” Democratic strategist James Carville asked me a few weeks ago. “Ebola!”
I’m not blaming ordinary people for reacting as they did to a deadly epidemic they’d been told was difficult to stop.
I’m not even blaming governors who scrambled to impose quarantines to stop the spread of a disease they didn’t know much about. Their job was to protect their citizens. And when they discovered that their initial reactions might have been too broad, they pared them back — even Chris Christie.
It’s worth remembering, as well, that the Obama administration initially did a ham-handed job of mastering the crisis. Dr. Thomas Frieden of the CDC started out by assuring the country that the situation was under control — even though it wasn’t, at first.
But there is one list of politicians who still deserve a measure of scorn: the ones who fanned fear for fear’s sake.
This week, those politicians shared in an award they probably didn’t want: the annual “Lie of the Year” prize conferred by PolitiFact, the fact-checking arm of the Tampa Bay Times. They won, the paper said, because they deliberately “produced a dangerous and incorrect narrative” about an important global problem.
Before you dismiss that as another liberal media attack on the GOP, consider this: Last year’s PolitiFact winner for “Lie of the Year” was President Obama, for his promise that under his 2010 healthcare law, “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it.”
The politicians mentioned in this year’s citation included Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), an ophthalmologist who may run for president.
His advice on Ebola included this warning: “This is an incredibly contagious disease. People in full gloves and gowns are getting it.”
Well, no, as thousands of medical workers in Africa can testify — not when true precautions are in place.
“This is something that appears to be very easy to catch,” Paul added. “If someone has Ebola at a cocktail party, they’re contagious and you can catch it from them.”
Theoretically true — but only if your cocktail party acquaintance is emitting fluids in your direction; Ebola can’t be transmitted by air.
Then there was Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA), another physician, who managed to combine two hot-button issues, Ebola and immigration. Gingrey announced that he had received “reports of illegal migrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever and Ebola.”
Other members of Congress speculated that terrorists might infect themselves, sneak into the United States and try to spread the disease in crowded places. PolitiFact carefully said it couldn’t count that as a lie, since it was mere speculation.
But it was surely intended to increase fear. And fear is a powerful emotion, much easier to provoke than to ease.
So now that the acute fear of Ebola has ebbed, we should pause for a moment to thank some Americans who didn’t panic — and, more important, even did something to bring the epidemic closer to an end: the courageous relief workers who went to Africa, not knowing whether they’d be allowed to return home, relief workers that included roughly 3,000 U.S. military personnel who accepted deployment to Liberia as part of their jobs, and whose clinic-building mission will be complete soon. And yes, even those politicians, beginning with President Obama, who didn’t panic.
By: Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times (TNS); The National Memo, December 18, 2014
“Bragging About Their Ignorance”: “I’m Not A Scientist” Is A Dangerous Cop-Out
The evidence for global climate change is overwhelming. Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists, along with the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and more than 30 professional scientific research societies, agree that climate change is happening because of human actions and that it will be an increasingly serious problem if we don’t stop it. It is reasonable for politicians to debate the best way to solve this problem, but whether it is a problem should not be up for discussion anymore. However, in response to questions about climate change, political candidates, including high-profile politicians such as Senate Minority (for now) Leader Mitch McConnell, Florida Gov. Rick Scott, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio are frequently saying: “I’m not a scientist.”
When politicians say “I’m not a scientist,” it is an exasperating evasion. It’s a cowardly way to avoid answering basic and important policy questions. This response raises lots of other important questions about their decision-making processes. Do they have opinions on how to best maintain our nation’s highways, bridges, and tunnels—or do they not because they’re not civil engineers? Do they refuse to talk about agriculture policy on the grounds that they’re not farmers? How do they think we should be addressing the threat of ISIS? They wouldn’t know, of course; they’re not military generals.
No one would ever say these things, because they’re ridiculous. Being a policymaker in a country as large and complex as the United States requires making decisions on a variety of important subjects outside of your primary area of expertise. Voters wouldn’t tolerate this “I’m not a scientist” excuse if applied to any other discipline, yet politicians appear to be using this line successfully to distance themselves from experts crucial for solving many of our country’s most important problems.
American populist rhetoric has always had a dark side of anti-intellectualism, the belief that the common sense of the average man on the street is equal to or greater than the expert knowledge of people who spend years studying a particular question, and that has been on full display in recent years. Who can understand what those weird, other-worldly scientists are talking about, anyway? Somebody needs to “stand up to the experts.” Despite what any politician says, the overwhelming evidence supports the scientific consensus that climate change is happening because of human activity and that we should take action to stop it because it will be a significant threat—a position the U.S. military agrees with.
I actually am a scientist (a marine biologist), but you don’t need to be an expert on anything to pay attention when 97 percent of people who are experts in that subject agree that something is a problem and that we should do something about it. You don’t need to be a fully trained expert in the sciences to make decisions that involve science (which is good, because less than 4 percent of the representatives in Congress have any kind of scientific training, even broadly defined).
“ ‘I’m not a scientist’ is a cheap cop-out that is becoming all too common, not just on climate change but on issues like fracking and evolution, too. Politicians of both major political parties are trotting out the ‘I’m not a scientist’ remark to avoid stating where they stand on policy,” says Michael Halpern, the manager of strategy and innovation for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Lamar Smith (R-Texas), is also not a scientist, but that’s not stopping him from attacking National Science Foundation–funded scientific research. Smith has been publicly mocking grants to study topics that he doesn’t personally see the value in studying, proposing laws that would change peer review at the NSF to value studies with purported economic benefits, and attacking NSF officials in congressional hearings. Smith seems to be trying to look tough on government spending, and appealing to anti-intellectualism is an easy strategy. However, the total budget of the NSF is less than a quarter of 1 percent of the federal budget, and only the top 5 percent of proposals are funded. All research proposals submitted to NSF go through a rigorous system of peer review with experts in the field anonymously evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each, often with suggestions for how to improve the research in the future. Peer review is a critical part of free scientific inquiry, and the fact that an anti-intellectual politician doesn’t personally see the value in a particular study should be irrelevant to whether that study is funded.
The ranking Democrat on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee says she is baffled by Smith’s public attacks on the peer review process. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson has correctly pointed out that there is no evidence whatsoever of waste or fraud associated with the NSF grants that Smith is investigating, that Smith seems to be targeting NSF-funded projects that he thinks sound silly based on his limited understanding of their purposes, and that such unprecedented attacks from a high-ranking government official can have a chilling effect on the free scientific inquiry that has helped make the United States an economic powerhouse.
You don’t need to be a scientist to recognize that climate change is a problem, but you do need to be a scientist to appropriately participate in peer review. Politicians who get this backward, as well as those who disrupt the process of scientific research or willfully ignore the conclusions of that research, should be voted out of power.
By: David Shiffman, Ph.D. Student at The Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy at the University of Miami; Slate, October 22, 2014
“Ebola Politics”: Let Obama — And Frieden — Do Their Jobs
If the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind, then even the possibility of infection with Ebola should do the same — for all of us. Instead we seem easily distracted by attempts to blame President Obama and scapegoat the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Republican politicians and media loudmouths demand the resignation of Dr. Thomas Frieden, the CDC director, evidently because he refused to endorse a West African travel ban.
They’re all dead wrong.
First, Obama is following precisely the correct approach in addressing the outbreak with his order to dispatch American troops to Liberia. At this stage, no force except the U.S. military is capable of getting the situation in West Africa under control. The men and women of the medical corps can swiftly set up emergency tented facilities in every Liberian county, while security personnel begin to restore order and prevent panicked destruction.
The president didn’t foresee this outbreak, but neither did anyone else, principally because every earlier Ebola outbreak had been contained within a few rural villages. While his order to send troops isn’t popular – and nobody likes the idea of sending our troops into danger – he made a difficult but wise choice. (Our British and French allies have agreed to do the same in Sierra Leone and Guinea, respectively.)
Why are the unique characteristics and large scale of the U.S. military so vital now? Simply because no other force can adequately handle the logistical and safety requirements of this chaotic, perilous undertaking. To take just one example: Both our troops and the local health care workers will need an enormous supply of protective gear known as Personal Protective Equipment – each of which must be not just discarded, but carefully destroyed after a single use.
More broadly, the effort to contain Ebola needs very well-trained, well-organized, and well-disciplined people on the ground – which is to say, an army. Our military personnel are the best in the world, and will be able to provide leadership and guidance to the Liberians, organizing local health workers to restore order amid chaos and fear.
No organization except the U.S. military possesses the capacity to deal with such problems.
Second, the calls for Dr. Frieden to resign by Republican members of Congress more resemble cheap midterm campaigning than intelligent policymaking. Although the CDC has not functioned perfectly in the current crisis, its director is certainly the most qualified and experienced figure to stem a threatened outbreak of infectious disease. His expertise is not merely on paper, either.
During four of the worst years of the HIV/AIDS crisis in New York, when multi-drug resistant tuberculosis was taking a terrible toll, Dr. Frieden oversaw the program that eventually controlled TB and reduced cases by 80 pecent. For five years he worked in India, dispatched by the CDC to work with the World Health Organization to control TB in that country – where his efforts helped to provide treatment for at least 10 million patients and saved as many as 3 million lives. Those are among the reasons that President Obama appointed him in the first place – and why he still deserves far more confidence than the partisan screamers in Congress and on cable television now attacking him.
Now is the wrong time for politicians and pundits to harass the Pentagon and the CDC, as they address the difficult task at hand — which will require many weeks of intensive struggle. There will be plenty of opportunity for recriminations later, if that still seems necessary.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when the country faced what felt like an existential crisis, many public figures, especially Republicans, urged everyone to put national unity and cooperation ahead of partisan bickering. It would be good if, just this once, they would follow their own advice.
What we will need in the months to come is a fresh assessment of our foreign aid programs. We need to understand why our traditional stinginess does both our country and our children a terrible disservice. Our best hope for survival, in the long term, is to notice how small our world has become – and to recognize that protecting our fellow human beings everywhere is the only way to protect ourselves.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, October 17, 2014
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