“‘I feel we’re going to be here for years and years and years,’ said Lance Cpl. Edward Elston, 22, of Hackettstown, N.J. ‘I don’t think anything is going to get better; I think it’s going to get a lot worse. It’s going to be like a Palestinian-type deal. We’re going to stop being a policing presence and then start being an occupying presence. . . . We’re always going to be here. We’re never going to leave.’” (From a member of a Marine platoon stationed in Iskandariyah, 30 miles southwest of Baghdad, whose regiment has taken almost 10% casualties, including 4 dead — Steve Fainaru, For Marines, a Frustrating Fight, the Washington Post, 10/10)

That wasn’t the week that was

So we’ve entered the final run to the November 2 election and, remarkably enough, we’re still inside the American bubble, with much of the grimmer news of Bushworld largely happening offshore of American consciousness. On Sunday, for instance, accounts of the mistreatment of prisoners in our black hole of injustice in Guantanamo, Cuba, finally made the front page of my hometown paper, but only described as “harsh tactics” or “harsh and coercive treatment.” You had to read deep into the piece (Broad Use of Harsh Tactics Is Described at Cuba Base, 10/17) to find the word “torture,” and then just in a quote from a Clinton-era senior State Department human rights official.

Similarly, if you read almost to the end of a 10/15 Los Angeles Times report on 28 American soldiers (a number of whom ended up with the military intelligence unit at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq) implicated in the December 2002 torture and beating deaths of two Afghan prisoners, you found a description of American interrogation techniques in Afghanistan which, even in 2003, were said to include “repeated beatings, immersion in cold water, electric shocks and prisoners being hanged upside down and…” — here’s a special bit of horrific detail — “…having their toenails torn off.” The word “torture” was naturally never mentioned and the “spate of detainee abuse cases” in Afghanistan was, according to unnamed “Army officials” (who would want to be named saying this?), mainly attributed to a “shortage of trained intelligence officials and interrogators.” (Oh, and, by the way, that was Abu what? Abu where?)

What are we to make of a world where reality cannot be called by its many names? What are we to make of a world in which terrible things can be done by our representatives in our names, but we — the American public — are considered too fragile to have those things called what they are, or often even told to us directly on the front pages of our papers? It’s true, of course, that if you’re a news junkie with time on your hands, somewhere on-line or in a news account printed someplace in this country, you’ll be able to find much of what you should know about the ways in which our world is at present misfiring. But for most Americans this is not an option and so the gap between how they see the world and how others see it (and us) is — like that old “credibility gap” of Vietnam days — yawning ever wider.

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