For several years now, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein has a been a relentless foe of the Bush Administration, and has heaped ridicule on neocons like Bill Kristol to the point that he’s been called, more than once, an anti-Semitic Jew. Just recently, he’s posted a withering denunciation of the Bush Administration’s shameful record, closing with this: “…there should be some official acknowledgment by the U.S. government that the Bush Administration’s policies were reprehensible, and quite possibly illegal, and that the U.S. is no longer in the torture business. If Obama doesn’t want to make that statement, perhaps we could do it in the form of a Bush Memorial in Washington: a statue of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner in cruciform stress position—the real Bush legacy.”
The problem is, Joe didn’t always write that way. Glenn Greenwald, who did, can’t help remembering when Joe wrote like this, back in 2002, in reply to hostage negotiator Terry Waite’s assertion that the U.S. was torturing terrorist suspects in Guantanamo’s “Camp X-Ray”:
“Total rubbish, of course. The Camp X-Ray Yankophobe fiesta has died down in the past week as it has become clear that the prisoners—I see no need to use euphemisms here—are not being treated badly at all. The Red Cross has been in. Doctors are caring for them. They receive three square meals a day. They pray (and we provide arrows to point them the way). There’s no air conditioning, but the winter heat in Cuba isn’t exactly devastating. The cells are eight feet square; not the Ritz, but not quite inhumane, either. They were shackled and goggled when they were being transported, but no longer. They wear orange jump suits, which are probably an improvement over their Afghan cave-wear (I would actually prefer they be dressed in pink tutus, to give them an appreciation of the freedoms accorded western ballerinas). They are not being tortured, Terry. They are being interrogated.”
Glenn gets a little paranoid, as he is wont to do when discussing MSM journalists with their fancy offices and fancy expense accounts, attributing Joe’s change of heart to the change of Administrations, which I think is entirely false, but still. If I had written that “They pray (and we provide arrows to point them the way)” crack, well, I’d be awfully embarrassed about it, but I might find my way to admitting that I too was once a sinner.
Afterwords
I have to admit, setting up a proper memorial to the Bush Administration’s crimes does sound like an excellent idea. I live near “Embassy Row” in Washington, DC, and there are lots of statues set up expressly to piss other people off. Why couldn’t some Soros types get together and buy a well-placed chunk of land and set up a memorial to the victims of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al? I think it’s quite doable, and I think it should be done.
