From Democracy Now!: “U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan reported to the Security Council yesterday that many of the 6,000 prisoners detained by U.S.-led forces in Iraq are being held in violation of the Geneva Conventions.”
Meanwhile, PEEK spots this from Christian blog Slacktivist:
Nabobs of NABA
As in Not As Bad As. “We’ve heard a lot of this lately from the nabobs of NABA in the Bush administration. The American abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, we are reminded, was Not As Bad As the abuses committed there by Saddam Hussein back in the day … [I]s this what America is now reduced to? Do we really have to go all the way over to Stalin or Saddam to find an example of someone whose behavior is reassuringly worse than our own?
As in Not As Bad As. “We’ve heard a lot of this lately from the nabobs of NABA in the Bush administration. The American abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, we are reminded, was Not As Bad As the abuses committed there by Saddam Hussein back in the day … [I]s this what America is now reduced to? Do we really have to go all the way over to Stalin or Saddam to find an example of someone whose behavior is reassuringly worse than our own?
More from Democracy Now!:
Annan’s report read in part, “Prolonged detention without access to lawyers and courts is prohibited under international law including during states of emergency.” While the Fourth Geneva Convention allows occupying forces to detain individuals, there is no provision allowing internment after an occupation has officially ended.
This is the way that a lot of people try to silence abuse victims, by telling them “Oh, it’s not to bad…after all, it’s not as bad as (fill in the blank)”.
No, I’m not lessening the seriousness of abuse by making that comparison (another deflection tactic).
One of the first things they’ll tell you as a recovering abuse victim is not to downplay what happened to you by making such comparisons, even if everyone else is telling you to do so.
Who cares what Stalin or Saddam did in this context? This administration is still guilty of the evils it has committed.
From whose perspective? Certainly not the people being tortured and murdered … or their families.
Hussein killed and tortured people over the course of 30 years. We’ve been there for 1/10 that time. The fact that we haven’t murdered and tortured as many people, yet is hardly an indication that we’re NABA, it could just be that we’re still in the warm-up stages.
Re:
Witness the tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers “degraded” or “attritted” by an immeasurably superior force invading their country for no reason. These troops were, by comparison, defenseless, and most had joined Saddam’s army because it was the only job they could find.
To keep it short, and to help him not ruin what he wrote, I cut out this sentence: “Take the whole sordid affair — the Lynndie photoshoot, the torturing to death of innocents and adversaries alike… and it still doesn’t put us in the same league as the A-list All-Stars of Evil. “
That’s an unfortunate view. We ARE in the same league…. have been for a long time.
I think the Bushies would move the goal posts if they could.
They COULD have started by saying they are Not As Bas As Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Uzbekistan. But, OOPS! Those are our allies in the War on Terra. Can’t compare ourselves to them.
So that leaves you with Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Iran, Stalin, and perhaps Pol Pot (if any of them actually knew their history).
If you don’t have any core values about what you really stand for, NABA is the best you’re going to do.
This reminds me of an interview show I heard last night on NPR, talking about how the poor keep getting poorer. I got all steamed up because the right-wing think tank guy kept saying, even after an 80 year old woman called in to say how desparate she felt, that at least here it’s not as bad as most other places. Nabobs of NABA are all over.
I swear to god, a man like that would stand at that woman’s funeral and say, “It’s not as bad as being in a mass grave of Saddam’s victims.”
Is NABA already a part of the vernacular? Or is this new? If so, how long do you think it’ll take for it to become a common acronym?
[nod] And the point generally glosed-over is that there’s a big difference for any US-based critics, in that the actions of the US Administration are done — at least supposedly — in my name. So — theoretically — I’m supposed to have more to say about it.
The US also likes to hold itself out as the ultimate symbol and standard of freedom and human rights. I know that the factual record has always been mixed on that, but I like to think that our hearts were generally in the right place. Now it’s looking like those words are just entirely empty rhetoric for our leaders and becoming little more than patchwork delusion for the rest of us.
How about being able to say, “As Americans we would never, ever do anything close to what Hussein did, we don’t torture, we don’t murder, we don’t defile any person’t religious beliefs.”
Not as bad as be damned. We should be able to hold our heads up high knowing that our country has a fringgin’ conscience and we should never have to wonder for a second what is being done in our name.