Obsessive Compulsive Media Disorder
Charles Johnson
Wed Apr 27, 2005 at 5:06 pm PDT • Views: 311
The great thing about claiming to be a man known only for having a hood over your head is that there’s no way for anyone to prove otherwise—and PBS will still give you all the air time you need to spread anti-American propaganda: PBS ‘Now’ Visits Guantanamo Prison. (Hat tip: efuseakay.)
A former prisoner who says he was the man under the black hood in the gruesome photo from Abu Ghraib speaks out on this week’s edition of the PBS newsmagazine “Now.”
“I remember the box, the pipes, even the two wires,” Haj Ali says in reference to the photo which, with others like it, showed the world how U.S. soldiers were abusing Iraqi inmates.
“They made me stand on a box with my hands hooked to wires and shocked me with electricity,” Ali recalls through an interpreter in his first in-depth American TV interview. “It felt like my eyeballs were coming out of their sockets. I fell, and they put me back up again for more.” [Every other report on this incident has stated that the wires were not hooked up to a source of electricity. In other words, this story is a blatant fabrication. But don’t expect PBS or the SF Chronicle to mention this. —ed.]
Then mayor of a Baghdad suburb and a member of the ruling Baath Party, he was snatched off the street in late 2003 and transported to the prison, despite denying involvement in the insurgency. During his almost three months at Abu Ghraib, Ali’s family had no idea where he was.
This media obsession with Abu Ghraib is beginning to concern me. It just doesn’t seem healthy. Maybe it’s time for an intervention?
UPDATE at 4/27/05 6:47:48 pm:
Dr. Sanity concurs with my concerns about obsession, but offers a slightly different diagnosis: The Paranoid Style.
Frank says: