FROM PICADILLY TO THE ANTILLES My topic this week is London of course, what else could it be? I only know one person in London anymore, though I have a few relations scattered around other parts of the country, and I had been thinking of writing her sometime soon. Now I won’t wait. I guess actually I should call. If not, it seems like I’m automatically assuming she couldn’t possibly have been hurt. She didn’t assume that about us on 9/11. She called us here. Where do we go from here? Back to Guantanamo Bay, I’ll bet, if our lefticians get their way. If you follow these folks, that’s the big issue these days and they’re not going to be diverted from it by any sideshows in London or elsewhere. The New York Times is giving it blanket coverage of course. Nobody seems to have noticed that on June 12th they went overboard with a big spread in the Sunday magazine all about the torture chambers at Gitmo, illustrated by vivid photographs of the victims’ contortions as the red-hot irons or whatever are applied. They failed to mention that the “photographs” were actually staged scenes using professional models directed by none other than Andres Serrano, the geek who got the U.S. Government to subsidize one of his photos of a crucifix submerged in urine, titled “Piss Christ”. This was placed on exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, causing then-Mayor Giuliani to threaten to revoke the museum’s city subsidy if it wasn’t removed. Naturally a character like this winds up working for the Times. He’s shown the proper disrespect for Christian symbols. Now that he’s off the government gravy train, he can display his contempt for it and for the USA in general with the full support of the Times. It was love at first sight. I’m so happy for them. They were meant for each other. The question is, will Andres continue to confine his work to the media in which he’s been so successful or will he explore other possibilities for the development of his art, such as say, sewage? While the London attack will cause a shift of focus from Guantanamo, I hope that there will still be room for exposure of this outrage by the Times. The Guantanamo story as reported in the media is nothing but a planned distraction from the real situation that concerns us all a lot more than the alleged mistreatment of a gang of hole-and-corner assassins enjoying the kind of life only a bubble pipe of hashish was able to provide them before Uncle Sam’s magic carpet whisked them to their current tropic paradise. Now they’re complaining they thought they were flying down to Rio and found themselves at Rancho Notorious instead. They’ll get over it. As soon as the fighting stops, they’ll immigrate here, I guarantee, just like the Hessian soldiers did after fighting us in the Revolution (strikemepink 6/7/04). Their little adjustment problem is not what concerns us; the outcome of the war is what does. The Gitmo uproar is interfering with the pursuit of the campaign. The allegations of mistreatment serve as a pretext to conceal the actual agenda of the critics: stop Bush at all costs. They’ll have to find a better issue. The Guantanamo inmates are prisoners of war pure and simple. They were caught engaging in battle with weapons in their hands. The only thing differentiating them from the hundreds of thousands of war prisoners taken in WWII, et al., was that they weren’t wearing uniforms, only the nightshirts so fashionable in the mysterious East. In normal wars that’s enough to get you executed as a guerrilla, not bring on free transportation to an enchanted island, so they’re luckier than they deserve to be. In WWII the U.S. alone housed 250,000 prisoners of war, and nobody ever thought of holding hearings on them to find out if they were really German soldiers or not. If they had, the hearings would still be going on. The idea of holding them now on a bunch of characters caught shooting at our men to find out if they really meant it or not, is a notion that only could have been dreamed up at a methadone clinic. Let’s have no more of it. This doesn’t mean that we ignore these people and cut off communication with them except for what’s necessary in the running of a prison; on the contrary we should maximize interaction with them in the interest of cooling down the hate they feel for us. The best way to interact is not to -- not to seek them out and try to ingratiate ourselves -- but to treat them impersonally without hatred and with as much consideration as may be possible in a prison setting. That won’t make them our friends -- although that may come in time -- but it will earn us their respect where Abu Ghraib treatment will only inflame their hatred. This approach worked with our quarter million German prisoners in WWII who went home Pro-American, and while Moslems are a tougher nut to crack, we shouldn’t assume that they’re so different that they’ll be totally unresponsive to decent treatment. No prisoners were more “different” than the handful of Japanese that Americans captured in WWII. The Japs were all fanatics, it was said, they’re only captured if an explosion knocks them unconscious, otherwise they fight to the death for the emperor. Talk? They don’t even want to live when they’re prisoners, it’s such a disgrace. A Marine major named Sherwood Moran refused to buy into this stereotype. He knew better, having spent forty years in Japan as a missionary where he learned the language and the customs. His thesis was that every soldier had a story that he wanted to tell. Treat him like a human being, be patient with him, gain his confidence, and it will come out eventually. It worked for him and the Nisei soldiers he trained in his methods. Moran wrote up his recommendations in 1943. Sixty years later a group of Marine intelligence officers posted them on their website for the guidance of interrogators in the Iraq war. Unfortunately the news didn’t penetrate Abu Ghraib. In the same year the Atlantic Monthly printed a long article on interrogation which devoted a lot of space to the work of a Manhattan detective, Jerry Giorgio. He wasn’t asked if he knew about Major Moran’s work, but he described his own interrogation techniques in almost the same language used by the major. He didn’t play Good Cop and Bad Cop, he said, but only Good Cop. That way he got results that made him the top New York authority on confessions. The secret? Every prisoner, he said, had a story he wanted to tell. Somewhere up above Major Moran was smiling when he heard that.
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