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SOME PEOPLE HAVE IT AND SOME PEOPLE DON'T
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An interesting week. The highlight for me was Rudy Giuliani's testimony to
the Kean Commission describing his own movements on 9/11/01. There were
hecklers in the audience, but none while he was speaking. You could have heard a
pin drop. People were transfixed. What a story it was. Going to the WTC,
seeing people jump from the 102nd floor, hearing the bodies hit the sidewalk,
being told helicopters couldn't reach people trapped above the fire, they were as
good as dead, shaking hands and saying "God bless you" to a fire chief later
killed, then to a priest also killed, going looking for a headquarters to set
up a command post to replace the planned one at WTC, being driven out of one
by concussion and smoke, breaking into a firehouse to telephone the White
House, no American mayor has ever had a story like that to tell.
He told it perfectly. No emotionalism, no melodrama, simply matter of fact.
It made a fitting climax to the hearings, which can now be ended without
returning an indictment against anybody. Warning of attacks were flying freely
for years before 9/11, but none of them pinpointed exactly the form the attacks
would take. Nothing like them had ever been done. Plane hijacking had been
suppressed, so we thought. Kamikaze pilots belonged to World War II. Nineteen
of them cooperating to hijack four airliners at the same time was
unimaginable. The one chance to intercept them, the Moussaoui case, was ruined by the
interference of lawyers, and the information was never acted on.
Rudy got the kind of attention a Broadway star would kill for, but when he
was finished, a few dissenters emerged like the creature from the black lagoon,
clawing away. The most egregious was Jimmy Breslin, a writer who has
dedicated his life to Giuliani-hate. Rudy had achieved the unbelievable feat of
reducing violent crime in New York by 66% in his eight years in office. There were
two problems associated with this. One was the fact that most of those
arrested were members of racial minorities; the other was that Rudy had neglected to
notify the public that his full-court press against crime was bound to result
in a mistake here and there, cops not being any more infallible than other
human beings.
Breslin seized on these incidents as proof that Giuliani was carrying out
another Holocaust against blacks and Hispanics and made the welkin ring with his
high-pitched screams in print. When I was young even right-wingers thought
that Westbrook Pegler was overwrought in his pursuit of the Roosevelts, but
Breslin's Giuliani fixation made Captain Ahab look like a dilettante and Pegler
like a hobbyist.
As he was in his other feuds, Breslin was careless with the facts in his
attack on Giuliani's testimony. Today there was the usual correction by his
paper, buried in the midsection of the news. It seems that Jimmy was "mistaken"
about the radios carried by the firemen on 9/11. They were not the same ones
that had failed in an incident in March of that year. They had been replaced.
Somehow Jimmy got it wrong, just as he got Cardinal Egan's travel schedule
wrong in another controversy, and Bishop Murphy's activities wrong in some
other one, and God knows what else. Just innocent errors corrected by the paper
later on. Strangely, the errors never work in favor of Breslin's target. He
even had the gall to deny that Rudy got WTC dust on his suit 9/11, when all the
rest of us saw plenty of it.
The other sensation was the continuation of the flap over prisoner torture by
our troops in Iraq. At the end of the week some new photos came out,
reinforcing the impact of the first ones with their images of cretinous GI's
tormenting helpless detainees, thereby upholding American ideals of equal treatment
for all men, due process of law, presumption of innocence, avoidance of cruel
and unusual punishments, and all the rest of that kind of foolery, which is how
these soldiers regard it. Presumably their tune has changed now that the shoe
is on the other foot and we will hear their lawyers pleading that they be
afforded all the rights they denied to their victims. Of course they must get
them, but it's too bad they didn't learn about them sooner, when it might have
done some good.
I take it a little hard when these things happen because torture gets under
my skin. I can still be affected by movies that show the outrages of Japanese
prisoner of war camps in World War II, or by the story of the Hanoi Hilton or
other hellholes created by characters who rival monkeys in their ability to
copy the technology of more civilized societies, but revert to the primitive in
their behavior toward people under their heel. They know about civilization
all right, but they only choose to adopt the part of it that serves their
purposes while they ignore its foundations. They exemplify everything America's
against, making it hard to take when Americans begin to do the same.
So I don't like to see Americans being put in the same bag with the Viet
Cong, the North Koreans, the Chinese Reds, the Gestapo and all the other sadists
who get pleasure out of inflicting pain on people who are unable to resist.
That's what it all comes to in the end. We think of ourselves as people who
side with the underdog, not kick him in the ribs. I like it better that way.
Who's responsible? Maybe nobody, I don't know. By that I mean nobody in
the chain of command, leaving only the perpetrators themselves responsible. A
very significant fact is that the infamous pictures that were taken were done
with private cameras. That points to a spontaneous action by enlisted men
acting on their own. At an organized event there either would have been no
pictures allowed or professional pictures would have been taken, the first
possibility being much the more likely one.
How could the soldiers have gotten away with this if no officers knew about
it? How could they have taken all those pictures (supposedly now in the
thousands) with no one else in on it? All I can say about that is that a lot goes
on in the army and in military organizations generally that the officers never
hear about. I was involved in such organizations most of my life and I know
this. "When the cat's away, the mice will play". I think we will hear the
truth about this as the prosecution proceeds. I don't think anyone is going to
promise the soldiers leniency if they cover up for their officers, and in fact
I think it's much more likely that it will work the other way, just as it
does in civilian prosecutions -- the leniency is earned by giving up the
higher-ups. The hitch here is that some proof must also be produced and I don't
think the soldiers have it.
On with the dance.
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