Colonel Klink

New Days that will Live in Infamy?

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
06/12/06
http://zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/klink.htm

 

It seems that in every major war, someone says something that, at the very least, they eventually wish they could take back. Neville Chamberlain came to regret predicting there would be “peace in our time” just as General Westmoreland learned there was no light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam. Hitler promised his Reich would last a thousand years, and it was gone in three. Doug MacArthur did a quick fade away after learning that it didn’t matter if he thought invading China was a good idea. (Good thing Truman fired his ass, too; if Iraq is any example, we would still be fighting in China today, fifty odd years later).

But the remarks that really get remembered are the ones that were obviously cataclysmically stupid the moment they were uttered. “In order to save the village, it was necessary to destroy it.” The Congressman who promised, in the days following Pearl Harbor, that America would destroy the Japanese Empire in three weeks.

The occupation of Iraq has come a bumper crop of ill-advised, if not flat-out idiotic remarks. “Bring it on.” “Shock and awe.” “We know exactly where these weapons are located.” “Mission accomplished.” “Freedom is on the march.” “We will impose a Democratic government on Iraq.”

Of course, this war has an advantage. Never before in American history has America been led into war by a pack of feckless ideological morons who think that it doesn’t matter how stupid or unconnected with reality a statement is just so long as it sounds good in a ten-second bite on the evening news. Most of the remarks you hear, like “Freedom is on the march,” actually sound pretty good until you think about them for fifteen seconds.

Neither has America had leaders quite so willing to lie about what they are up to.

Or, for that matter, have they had as much reason to lie about what they are up to.

The world has seen this many times before. The pronouncements in each issue of Izvestia and Pravda were a source of mordant amusement among the Russians and Eastern Europeans in the days of the USSR. The claims and lies of dictators such as Hitler and Mao, and yes, Saddam – are the stuff of legend.

But Americans, unused to dictatorships, are still trying to figure out why the government appears to have taken leave of its senses.

If the first casualty of war is truth, the first casualty of dictatorship is sanity.

Take for example, the stunner that came from the commandant of the concentration camp at Gitmo the other day.

The commandant, a Rear Admiral with the imaginative name of Harry Harris, must have done something to piss off top command. Commander of a prison camp is a shit detail under the best of circumstances, and this command is one that disgraces America and the Navy just by the mere fact of its existence.

You don’t put your best men in charge of such camps. You put your Colonel Klinks in there. Klink was the commander of Stalag 13 in the old “Hogan’s Heroes” television series.

For those not familiar with the show, Klink was a thin, nervous and humorless man who had clearly been promoted beyond his level of competence and lived in abject fear of his superiors – granted, a display of good survival instincts in the madness of Nazi Germany. Klink was weak and ineffectual, and nevertheless carried about a self image that he was effective, loyal, and loved and respected by those under him – a self-image with little or no basis in reality.

Since the show was written for a target audience of sixth graders, the personality type that Klink was based on was sanitized. Men like Klink tend to be craven toward superiors, but make up for it with bullying, usually capricious and always vicious, against those unfortunate enough to fall under their authority. This would include their own troops, as well as the prisoners. (A good example of the pathology can be found in an excellent 1965 movie, “The Hill”, featuring Harry Andrews as Regimental Sgt. Maj. Bert Wilson in a British discipline camp in Liberia. Playing against Sean Connery).

The American concentration camp, purportedly for “terrorists,” has been a stain on American honor from the day it was opened. Thousands of people have been held there, and most were found, after years, to be guilty of no crime and released. (Only ten have even been charged with any crime at all, and none for terrorist-related activities). Those remaining are not much more likely to have been actually involved in such activities. Putsch, who is something of a Colonel Klink himself, has put the camp outside of American law and declared it exempt from international law. People are held there incommunicado, without charges and without any prospects of ever getting a fair trial or a release date. The conditions aren’t as physically harsh as Hitler’s work camps or Stalin’s gulags, but the emotional and psychological tortures are unremitting, and involve continuous surveillance (no privacy whatsoever) in featureless enclosures that are brightly lit 24 hours a day seven days a week.

Not surprisingly, it is a troubled place. There have been hunger strikes, riots, sit-down strikes, and attempts at complete news blackouts. Reports of force-feeding of convicts, desecration of qu’arans and other such incidents are nearly constant.

I strongly suspect that at some point in the future, those prisoners will come to be regarded, if not as heroes, at least as victims. America, on the other hand, will not fare so well.

Forced feeding. Stuffing a tube down a man’s throat and forcing him to eat against his will. These are American soldiers doing this.

Three men – two from Saudi Arabia and one from Yeman – died last week. Colonel Klink says they were suicides, which is odd, given the bright lighting and the fact that bedding is removed during daylight hours, and of course, the constant surveillance. But he says it was suicide. Given that these men have been leading an in-prison resistance against the disgraceful treatment they are receiving at the hands of the Americans, that’s a little hard to believe.

But that’s not all Colonel Klink had to say. He went on to say that the suicides were an “act of war” against America. The exact quote is, “"They hung themselves with fabricated nooses made out of clothes and bed sheets [...] They have no regard for human life. Neither ours nor their
own. I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us.”

You read that right. Suicide is an act of war. I don’t even think the Romans claimed that at Massada, and it’s unlikely the Mexicans saw the defenders of the Alamo in that light. But these three desperate men, stripped of all rights and dignity and probably without any true cause, died. This was an act of war against the fatherland! Someone must be punished!

Probably that means the other prisoners. Three nights without sleep, or something equally nice.

That’s just how Colonel Klinks think.

Time will tell if it is how Americans in general are beginning to think.