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THE SPIN MACHINE :: 06/12/06 I was flipping through the paper this morning when I happened upon an article that caught my eye. "Three Prisoners Commit Suicide at Guantanamo," read the headline. Now, this wasn't particularly shocking to me - any heinous prison is likely to have its share of suicide. What I found shocking was the U.S. government's response. The presiding military official, Admiral Harry Harris, had this to say: "[The inmates] have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of assymetrical warfare against us." The U.S. government's spin machine has come into play once again. Oh, they didn't kill themselves because we hurt them beyond human tolerance, deprived them of all their rights, and took away any hope of escape - it's just those clever terrorists, who have no regard for human life, trying to make the U.S. look bad. Honestly, this just makes me angry. It seems like anything wrong the government does (economic problems, losing a war, killing innocents, wire-tapping, etc...) can be turned into either a non-issue or be blamed on someone else (either those nasty Dems or some sort of Arab country). The sad thing is that everyone buys into it. The average American will blindly believe what the government tells them, and can't seem to see through such obvious crap as "assymetrical warfare." And so it is. The American political system is locked into a structure based entirely on its appearance. The fact that everyone gets to vote can be either the greatest strength or the greatest weakness of democracy. When no one can see past the spin, no one can think long enough about politics to make intelligent decisions, and no one ever complains loudly enough about what's going on, it seems fairly obvious which it is. |