[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 65 (Tuesday, May 11, 2004)]
[House]
[Page H2739]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        RHETORIC OF WAR CRUSADE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 20, 2004, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is 
recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the previous speakers have talked about 
the attitude of the American soldier and the American public, and the 
rhetoric of war is what really gets us to where we are today in the 
situation in Iraq. When you dehumanize people, you can then do anything 
to them.
  It is my firm belief that this attitude starts at the very top. When 
we have someone who leads us who says that the leader of the other 
country is Hitler, raising all those images of a Holocaust and all the 
rest, or talks about the issues of being on a crusade, which raises all 
the issues of the various crusades that went through the Middle East 
back in the 11th and 12th century, we realize that the stage is being 
set psychologically for everyone in this country.
  I was reading the British press. One of their articles started, ``The 
media in this country is politely shocked at photos of Iraqis being 
tortured and humiliated by U.S. and British troops. A BBC1 news 
presenter says the picture seem to have been ``merely mementos.' '' 
Something one would laugh about in the family and then paste in the 
family album.
  Now, those young people, and I have been watching the hearings over 
in the Senate, the effort to limit this and say it is just seven or 
eight young people and perhaps a couple of lieutenants up the line but 
really it is a rogue operation, is simply not true. It runs all the way 
to the top.
  The decisions here have to be signed off. Anybody who has been in the 
military knows about the chain of command, and somebody does not sign 
off down at the lieutenant level and not bother to send it up to the 
captain or to the colonel or to the general. They all go up the line. 
They have all been signed off, one way or another, or somebody at the 
top said here is a blank check, do whatever you want, which of course 
they would deny. They would never say that, but then how do you explain 
that this behavior went on through this period of time?
  Another excuse that I hear thrown around here is that, well, they are 
not as bad as Saddam. Look what Saddam did. Well, since when is our 
standard Saddam Hussein? That clearly is not the standard by which we 
operate; but unfortunately, the attitude of the people who took us into 
this, the neo-cons in the administration, right next to the President, 
couple of them, Ken Adelman, Paul Wolfowitz, have spoken of snakes. If 
you want to talk about Iraqi people as snakes, I guess you can, but you 
pay a price in your own soul when you think of another human being as a 
snake or you talk about going over and draining the swamps in 
uncivilized parts of the world.
  The Arabs invented arithmetic. They invented the zero. They were some 
of the earliest astronomers. Do not tell me they have no civilization. 
But when you start to dehumanize them and put them down at this low, 
low level, then you send the message out verbally, nonverbally, whether 
it is in a memo, whether it is in written form, whether it is how you 
talk to your troops, you are giving permission to do what was done and 
to take pictures.
  Now, you do not take pictures of this to take home to your family 
album. Those pictures were done to humiliate. Everybody says, wait a 
minute, let me comb my hair before I have my picture taken. Everybody 
knows what a picture does because it grabs the moment in a way that you 
cannot change it. So when you take a picture of one of these events, 
you know what you are doing. You are doing it because somebody told you 
to do it or somewhere you have got the idea that what you were doing 
was already one or the other. Either that was an order to take those 
pictures, or else the atmosphere was such that people felt that they 
could take these pictures.
  We have a moment here in this country in which we can examine our own 
souls and our own hearts about how we let this happen. We all bear 
responsibility for it. Our leadership from the top on down, they always 
dehumanized.
  I remember during the Vietnam War, we had a lot of names for people 
who were from Vietnam, not very nice names. You would not use them 
today; and when that starts happening at the top, it goes down and we 
cannot end with putting seven soldiers in the brig. That will not be 
justice.

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