If you’ve spent any time in a high school debate chamber, a classroom with any interest in media literacy, or you’ve put the news on some time in the last two years, you’ve probably heard the old Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” For those of us deep in these cultures, you’d probably swear that a cranial x-ray would show the words etched into the inside of your skull, repeated and deep enough anyone would think it was done by Jack Torrance during a particularly long winter vacation.
And yet, regardless of repetition that would make a broken record blush, facts have remained decidedly unstable things.
Look no further for evidence of this fact than Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post’s fact-checker, writing in the The Daily Beast about how Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) questioning of US Special Envoy to Venezuela, Elliot Abrams, “backfired.”
Glenn Kessler’s Temper Tantrum
The article itself mostly records the facts of Omar’s exchange with Abrams before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, but not without Kessler’s impudent whining laced throughout. He makes sure to note that he qualifies Omar’s inquiry as “questions” in scare-quotes because it is clear that he actually has no intent of taking Omar seriously. Even when she herself mostly did a rendition of a live fact-check on a person who Kessler concedes in the article “had pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress pertaining to the Iran-Contra debacle.”
Kessler even gets so far into his childish mentality that he observes, “Omar opened up by calling Abrams “Mr. Adams,” which no one corrected…” Did you hear that? The sound of the the air leaving the room because a sitting member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee didn’t treat a man convicted of lying to congress – a man with no actual title to respect to begin with – with a facade of apologetic civility?
Let’s skip past all the racial implications of a white man condescending to one of two Muslim women in the House of Representatives for not being courteous enough and get right to the nitty gritty of Kessler’s apologism for war crimes. Because despite Kessler’s dismissal of Abrams crimes, any person with a remedial understanding of South American or American history – or even merely a functioning google-search – can tell you that Kessler’s hand-wringing and scare-quoting does not change the fact that Abrams is a war criminal.
Rep. Omar’s line of questioning should have made as much clear to Kessler, had he not been wiping sweat from his brow and tears from his eyes as he no doubt looked on with impotent rage while a member of D.C.’s foreign policy consensus might be made to actually face up to the horror they have wrought.
Even given Kessler’s wailing and gnashing of teeth, he can not bring himself to deny that Abrams was objectively convicted of lying to congress about the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. During that massacre, of which Abrams is responsible for the training and arming of the Atlacatl Battalion, the entire civilian population of El Mozote was imprisoned, tortured, and then murdered. Men were separated from women and children and then hung or decapitated. Women and children were raped before facing the same fate.
War Crimes, Shmoar Crimes
To properly understand the horror of this massacre it is necessary to understand Abrams and why people like Kessler feel the way they do about him. Abrams was convicted of lying to congress about the massacre, given two mere misdemeanors, and afterward he spent the next 30+ years hanging around D.C. securing for himself other well-paying government jobs. His direct role in facilitating the massacre has never been held against him, not until Rep. Omar displayed more courage in the span of a single questioning session than the rest of Congress has in all the years since 1981. He was not convicted of ordering and facilitating war crimes in El Salvador and genocide in Guatemala. He was convicted of lying about it, given a slap on the wrist, and then went right back to what he was doing before.
Kessler is mostly mad that someone, anyone, with any sort of visibility or power in our nation’s capitol could look at such an arrangement and say that this guy is actually a monster who has no place in government.
Consensus by Community
He’s not alone either. The D.C. foreign policy consensus is held up by both sides of the aisle. By both credulous and outright mendacious careerists whose personal fortunes and future employment actually depend on people like Abrams not answering for their crimes.
This Tom Scocca article does a good job of collating all the other foreign policy professionals that came out of the woods Evil Dead-style to defend the good honor of a man who multiple U.N.-recognized Truth and Reconciliation commissions have directly linked to war crimes. A professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government wanted to appeal to people’s decency and asked that we “not tear people down.” (Perhaps notably he only mentioned tearing them down, not decapitating, torturing, or raping them.) Dave Harden, a board member of an organization called “Kids4Peace” and a former USAID assistant administrator, implored people to “see the best – rather than the worst – in people.” Fellow Washington Post contributor to Glenn Kessler, Max Boot dismissed the “disgraceful ad hominem attacks” on his “colleague.” A professor of international politics, Daniel Drezner, wrote in The Washington Post somewhat in defense of Omar’s questioning, ceding its origin in what some may call “the objective material history of reality,” but mostly so he could then dismiss her concerns about the present administration’s Venezuela policy.
Drezner’s back-handed defense is perhaps the most elucidating of How-Things-Are-Suppose-to-Work. Yes, the current administration went out of its way to dig up a guy credibly implicated in genocidal war crimes, but should that stop us from blindly accepting the administration narrative now? This is to say nothing of Syria or Iraq or Libya or every other case over the last 60 years where the interventionist narrative has been proven definitively wrong and only led to more, and worse, crimes against humanity.
The Way Things Work (Around Here)
While Drezner’s response is at best half-hearted and wanting – almost pitiable for how pathetic it is in challenging the actual injustice present – Boot’s makes more clear the way things typically work. He slandered Omar as defending the Maduro regime, something which was never brought up during her questioning, but it’s a predictable move from a guy who has been around long enough to have slandered opposition to the war in Iraq as uniformly Saddamist. We are to believe the country that can not hold its internationally recognizable war criminals accountable for anything is still the Noble and Good police of the world. By the way, we reintroduced chattel slavery to Libya. Max Boot is either intellectually unfit to be a published commentator on American foreign policy, or a knowing supporter of his “colleagues” who demanded the rape and torture of women and children. Either should be disqualifying from being a regular contributor to the pages of a “paper of record,” and yet it has not, nor has it impinged on his career in any way.
If it seems I’m implying that this willingness to pardon American monstrosity is actually the reason that Boot can call Abrams a colleague at the Council of Foreign Relations to begin with, it’s because I am.
And yet, still the most embarrassing defense of both Abrams and American foreign policy consensus came from Kelly Magsamen, the Vice President of National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress. Magsamen’s career itself is a stunning critique of bipartisan support for bloodshed, as her twitter bio will tell you she has bounced around from the National Security Council to the Department of Defense and State Department under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Though she has since deleted the tweet, it’s plain viciousness and obliviousness to the circumstances got it roundly denounced before being archived through, probably, no fewer than a couple thousand screenshots. Here it is in its full glory:
And here’s her limp-wristed non-apology. I could write you a book on these two tweets alone. They rival Hemingway, or Pynchon at his greatest, for their ability to pile a survey of an infinite number of atrocities into a few dozen syllables. The defense of Abrams as a “fierce advocate for human rights and democracy.” The writing off of sponsoring and ordering genocide as a “serious professional mistake.” The utterly blinkered assertion that he’s been held accountable. Topped off by the delectable, implicit scolding of Abrams critics as simply partisan – perfectly echoing Kessler’s sentiments on the subject – as she is both a liberal(!) and fair(!!). Kessler retweeted her inane defense of a war criminal, of course.
After deletion, she continued to explain away people’s critique of Abrams by saying they “understandably felt” she was glossing over the horrific actions he designed, facilitated, and ordered. Which she clarified was not her intent. As if to say, “It’s not that I’m defending a war criminal – I am merely acknowledging our shared goals and his critics own short-comings – you simply understood me to be defending a war criminal.” There is enough mendacity and design here in these two utterly unintelligent tweets that it is impossible to not lapse into aesthetic critique most associated with Patrick Bateman appreciating business cards. The tasteless deflection, the implied condescension, the assertion of bipartisan – and thusly correct – reasoning. My god, it even doubles down on defense of Abrams’ character.
A Fact-Check you can Cash
So in conclusion, we here at the FOUR-LTTR WORD FACT CHKR give the US foreign policy professionals defenses, and Glenn Kessler’s irate declaration that a critic reading Abrams’ book somehow diminishes Rep. Omar’s questioning, a stunning – and heretofore ungiven – Five Pinochet rating on their apologism for war crimes and war criminals. Here you go pals, you earned this one.
Kyle is a four-letter word 