One thing that happens when you're a hitchhiker is that you learn to read newspapers and other mass-media in a totally different way.

Many people have a hard time understanding, in this age of "free flow of information", CNN and supposed globalization, how parochial and controlled their access to news really is. Phil Hughes sent me a short email today which really brought this home. It was about the gathering held yesterday in Managua which celebrated the ouster 25 years ago of Nicaragua's US-backed dictator, Anastazio Somoza. Phil said he could find nothing in English about the event, and very little outside Nicaragua in Spanish. I did a little better, finding this story from BBCNews. Note that this article says there were 1,000 people at the service. However, this article (Spanish) says there were more than 300,000 people at the main gathering in Managua. As Phil points out, in percentage terms for a country that would be equivalent to 14 million people showing up for something in the US. But, it's not news in the US.

In the BBC article, there is a pretty much ho-hum treatment of US president Reagan's acts which "left thousands dead". This article (again in Spanish) paints quite a different picture: "The civil war....left 50,000 victims, among the dead, wounded, disappeared, mutilated and orphaned."

Certainly Nicaraguans have a lot to be thankful for these days - for one thing, the US military has moved on from the torture practiced in their country to the much more amusing (for Vogons at least) practices now being done in Iraq. As this article from 1997 points out,

...the American people are the ones most thoroughly kept in the dark about the unsavory secrets of the past half century. When bits and pieces of that history do leak out or are forced out by diligent journalists, the stories often are constructed narrowly, denied by the government or attacked by major media outlets. The larger picture is never brought into focus.

What was actually done in Nicaragua (and other countries)? Further on in this article:

But the U.S. government continues to conceal its complicity in these crimes, as well as its role in the decades long orgy of murder, torture and rape against hundreds of thousands of civilians who perished in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration even supported the Argentine military as it trained the Nicaraguan contra rebels in Honduras.



Over the past year, however, evidence has dribbled out that the CIA and the Pentagon contributed directly to these and other human rights violations. In January, The Baltimore Sun discovered a 1983 CIA manual that taught psychological torture techniques to five Latin American security forces. "While we do not stress the use of coercive techniques, we want to make you aware of them and the proper way to use them," the manual coyly advised.



Yet, in the major U.S. media, the CIA's torture manual did not rate as front-page news. The Washington Post stuck its pick-up of the story on A9 and the New York Times ran its version on Al l. Both newspapers played up the fact, too, that the CIA had revised the manual in 1985 to discourage use of these "coercive techniques," although the methods were still described, including how to induce "physical weakness" by subjecting the victim to extremes of heat and cold and deprivation of food and sleep.



But the manual was only watered down in 1985 because of a controversy that erupted in October 1984 around stories that I wrote for The Associated Press on the CIA's so-called "assassination" manual for the contras. That "psychological operations" manual advocated "selective use of violence" to "neutralize" civilian opponents and arranging other deaths for political advantage.



The Baltimore Sun's new torture disclosures also follow the Pentagon's admission last year that the U.S. Army's School of the Americas used manuals that advocated torture, murder and coercion. Those Pentagon manuals were prepared in 1982 for training of Latin American officers at the school which has graduated some of the Hemisphere's worst human rights abusers, including El Salvador's "death squad" commander Roberto D'Aubuisson and Panama's Manuel Noriega. Clearly, these manuals were not isolated incidents, or simple "mistakes."



Indeed, the evidence points to conscious U.S. complicity in widespread human rights violations. Yet not a single U.S. official has been held to account for involving the United States in these serious offenses against humanity.

Now, the US wasn't really running the show directly in these countries; it was only doing the training, and sometimes indirectly. Currently in Iraq we're seeing the experts show us how it's really supposed to be done.

 Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker reporter who first broke the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, recently spoke at an ACLU convention. He has seen the pictures and the videotapes the American media has not yet shown. "The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking," said Hersh. "And this is your government at war."



    Hersh described the prison scene as, "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway," and that there has been, "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."



    Reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American prisons have been public knowledge since the release of the Taguba Report. Recently, however, some 106 annexes to the report, previously classified, have also been released. U.S. News and World Report detailed the sum of what is contained in these annexes in an article titled 'Hell on Earth.'



    In it, U.S. News says, "The abuses took place, the files show, in a chaotic and dangerous environment made even more so by the constant pressure from Washington to squeeze intelligence from detainees. Riots, prisoner escapes, shootings, corrupt Iraqi guards, unsanitary conditions, rampant sexual misbehavior, bug-infested food, prisoner beatings and humiliations, and almost-daily mortar shellings from Iraqi insurgents--according to the annex to General Taguba's report, that pretty much sums up life at Abu Ghraib." According to coalition intelligence officers cited in a Red Cross report from last May, between 70% to 90% of Iraqi detainees held in these prisons were arrested "by mistake." That means they were innocent.



    The orders to treat prisoners in this fashion were not manufactured by the few "bad apples" we have heard about, but came from up on high. Brig. Gen Janis Karpinski, former commander of Abu Ghraib and now scapegoat for the abuses, says the truth about where the orders came from would be revealed in the trials of the accused soldiers. Memos ordering the abuse of prisoners were signed off on by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. The Justice Department and Mr. Bush's senior legal advisor went out of their way to craft arguments justifying this, claiming that torture isn't really torture and that the President is basically above the law.



    Mr. Hersh will revisit this issue within the next several weeks. In the meantime, the American news media has an obligation to report on this situation. Photographic and videotape evidence of this torture is currently in the hands of the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the U.S. Congress and the White House. It must be released.

It remains to be seen whether or not it will be released.

What's the point of all this and what does all this have to do with hitchhiking? I guess I need to connect the dots here. If you are a hitchhiker, you're more likely to see that your planet is about to be annihilated, and you're more likely to be ready to move if Vogons do go into orbit around it.

From reading the above articles, it's fairly easy to come to the conclusion that reality is what you decide it is, so you'd better pay attention to the Vogons and not try to pretend they're not there. The next thing to notice is that when you're dealing with Vogons, you need to be very careful and understand just how dangerous the situation might become. After Abu Graib, any poetry recitals look pretty inoffensive.

What I wish someone would explain to me is the disconnect or denial that I see in people who live in the US. If it's Ok for their government to torture and kill people (for whatever justification), why do they think that this same government would hesitate to use the same tactics on its own citizens? Some people I've spoken to about this say that it's because people in the US are racist; by this they mean that to an American, US lives have more value than Nicaraguans' or Iraqis' lives. I don't believe this for a moment because I know a lot of Americans, and from what I've seen, Americans keep race and class consciousness to a minimum. My own opinion is that somehow Americans have created a magic mental wall which keeps the logical conclusions from being drawn. They truly believe that their government is only making mistakes, and that they wouldn't dare do such things to US citizens.

To me, as a hitchhiker, I see absolutely no reason to believe that. Unless someone can convince me otherwise, I'm going to believe that it's an amazing case of mass self-delusion; and that the US media continually feeds that comfortable delusion with very large shovels.