Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on the inherent delusions of the American corporate media and posits: the world looks at us with contempt and slams the exceptionalist mindset:
I’m asking this sincerely, not rhetorically:… is there anything other than extreme self-delusion, grounded in blinding self-regard… (i.e., self-decreed exceptionalism), that can explain this?… … The Washington Post Editorial Page today is demanding that the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran include not only efforts to curb their nuclear program but also:… … “at least one other item should be on the agenda: the government’s recent repression of domestic opposition, and in particular its prosecution of Western citizens.”… … Here’s what they specifically have in mind:
“One way to avoid this pitfall is for the United States to insist on discussing the human rights issues raised by the show trials. The obvious lack of due process for leading regime opponents contravenes international human rights standards that Iran claims to respect.”
So we’re supposed to roll into these negotiations righteously complaining about Iran’s “obvious lack of due process.”… For the last eight years and counting, we’ve been imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims around the world with no charges of any kind.… Keeping people who have never been charged with any crime shackled in orange jumpsuits and locked in cages for years on a Cuban island has become our national symbol.… Just yesterday, the… Obama administration demanded that a court rule it has the power to abduct people anywhere in the world, ship them to Afghanistan, and keep them indefinitely imprisoned there with no trial of any kind — which is exactly what we’ve been doing for years and still are… (in a dank and nasty prison which happens to be right over Iran’s Eastern border).… Our current President just recently advocated and is currently devising a scheme of so-called “preventive detention”… whereby he’d be empowered to lock up people indefinitely for crimes they might commit in the future.… We continue to abduct people from all over the world and ship them to third-party countries for interrogation and detention (“renditions”) without any pretense of due process. … And right over Iran’s own Western border, we not only continue to occupy Iraq, but maintain prisons in which thousands of people are imprisoned by our military without any charges of any kind — including an Iraqi journalist who works for Reuters who was ordered released by an Iraqi court yet continues to languish in an American prison in Iraq, merely one of numerous foreign journalists we imprisoned for years, in Iraq and elsewhere, with no charges at all.