Dopey Gitmo "expert" and author Mahvish Rukhsana Khan

I don't want to belabor this particular point, since it has nothing at all to do with my part of South Florida, per se, the usual main course on this blog, but I also didn't want to let it be like the 1,001 other things I've wanted to comment on here or at South Beach Hoosier over the past 18 months and never got around to mentioning for whatever reasons, usually timeliness.
Instead, I'm just going to say it and leave it to a future post to pick up the conversation.
And then get some sleep.


After watching the series finale of the excellent ITV WWII series, Foyle's War, on PBS as part of their Masterpiece Mystery-about veteran Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle and his colleagues batting crimes and mysteries in the seaside town of Hastings during the war- roughly about 12:30 a.m., I flipped over to C-SPAN's Book TV to see who was on.
(See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/foyleswar/ , http://www.foyleswar.com/ and http://www.booktv.org/ )

The segment airing was After Words: Mahvish Rukhsana Khan author of "My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me" interviewed by Nancy Snow, senior research fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy which I'd seen parts of earlier in the day.

For purposes of information, while I was growing-up in the 1970's in North Miami Beach, I lived in a house next door to a wonderfully kind older Central European couple who loved gardening, both of whom were concentration camp survivors.
We had many, many conversations, the moral and philosophical points of which remain with me today.

Two of the undercurrents of the last episode of Foyle's War, "All Over," were the growing sense of anticipation that the war would be ending -V-E Day- and the growing anti-German sentiment and sense of revulsion following the news of the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp and what had transpired there.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005224

So, half-asleep, I was not quite prepared to suddenly hear recent law school grad and newly minted author Mahvish Rukhsana Khan -whom you and I have never heard of for good reason- express her p.o.v. that, after roughly 30 visits to Cuba, she really thought the U.S. treated the Gitmo detainees just like the Nazis treated Jews.

Even more improbably, if possible, after admitting that -shocker!- she never met any of the high-risk detainees, she expressed her disappointment at finding out that a man she was to meet accused of being either an Al Qaeda/Taliban member/sympathizer(?), actually looked much more like a kindly old man, not one of the 9/11 hijackers.

As it turned out, the man apparently had been a pediatrician in Afghanistan after the Russians retreated, and Khan went on at some length to talk about how middle-class the doctor was in his personal views.

Yet Khan admitted that while she was in Gitmo, she really wanted, perhaps even secretly hoped for, was to see a detainee who more closely approximated the physical appearance of the popular image of what a 'terrorist" looked like, but she never did.

A few moments later, almost as if I'd written it for entirely comic purposes, like two ships passing in the night, moderator Nancy Snow, a Cal State-Fullerton prof, expressed the p.o.v. that the truth is always much more complicated than simple black and white.
Who could argue with that simple maxim?

Yet Snow said it in such a smug, condescending way that it was readily apparent to me that she intended the remark to stand as a chastisement to U.S. popular opinion.
As if we were all just rabble, rolling around like a marble in an old car's trunk, completely unaware of any of the the complexities of the matter that someone of Snow's station knew implicitly.

What made it funny from my perspective was the fact that it was author Khan, whom Snow had already been interviewing for over a half hour, who had expressed the un-sophisticated stereotypical B&W p.o.v. she'd criticized, not some imaginary straw man named USA or the viewers.

Snow was so insistent on playing the role of the moral scold that she didn't let the facts get in the way.
You almost have to admire her, even while you're glad you were never stuck in one of her classes, since it must be sheer torture.
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One more general criticism before I hit the sack:
Can I be the only person in the country who's noticed the steady decline of Book TV's interviewers and moderators?
They seem to be putting just about anyone on C-SPAN 2 these days, and that's not to even get at how bad the Book TV website has gotten, with LESS complete information available on the books there than ever before.


Nancy Snow is a senior research fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy. She is also an associate communications professor at California State University, Fullerton and adjunct communications professor at the University of Southern California. Ms. Snow is the author of three books, including "Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech & Opinion Control Since 9/11 public