"Good Night, And Good Luck" - Of Witch Hunts, Red Scares, and Guantanamo

 
George Clooney shows that false patriotism is the first refuge of a scoundrel.

 

By James J. Murtagh, M.D.

Warning: movie spoiler alert. If you have not seen "Good Night, And Good Luck," consider seeing it before reading

And the {Scape}Goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a Land not inhabited." (Leviticus 16:22)

Was Salem 1659 an aberration? How badly did the red scare harm our nation's security? George Clooney has produced a spectacular allegory that explains why citizens must forever be vigilant if they want to live free, and that the  press must have backbone.

Clooney shows, as Miller showed previously in "The Crucible," that in desperate times, citizens are depressingly predictable, and burn for short cuts and scapegoats. Mobs lynch scapegoats, or burn them at stakes, or torture them, intern them in camps, or simply blacklist them. Good people look the other way, rationalizing  desperate times make due process impossible. But when are times not desperate?

The press fears the mob, not wanting to be accused of obstructing, or being liberal, or biased in another way, or unpopular, or to lose subscriptions or advertisers. No press wants to be called a scapegoat lover, witch lover, commie lover, etc. This is how national tragedies occur. And when the press repeatedly forgets how it failed during a prior emergency, the cycle worsens.

"Good Night, And Good Luck," brilliantly shows Edward R. Morrow's fight against McCarthy. America faced the very real threat of the cold war and the nuclear arms race. However, unscrupulous McCarthy escalated risk, exploited fear, with highly sophisticated psychologic scapegoating.

The scapegoat originates in Leviticus 16.  The community projected its troubles ritually on a sacrificial goat that was driven off into the wilderness on Yom Kippur Day of Atonement. Psychologically, the community may have felt better, but blaming the scapegoat was a bit of witch doctoring that only prevented real solutions from being found.

McCarthy gained power by falsely accusing good men of being Communists. This prevented confrontation of real threats, and ultimately made a mockery of the entire problem. The scapegoating was counterproductive.

Murrow, with unflinching integrity, faced down McCarthy, his network, and his sponsors. Can anyone imagine that Murrow would not have outed the faulty intelligence that preceded the current war? Murrow, a decorated war correspondent, would never have allowed violations of the Geneva Convention.

Puritans of Salem, 1659 were every bit as terrified of witches as we are today of our adversaries. The population demanded due process be suspended.

However, if one is going to try and decide who is a good witch and who is a bad witch, one needs a definition of what a witch is. The same with the red scare. Being a card carrying-communist meant as little then as carrying an ACLU card now.

Ironically, the whole concept of law originated in of all places Iraq. Babylonian king Hammurabi in 1780 BC. He came up with the bedrock principle of the rule of law that the accused must always face his accuser. The Hammurabi law was an alternative to scapegoating. Abraham, who lived in Babylon at the time of Harmmurabi, is believed to have introduced these laws into Hebrew custom.

Hammurabi was clear. There must be due process. However, age after age somehow authority forgets this bedrock, we end up with an Inquisition, a crusade, a gulag, a concentration camp, a red scare or a witch trial.

Some claim a trade off between due process and national security is inevitable. They are dead wrong. Lack of due process always makes a society less safe. Without due process, the innocent will be locked up and the criminals will go free. To get tough on crime, we must be tough on due process. That way, we know that the truly guilty are punished. To get tough on terror, we must have scrupulous due process, and we must have probing intelligence that spares no one.

The very people who have advocated getting tough on crime have also advocated soft inquiries into intelligence failures. We must have intelligence that we can absolutely rely on that will stand up to international scrutiny. The folly of simply pointing a finger and claiming "weapons of mass destruction" has led us down a path that of great insecurity.

Indeed, if we accuse a criminal of the wrong crime, the criminal is going to get off, and the whole process will become a laughing stock, as McCarthy did. The US had real security concerns that were hugely put back by McCarthy's arrogant abuse of power, and reckless disregard for due process.

US policy makers need to see "Good Night, And Good Luck." They need to ask, do we want the rule of law, or do we want scapegoating? Due process is our best guarantee of security, and it is time we all knew it.