Obama, Tribunals, and oh, let’s throw in Guantanamo to get your attention

So today, President Obama made a statement about military commissions for detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan. You can, and should, read it here. It is three paragraphs long; it will take you five minutes to make yourself an educated citizen.

So let’s summarize, shall we? Paragraph One: Military commissions are lawful and effective instruments of justice when done right, and I invite you to check my record because I’ve always said this. Paragraph Two: We have some suspended but still pending military commissions in progress, and we’re going to get back to them but we’re going to do it right this time. Paragraph Three: Did I mention we’re going to do it right this time?

Let’s also note what isn’t mentioned in the statement: Guantanamo Bay. It doesn’t appear at all. He does not say, anywhere, that the military commissions will happen there. It might be because he’s dodging the whole issue of a facility that bears the collective revulsion of the world, and he’s trying to hide the fact that he’s using it from us. Or it might be because Guantanamo Bay is completely irrelevant to the subject of doing military commissions right, which was his point. Now, given that Guantanamo Bay is closing this year and Obama has a magnificent track record on not dodging issues, I lean towards the latter. But if you’d prefer to live in a conspiracy theory, by all means — believe that he’s lying to you. Probably because the Illuminati told him to do it.

So anyway, the nation’s news organizations got the same statement as you read above (because you did bother to read it, right?). They could have run this headline:

Obama Will Do Military Commissions Right

Or they could have gone with this:

Obama Revives Bush-Era Military Tribunals at Guantanamo

Guess which one they all picked?

The fact of the matter is that the news media isn’t biased towards liberals or conservatives, it’s biased towards getting your attention. Sadly, it’s perfectly happy to abandon the truth and imply as much as it possibly can as long as it makes you pay attention to them. So they will imply that Obama has lied to you, that he has gone back on his word, that he is just as bad as his predecessor, that he is a hypocrite, that he has no appreciation for the revulsion that we all have for Guantanamo Bay, and so on and so forth, unto infinity, as long as it wins your eyeballs.

The really pathetic thing is that so many people do pay attention, relying on news outlets to take the President’s statements, published on the internet and totally available to anybody who bothers to read it, and “translate” them to make them understandable to plebes like them. Come on — was there anything in that statement that you couldn’t understand? Do you really need somebody else to tell you what that means, especially when they’re going to throw in tons of implications with little-to-no bearing on reality, just so you’ll pay attention to them instead of the other news outlet, which is doing the exact same thing?