An Insensitivity Chip Shot
June 15, 2006
In March of this year I spent a weekend with a number of public diplomacy brass from government, the private sector, and the academy at a posh estate outside London. Like home, it wasn't. We got the full VIP treatment and rumor had it that Karen Hughes might join our intimate gathering of about 40 people. Alas, in her place we received Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy, Colleen Graffy. I found Graffy to be a smooth operator, the type of political appointee I was quite familiar with in my days working as a Presidential Management Fellow at the U.S. State Department and U.S. Information Agency. She was very polished, presentable and just the type of Bush Administration PR spokesperson I would expect, with a well coifed hairstyle and much nicer threads than mine. I told her "we'd have to talk" but she left the conference before I had a chance to dialogue with her. Political appointees like Graffy intrigue me. They are generally campaign contributors who get to enjoy the spoils of the victorious political party every presidential election. They are not automatically given deference from the lifer civil servants who grunt it out over the decades. Most of these politicos stick around no longer than 18 months.
Graffy's days may be even shorter than that. An attorney by training, she spent a number of years teaching law in London and was the former chair of the Republicans Abroad for the United Kingdom. The story goes that the U.S. Embassy staff in London was so impressed by Graffy's holding her own on that liberal media joint BBC that it asked the clever wordsmith join the Bush Administration and help promote America to the world. Last September she was formally appointed to Hughes' team and this week she said the most outrageous remark I've heard in a while. In response to three suicides at the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Graffy told the BBC that the deaths were "certainly a good PR move to draw attention." Where's Homer Simpson when you need him? Doh! Global reaction was swift and negative. The U.S. State Department had to quickly do an internal PR damage control move to distance itself from one of its own. U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters, "We would not say that it was a PR stunt. We have serious concerns anytime anybody takes their own life." Nice try, Sean, but it's "his own life." Well, actually three lives in this case. But I digress.
I recall Jennifer Aniston's interview in Vanity Fair where she said that her ex-husband was missing a "sensitivity chip." The same could be said for Graffy's callous comment to the BBC. I could really care less about the end of Jenn and Brad's relationship. How my country's leadership officially responds to events that impact our relations with the rest of the world concerns me a lot.
I was saddened by the suicide by hanging of the three men, two Saudis and one Yemeni. They had been held over four years in the prison camp with no formal charges. Does anyone know if they were terrorists? Perhaps they were, or maybe not. Anyone is capable of a great deal of psychological suffering and mental strain in response to a seemingly never-ending detention that is Gitmo. U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris said he thought that these suicides were just an example of asymmetric warfare and not personal desperation. Then turnaround is fair play. Maybe Lynddie England's defense is true. That thumbs-up gesture and leashing of Abu Ghraib prisoners was just an example of military psyops and not as the administration sought to portray it, an aberrant case of the international edition of girls gone wild.
