The Diddly Award

Honoring our rubber-stamp Congress, whose members have found plenty of time to do squat.

Illustration By: Peter Hoey

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The See-No-Evil Black Hood is awarded to the U.S. senator most adept at confecting an excuse for the torture
at Abu Ghraib, which not only shamed the nation but failed to yield a single known piece of valuable
intel. The nominees are…

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who announced that he—and
many others—were “more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment.”
Despite a report from the Red Cross estimating that as many as 90 percent of Iraqi inmates were
“arrested
by mistake,” Inhofe elaborated: “These prisoners, you know they’re not there
for traffic violations. If they’re in cell block 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they’re
murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents. Many of them probably have American
blood on their hands, and here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.”
(Later, U.S. forces released more than 2,000 of these detainees.)

Sen. Zell Miller (ambiguous political orientation-Ga.) said that the sexual degradation
at Abu Ghraib was just high school gym stuff: “The two times I think I have been most
humiliated in my life was standing in a big room, naked as a jaybird with about 50 others, and they
were checking us out. Now that was humiliating…. It didn’t kill us, did it? No one
ever died from humiliation.”

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), at a hearing with General John P. Abizaid, the commander of
U.S. forces in the Middle East, after the scandal broke, said he was bewildered by the “unreal”
press accounts and promised Abizaid that he’d go easy on him because, “It’s been
a landslide of criticism.”

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), apparently looking back to the days of Bull Connor sic-cing
hounds on civil rights marchers, harrumphed about the guards’ use of unmuzzled dogs, “Hey,
nothing wrong with holding a dog up there, unless the dog ate him.”

And the Hood goes to… Pat Roberts, who, within earshot of a New York Times reporter, began his investigation
of the scandal by whispering to Gen. Abizaid: “I’ll throw you a couple of softballs.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate