[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Circle of Blame

[Bill Totten]

It Takes a Nation of Torturers to Hold Us Back

by Ted Rall

uexpress.com (April 23 2009)


I suppose I should take a bow.

For eight long years (years that passed like centuries for the
miserables rotting in cages at Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and
Diego Garcia and Bulgaria and the US Navy's fleet of prison ships) no
one cared about torture. Law professors, politicians, and journalists
justified it. Even liberals didn't care: there wasn't one major protest
march against beating or raping or drowning people to death. Strange but
true: the only forces raging against the collective madness that warped
the American psyche after 9/11 were human rights organizations and a
couple of cartoonists.

The syndicated political cartoonist Matt Bors and I took point,
repeatedly ridiculing and ranting about the Bush Administration's
torture policies and Americans' tacit tolerance of it in cartoons we
knew would be reprinted in only a handful of publications. Editors and
readers advised us to "stop obsessing" and "move on". Award committees
passed us over in favor of cartoonists who bought Bush's tall tales
about WMDs in Iraq. We were blackballed.

At least they didn't shove a flashlight up my ass. That is a favorite
interrogation tactic at Gitmo (and Bagram, where Obama plans to send the
Gitmo victims next).

Perhaps the declassification of CIA documents revealing that the CIA
waterboarded one man 183 times (why not 182? Why not 184?) prompted
Americans' newfound distaste for taxpayer-funded dungeons. Maybe it was
the juvenile stupidity displayed by Bush's legal eagles: "As we
understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a
stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless
insect in the box, such as a caterpillar", one memo said. Because, you
know, they don't have caterpillars in the Northwestern Frontier Province.

Whatever the cause, better late than never (though not for the dozens of
fathers, brothers and sons murdered in American torture chambers), but
things have come full circle. Americans are against torture again. Some
Congressmen are calling for investigations into Bush's war crimes.
President Obama, forced to backpedal on his infamous inclination to
"move forward" rather than compel the CIA's goons to "look over their
shoulders" while applying electrodes to the genitals of
fourteen-year-old Afghan boys, seems amenable to throwing the Dirty Half
Dozen - the six Bushie lawyers including John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Alberto
Gonzales - to the tender mercies of a special prosecutor.

My favorite aspect of the discussion involves whether or not torture
works. "High value information came from interrogations in which those
methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the Al Qaeda
organization that was attacking this country", Obama's national
intelligence director argued last week. Key suspects "provided much
valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher
handling produced no breakthroughs", countered The New York Times about
the newly released documents.

I don't care if torture works. I don't give a damn if torture could
reveal a plot that would cost millions of lives. I would rather die in a
terrorist attack than live in a society that relies upon torture to
protect itself. But what do I know? Maybe I've just been brainwashed by
my Christian upbringing.

As I wrote two weeks ago, the Dirty Half Dozen lawyers ought to be
prosecuted for constructing an illegal CYA framework to justify heinous
acts by government torturers. An attorney who perverts logic and the law
as follows is far too dangerous to be allowed to walk among free men:
"Although we do not equate a person who voluntarily enters a weight-loss
program with a detainee subjected to dietary manipulation as an
interrogation technique, we believe that it is relevant that several
commercial weight-loss programs available in the United States involve
similar or even greater reductions in caloric intake".

An officer of the court who doesn't pack up his office supplies and type
up a resignation letter rather than write the following suffers from
both psychosis and stupidity: "Although the abdominal slap technique
might involve some minor physical pain, it cannot, as you have described
it to us, be said to involve even moderate, let alone severe, physical
pain or suffering". Do a Google Image search on John Yoo, author of many
of the Torture Memos: the pudgy little pig would break down in tears if
he ran out of hand lotion.

Jail the lawyers, preferably for life. But don't forget their bosses. As
has been amply documented, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld and
others personally signed off on specific acts of torture. They ordered
the Dirty Half Dozen to draft those memos to provide them with legal cover.

Lawyers don't write law; they interpret it. If a corporate executive
relies on bad legal advice, he goes to jail. Hiring a crappy lawyer
isn't a defense. Bush and his war council should spend the rest of their
lives at Guantanamo. Since he's continuing Bush's detention policies, so
should Obama.

And let's not forget the CIA and military torturers, the so-called
little fish. As servicemen learn during training, it is illegal to
follow an illegal order. An order to torture or abuse prisoners of war
violates US law and international treaty obligations, as well as
international law. When given such an order, it is every person's moral
and legal obligation to refuse it, even if means facing a court-martial.
Everyone involved with torture deserves prosecution, including the
physicians and psychologists who sat in on sessions that involved "harsh
interrogation techniques".

At the Nuremberg trials that followed World War Two, hatemongers like
the Jew-baiting newspaper publisher Julius Streicher were prosecuted for
promoting racist Nazi ideology. Surely an analogy can be found for
right-wing torture fans like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, who
repeatedly fanned the anti-Muslim hatred that led to our current shame.
Even Bill Maher, libertarian-cum-liberal post-ABC firing, was
pro-torture after 9/11.

In the end, of course, we are all to blame. It was the American people's
moral obligation to rise up as one against a government that carried out
torture in our name. Yet we didn't lift a finger. If only there was a
prison big enough to hold all of us.

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/


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