My father served this country in three separate wars - a story I tell in
An American Tale. He passed on to me his great love for this country and his profound respect and admiration for the principles upon which it was founded. From him I learned to revere the principles of liberty, equality, and justice for all. From him I learned to love the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights. I grew up to share his high regard for the American values of honesty, hard work, kindness, mercy, and fair play. I came to feel my father's deep sense of pride in the democratic ideals that we, as a nation, have upheld as a shining example to the world for the better part of 230 years.
(pride turns to shame after the jump)
America Stoops to Torture
I viewed the stolen Presidential election of 2000 as a harbinger of doom for our nation. I was a certified pessimist on Bush all along, and knew that we could expect nothing but bad news and trouble from this swaggering Texan with the dubious connections - this spoiled richboy - this scion of the Bush family mafia. But I seriously underestimated the damage that Bush and his half-bright gang of neocon nutcases could do.
I knew he was cruel and heartless; that he had signed more death warrants than any other elected official in American history - 131 of them without granting a single reprieve. I knew that he had cruelly mocked Karla Faye Tucker for wanting to live - just before he put her to death.
In his autobiography, Bush claimed that the pending execution of Karla Faye Tucker "felt like a huge piece of concrete...crushing me." But in an unguarded moment in 1999 while traveling during the presidential campaign, Bush revealed his true feelings to the journalist Tucker Carlson. Bush mentioned Karla Faye Tucker, who had been executed the previous year, and told Carlson that in the weeks immediately before the execution, Bianca Jagger and other protesters had come to Austin to plead for clemency for her. Carlson asked Bush if he had met with any of the petitioners and was surprised when Bush whipped around, stared at him, and snapped, "No, I didn't meet with any of them." Carlson, who until that moment had admired Bush, said that Bush's curt response made him feel as if he had just asked "the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed." Bush went on to tell him that he had also refused to meet Larry King when he came to Texas to interview Tucker but had watched the interview on television. King, Bush said, asked Tucker difficult questions, such as "What would you say to Governor Bush?"
What did Tucker answer? Carlson asked.
"Please," Bush whimpered, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "please, don't kill me." Source
It came as no surprise to me that Bush was a hardhearted bastard; a man utterly lacking in compassion or human decency; a man who would gleefully steal from the poor and give to the rich. I understood that our country was in the hands of an unqualified, mean-spirited, and dangerous man. But never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the mind-boggling extent of the damage he would do to this once great nation. I woefully underestimated his complete and utter contempt for America and everything for which she once stood.
I guess the stolen election should have tipped me off. I mean that was a pretty good indicator that democratic values were not going to be respected. At the risk of sounding disturbingly like Condi Rice, I will ask who could have anticipated the depths to which they would stoop?
So Bush was sworn in as our President (I still can't believe it) and immediately set about to piss away the historic Clinton surplus, plunge us into debt, and drive the economy straight into a ditch - just as we have come to expect of any Republican. But W did it with greater aplomb and dispatch than any I have ever seen. It was breathtaking how quickly he took a vibrant economy and stood it on its head.
By the summer of 2001, me and my fellow hi-tech contractors were in desperate straights due to the recession and lack of work. All around me people I knew were dropping like flies, going belly-up; losing homes, apartments, vehicles, marriages. Most of us never imagined that it could get dramatically worse.
And then it happened.
Regardless of whoever did or didn't know what when, the attack ended up being the perfect excuse for the PNAC treatment - a giant neocon-flavored enema for America.
It turned out that me and my long-suffering friends, what with our jobs, our privacy, our constitutional rights, and our internets, had had it way too good for way too long and just didn't know it. But that's another story.
This story is about torture.
The Unspeakable Evil of Torture
In order to more meaningfully discuss the reality of torture, I think one needs to consider the subject from a very personal point of view. I believe you have to place yourself in the shoes of one who is tortured to develop a realistic feel for just what it is we're talking about here. It's too easy to deal with torture in the abstract.
What would it be like to be the victim of torture?
Imagine that a powerful and dangerous enemy has captured you. They take you to a prison fortress and strip you naked in a great hallway. They sic a vicious war dog on you, letting it bite you over and over until you are covered in your own blood. They laugh at you and mock you, getting off on your terror.
When you think you've had all that you can possibly endure, they begin to beat you. They enjoy it; they do it almost casually. It's their job. They laugh when you moan or cry out - but they keep on beating you. You feel your bones breaking, your ribs cracking. Your blood pools on the floor. They kick your teeth out. You cry out for help, knowing full well that there is no one coming to help you. They won't stop. They stomp on your head, smashing your face into the concrete. They kick you in the gut, and stomp on your feet, breaking bones. When they get tired, they sic the dog on you again. They keep going like this and maybe they don't stop - until you die.
Or maybe instead of beating you, they strap you to a board, tip you backwards and slide you upside down into a tub of water until you are drowning. Before you are completely drowned, they bring you back up and resuscitate you. As soon as you are almost but not quite recovered, it's back into the water with you to drown some more. Again, they pull you out just before you die. They're good at this. They're very well trained, and know exactly what they're doing. They can keep you alive while drowning you over and over again. They call this delightful little game waterboarding.
"The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch. Source
Or imagine that they force you to balance blindfolded on a precarious perch, while they wire you to a battery with which they administer electric shocks. It is terrifying, excruciating, and life threatening - but it amuses your captors. They mock you and snap a picture for the folks back home.
Now imagine these things being done to someone you dearly love: your mother, your father, your sister or brother - or maybe your ten-year-old son.
Now maybe we're getting into the spirit of this thing. Maybe now we can talk about what it is to torture people. Now perhaps we can address the unspeakable evil, the abomination that is torture, and quit speaking of it as if it were merely bad manners - or the equivalent of a fraternity prank, as the rightwingers would have us believe.
Limbaugh on torture of Iraqis: U.S. guards were "having a good time," "blow[ing] some steam off"
Hours before President George W. Bush announced plans to address the Arab world to condemn the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison, Rush Limbaugh justified the U.S. guards' mistreatment of the Iraqis, stating that they were just "having a good time," and that their actions served as an "emotional release."
(snip)
CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men -
LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off? Source
In addition to being a monstrous and despicable act, an act of cold-blooded violence taken to its most obscene and perverse extreme; torture is a blatant violation of the War Crimes Act of 1996, the Geneva Convention, and the UN Convention Against Torture.
U.S. Torture and Abuse of Detainees
"No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
--The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5 (1948)
Each day brings more information about the appalling abuses inflicted upon men and women held by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world. U.S. forces have used interrogation techniques including hooding, stripping detainees naked, subjecting them to extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, and depriving them of sleep--in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. This apparently routine infliction of pain, discomfort, and humiliation has expanded in all too many cases into vicious beatings, sexual degradation, sodomy, near drowning, and near asphyxiation. Detainees have died under questionable circumstances while incarcerated. Source
Almost immediately in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration started floating trial balloons. Questions about the use of torture and whether or not the Geneva Conventions applied to terrorists began to surface in the media. Before the year was over, a matter of only a few months, a well-coordinated program of torture sanctioned by the President was in place and operational in Afghanistan.
The Defense Department, which we now know had in late 2001 begun a secret, presidentially approved program of torture of Afghan and Al Qaeda captives at Bagram Air Base and other locations, had made it clear to the Justice Department that it wanted the suppression hearing blocked (of John Walker Lindh, ed.). American torture at that point was still just a troubling rumor, and the Bush Administration clearly wanted to keep it that way. Source
Alberto Gonzales and his merry band of neocon pranksters outdid themselves in justifying the unjustifiable, and laying the "legal" groundwork for Bushco's crimes against humanity.
On January 18, 2002, President George Bush (the decision is referenced in the Gonzales Memo of 25 January, 2002) made a presidential decision that captured members of Al Quaeda and the Taliban were unprotected by the Geneva POW Convention. That decision was preceded by a Memorandum dated January 9, 2002, submitted to William J Haynes II, General Counsel to the Department of Defense, by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (which provides legal counsel to the White House and other executive branch agencies) and written by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and Special Counsel Robert J. Delahunty. Source
These yahoos cranked out the memos and opinions to assure Bush that whatever evil he harbored in his dark little heart was perfectly legal - US law, International law, and every acceptable moral standard in the world not withstanding.
An Aug. 1, 2002, memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, addressed to Gonzales, said that torturing suspected al Qaeda members abroad "may be justified" and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogation" conducted against suspected terrorists. Source
All of this took place in direct contradiction to any number of public statements from the President that disingenuously suggested a more humane approach to the subject of torture.
During his State of the Union address, President Bush spoke about the horrifying torture techniques Saddam Hussein has inflicted on prisoners in Iraq. He described the use of electric shock, burning with hot irons, acid, and rape. He said that the Iraqi government tortured children to get their parents to confess to crimes. President Bush concluded: "If this isn't evil, then evil has no meaning."
There is now strong evidence that the United States itself has engaged in torture and condoned its use by others as part of its war against terrorism. Photographs of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, hooded, naked, attached to wires, attacked by dogs, forced to simulate sex acts and assume humiliating and painful positions, and presided over by smiling U.S. military personnel have shocked the world. Other incidents of abuse and even murder have come to light and received new attention. Source
"If this isn't evil, then evil has no meaning." I couldn't have said it better myself mister President. It is so fucking evil that you and your henchmen deserve to be roundly punished for these heinous and unbelievable crimes - and who knows, maybe some day you will be.
Bush and his legal staff, then headed by Attorney General-designate Alberto Gonzales, were openly concerned with "avoiding prosecution for war crimes" under some future administration that might lack the Bushists' finely nuanced view of ramming phosphorous lightsticks up a kidnapped detainee's rectum or other enlightened methods employed in the Administration's crusade to defend civilization from barbarity. Source
Yes the Bushies were worried about "avoiding prosecution for war crimes." Apparently, they needn't have. With few exceptions, the public yawned as the revelations about the torture of American prisoners began to percolate up from the darkness.
The Abu Ghraib prison scandal now implicates the highest levels of the Bush Administration in violating federal law and in war crimes. In barely two weeks, the story has shifted from horrific photographs of prisoners to intimations of homicide; from prison mismanagement blamed on the fog of war to the cool clarity of deliberate White House designs to protect torturers from prosecution; from "the six morons who lost the war" to the Defense Secretary, the White House Counsel and the President himself.
The sheer range of brutality and illegal acts defies brief summary. And more details emerge daily: On the Nation website, Jason Vest reveals possible perjury by Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, while according to Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld personally approved a secret "special-access program" for incarceration, humiliation and violent interrogation, expanding the program from a narrow group of presumed Al Qaeda prisoners in Afghanistan to the insurgency in Iraq.
One revelation in particular should be sounding a constitutional emergency siren: The President has known for more than two years that his Administration has been pursuing policies that could qualify as war crimes under federal and international law.. In a January 25, 2002, memo, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales advised the President of "the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," a federal statute. He advised Bush to invent a legal technicality--declaring detainees in the "war on terror" to be outside the Geneva Conventions--which, he said, "substantially reduces" the chance of prosecution. Gonzales went further, telling the President that the war on terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners"; he pooh-poohed concerns that abandoning the Geneva standards might endanger US troops. Source
Yes, key members of the Bush administration were beginning to fear the prospect of one day having to pay for their bloody war crimes. It had dawned on some of their brighter constituents that not just everybody in America approved and applauded their callous disregard for any and all standards of human decency. Paranoia began to creep in. What if somebody made them answer for their crimes against humanity?
The political fallout from the various Administration torture-memos -- those prepared for Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and the White House, that earlier had been leaked to the press -- was simply too damaging. Something had to be done.
White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales said the latest documents, and the Bush letter, were being released because the Administration "felt it was harmful to this country in terms of the notion that we may be engaged in torture." In other words, Bush's 2002 letter on torture was being made public not because torture is illegal and immoral (and usually counter-productive to boot), and thus must be rooted out, but because of the public-relations damage this whole scandal was bringing to the United States. And, left unsaid, "to our election chances in November."
The political bleeding somehow had to be stopped.
Those Administration torture memos -- which we now know were not solely the work of Justice and Defense attorneys but which also were vetted by the White House Counsel, lawyers at the National Security Council and staffers at Cheney's office -- were designed to provide Bush legal cover for state-approved torture. More importantly, they asserted that Bush, as Commander-in-Chief, was above the reach of the law. Source
But asserting that Bush is above the law doesn't make it so. In the America I dream of, anyone guilty of such monumental transgressions would be held accountable and be made to pay dearly. But so far that hasn't happened in the America we actually have.
Although the terrible revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib hit the front pages in April 2004, no senior officials in the US military or the Bush Administration have yet been held accountable. The scandal has shamed and outraged many Americans, in addition to creating a greater threat of terrorism against the United States. But it has prompted no investigative commission (in the manner of the 9/11 commission) with a mandate to find the whole truth, or full-scale bipartisan Congressional hearings, as occurred during Watergate. Indeed, it is as though the Watergate investigations ended with the prosecution of only the burglars, which is what the cover-up was designed to insure, instead of reaching into the highest levels of government, which is what ultimately happened.
In just the latest sign of the current Administration's nose-thumbing at accountability for higher-ups, Lieut. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq when the Abu Ghraib abuses occurred, is reportedly under consideration for promotion. Source
Fear of prosecution has not slowed these bastards down one bit. While steadily lying about having ever tortured anyone, the sons-of-bitches have been openly arguing that it is nevertheless their right to do so if they so-fucking-well-please.
If the events I am about to describe were taking place in a movie, or novel, I would lose my ability to suspend disbelief: Who could conceive of an American President and Vice President demanding that Congress give them authority to torture anyone, under any circumstances?
Yet that is exactly what happened. Until Congress -- finally -- showed some institutional pride and told Bush and Cheney that it would not tolerate torture.
To place this activity in context, I have been trying to think of a similar "un-American" low point in the American presidency. Possible candidates might include John Adams's approval of the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, or Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War.
But neither of these moments strikes me as sufficiently shameful. Indeed, not even Franklin Roosevelt's horrific internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II is, in my view, as low a point as President Bush and Vice President Cheney's call for the unrestricted, unreviewable power to torture. It seems the precedent for Bush and Cheney's thinking resides in the Dark Ages, or Stalin's Russia. Source
It is disgraceful how the rightwingers have fallen all over themselves to justify torture and declare it a legitimate prerogative of the President. From the Wall Street Journal we have:
A ban on aggressive interrogation would amount to unilateral disarmament in the war on terror. Source
What unbelievable bullshit! What a vile disservice to America! When Senator John McCain, himself the former victim of torture in North Vietnamese prisons, introduced an amendment banning torture, the entire Bush administration began to howl insanely and indignantly about their right to torture people.
The unseemly spectacle of Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush openly opposing the McCain amendment banning torture for a torturous five months has done irreparable harm to America's standing abroad. The damage will not be attenuated by the president's reluctant acquiescence to the McCain amendment. The most that can be said is that the harm would have been still greater if McCain caved in to Cheney's obtuse opposition, or if Bush had chosen to veto must-pass defense legislation in order to defeat the amendment. Source
But Bushco had a trick up their sleeve when they `reluctantly acquiesced' to the McCain amendment. They never had the slightest intention of stopping the torture.
When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.
After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a ''signing statement" -- an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law -- declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.
''The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief," Bush wrote, adding that this approach ''will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks."
Some legal specialists said yesterday that the president's signing statement, which was posted on the White House website but had gone unnoticed over the New Year's weekend, raises serious questions about whether he intends to follow the law. Source
Raises serious questions about whether he intends to follow the law? Well no fucking kidding!
The arrogance, hubris, and hypocrisy of the Bush administration is stunning. The fact that they've been allowed to get away with this most despicable evil is beyond belief.
The leader of the free world should know better. And if you went by his words, you would believe that he does.
Statement by the President June 2003
United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
Today, on the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the United States declares its strong solidarity with torture victims across the world. Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere. We are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law. Source
Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere. That is so true mister President. That is so true.
Once upon a time, when I traveled abroad, I held my head high. It was then easy to believe that my country stood for what was good, and right, and true. I was the descendant of extraordinary men who gave the world the promise of democracy and freedom. My forefathers had sacrificed to help free Europe from the yoke of oppression. They stopped Hitler and saved the world from Nazism and Fascism. We once led the world in championing justice, fairness, and human rights. We were instrumental in punishing the Nazis at Nuremberg for their transgressions against mankind. We have always been a proud signatory nation to the Geneva Conventions.
We Americans have been known all over the world for our generosity, kindness, and compassion. When there have been major catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods, or tsunamis the Americans have always been there to help in every possible way. That is all done now.
Nobody thinks of these things anymore when they think of Americans.
When the world contemplates America now, they think instead of the horrors of Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Gitmo. They think about waterboarding, sexual humiliation, and torture. They think about rape, beatings, flagrant human rights abuses, and cold-blooded murder. Thanks to George W. Bush and the neocon Republicans this has become our enduring legacy.
The American people deserve so much better from their leaders. Thanks to the traitorous Republicans and the dangerous fools who support them, we Americans are now infamous all over the world for torturing helpless prisoners. We are hated and scorned.
Because of all that has been done in our name, and despite being overwhelmingly sympathetic to us immediately following 9/11, the world has largely turned against us. They are just not too happy about our grand and glorious America these days. And who can blame them?
What we have done is so very wrong. Who among us can bear the shame?