George II, professed acolyte of Jesus of Nazareth, high priest of the party of the Ten Commandments, Wednesday looked the nation directly in the eye and boldly violated the
ninth commandment.
The men and women of the Fourth Estate did not seem much concerned. This was not, after all, Bill Clinton proclaiming "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." That canard, it will be remembered, set the nation's premier scribblers to furiously emptying their inkwells, ensuring for 18 straight months that the presidential prevaricator paid dearly for his falsehood.
But when George II Wednesday said, in effect, "I did not torture that man, Mr. Zubaydah," there thundered from the same scribes but silence. Why? Because in this country sex is not sanctioned. Suffering and death, however, very much are.
This is what George II
Wednesday said of Abu Zubaydah:
Within months of September the 11th, 2001, we captured a man known as Abu Zubaydah. We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden. Our intelligence community believes he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained, and that he helped smuggle al Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan after coalition forces arrived to liberate that country. Zubaydah was severely wounded during the firefight that brought him into custody--and he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA.
After he recovered, Zubaydah was defiant and evasive. He declared his hatred of America. During questioning, he at first disclosed what he thought was nominal information--and then stopped all cooperation. Well, in fact, the "nominal" information he gave us turned out to be quite important . . . Abu Zubaydah also provided information that helped stop a terrorist attack being planned for inside the United States--an attack about which we had no previous information. Zubaydah told us that al Qaeda operatives were planning to launch an attack in the U.S., and provided physical descriptions of the operatives and information on their general location. Based on the information he provided, the operatives were detained--one while traveling to the United States.
We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful. I cannot describe the specific methods used--I think you understand why--if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.
Zubaydah was questioned using these procedures, and soon he began to provide information on key al Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September the 11th.
All of this is a lie. It is a lie from top to bottom, front to back. In reality,
[Zubaydah was] mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3"--a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."
Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics--travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.
Abu Zubaydah was tortured. George II Wednesday lied when he said, "I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world: The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values. I have not authorized it--and I will not authorize it."
George II not only authorized the torture of Abu Zubaydah, he encouraged it. When CIA Director George Tenet told George II that Abu Zubaydah was grievously mentally ill, with no useful intelligence embedded anywhere in his sadly disordered brain, this is what took place:
"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety--against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."
It was silly of George II to worry about "losing face." He has, after all, so many faces to lose. He is the man in The Doors' song "The End," the song that, rather than "Hail To The Chief," should be played every time George II appears anywhere:
the killer awoke before dawn
he put his boots on
he took a face from the ancient gallery
and he walked on down the hall
Everything we know about George II leads us to believe that he would revel in the infliction of torture, for whatever reason. He delights in tormenting and killing small animals. He burns people. He mocks those he puts to death. Why not encourage the torture of an innocent, mentally-ill man, solely so as not to "lose face"?
I have been here before. Then I expressed the belief that with Abu Zubaydah the United States had reached its "never again" moment, that what had been done to Abu Zubaydah would one day link, in the public mind, George II with but one word: infamy.
I don't think I think that tonight. Instead, I think tonight that I bow to the superior wisdom of that anonymous Bushite who told Ron Suskind: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."
The reality of what happened to Abu Zubaydah has been out there for months. Wednesday George II superimposed a fantasy--no, a despicable, damnable lie--upon that reality, but I'll be fucked if I can find a single sorry member of the Fourth Estate who has called him on it.
Though when Bill Clinton spoke words untrue about his furtive encounters with a willing fellatrix, lo, the national roof fell in. We saw daily paraded the faithless Clenis across our newspapers and television screens, for twice the time it requires a child to gestate. In the world that is civilized, they scratched their puzzled pates: the former president of France buried with his wife and mistress standing side-by-side, as across the great water the twisted spawn of Europe-ejected prudes and puritans fulminated in the House well, lips flecked with foam, demanding that Bill Clinton be dragged from the White House for the sin of adultery, for the sin--that in civilized Europe is a virtue--of honourably declining to admit to an assignation with a woman.
The blowjob of Bill requires impeachment; the torture of Abu Zubaydah requires ne'er a shrug. Here I come to a depressing conclusion: in what Sigmund Freud identified as "the struggle between Eros and Death," this nation is most decidedly on the side of death.
I have been here before, too, and there I quoted this, from Freud's Civilization and its Discontents:
I adopt the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and I return to my view that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization. At one point in the course of this enquiry I was led to the idea that civilization was a special process which mankind undergoes, and I am still under the influence of that idea. I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man's natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilization. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it. And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species.
A nation that shrugs off the torture of Abu Zubaydah, but endlessly condemns the extramarital encounter of a man and a woman, is a nation that has clearly chosen sides, and the side it has clearly chosen is clearly wrong, clearly against the perpetuation of life on this planet.
I find myself tonight repeating the words of Anatole France, penned when his nation was deeply awash in the shame of the Dreyfus Affair: "When will my country be delivered from ignorance and hatred?"