This diary won’t be up to my usual standards, but there’s something so grossly offensive about reading the words "White House" and "light touch" in the same sentence, that I feel compelled to comment.
So Laura Bush selected William Yosses as the new White House pastry chef:
"He has a light touch with desserts, and the enthusiasm with which he approaches his profession makes him a real asset for all of us in the White House," [Laura Bush] said.
http://news.yahoo.com/...
Talk about getting your priorities backwards! You would think they could have exercised the same discernment about picking a UN Ambassador. John Bolton was an embarrassment to our nation and a hugely damaging presence at the United Nations. He was not a "real asset for all of us", at least the 300 million of us who don’t live in the White House. He would probably still be in office had Jim Webb and John Tester not won by a few thousand votes each. I’m glad they picked a pastry chef who is concerned about their digestive systems, but I wish they had a little more concern for ours. Their other appointments have made us nauseous for years.
But that’s not what I find most offensive.
I wish the architects of US torture policy had a "lighter touch". I wish John Yoo, Steven Hadley, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had a little more concern for the healing power of human touch, and a little less appetite for hypothermia, beatings, stress positions, and asphyxiation. I wish they had more regard for our standing in the eyes of the world, and ultimately, a little more regard for universal human dignity.
What has happened to us? How on earth did we reach the point where we promulgate standards for torture, and the President issues signing statements asserting his right "to inflict severe physical pain or suffering upon another person within his custody...", an act that is prohibited under US Code, Section 2240 (1) of Title 18
I’ll leave it to others to post images of Abu Ghraib in the comments section.
Just today, we started coordinating treatment for a young man from Baghdad who was kidnapped from the Ministry of Higher Education, taken by Mehdi Army militiamen to a warren of concrete houses in Section 70 of Sadr City, and tortured. He was beaten on the head and needs a neurological workup to determine whether some persistent weakness is due to a brain injury. He was subjected to positional torture, including suspension and suffered a dislocation. He was detained in a cold, dark place and deliberately disoriented, threatened with death and told that his family would be killed.
By Iraqi standards, this is not an especially severe case. The kid is alive, and he’s lucky if you can use that term for anyone who suffered torture. We have seen and treated worse. However, his injuries and experiences are consistent with the sort of abuse that the US has routinely inflicted on prisoners abroad, and was not as severe as the pain consequent to organ failure, which is the egregious standard the Administration tried to sell to the American public and Congress back in 2005.
So this young man suffered torture similar to what the US has inflicted, and probably continues to inflict. He suffered from the "light touch" that our President wants to preserve by the use of unconstitutional signing statements. What are the consequences? He hasn’t slept more than 2 hours a night since the event occurred more than a month ago. He has nightmares, flashbacks, persistent intrusive thoughts, and suicidal ideation. He has constant headaches. He is 22 years old and already broken. There’s time for him to reconstruct a life, but victims of torture irrevocably lose a sense of trust in others and the pain on some level is permanent.
The young man was not political, not a fighter or combatant, just a young man in Baghdad. He is a Sunni and that was enough. I’m not taking sides here – there are plenty of young Shia’ men who are being killed by Sunnis too. And the Kurds torture captives from Kirkuk and Mosul in a facility just 20 minutes north of my office.
I am not one to blame Iraq’s abyss of violence totally on the Bush Administration, although they deserve a huge share. Iraqis have suffered horrendous, deliberately inflicted cruelty for decades and it has created a society in which traumatic stress, anger and pain are so intense and ubiquitous that in much of the country, it is not an exaggeration to say that nearly the entire population consists victims, or perpetrators, or both. Any civil war is frightening, but the legacy of deliberate cruelty makes this conflict almost unique.
The Shia’ militia man who inflicted this torture may have spent time in one of Saddam’s jails. He probably grew up in the grim, sanctions-era hell that was "Medinat al-Thawra" (Revolution City), now known as "Sadr City". His family may have come from the marshes, where whole families were slaughtered and the land they loved and lived in for 4,000 years was reduced to a barren salt-crusted wasteland. He may have grown up in a family in which physical abuse and deprivation were constants, just as they are for millions of displaced families around the world, isolated and dehumanized by poverty.
I’m not justifying the militiaman’s actions. Not at all. I’m only saying that I can more easily understand how one young man came to be the perpetrator, and another young man came to be a victim. The deliberate infliction of cruelty is pathological – but it is at least comprehensible when inflicted by a militia fighter in Sadr City.
Here’s what I want to know: What, exactly, is John Yoo’s excuse? What weakness or insecurity causes a child of privilege, a graduate of an elite law school, to so readily embrace what Cheney referred to as "the dark side"? We all have a responsibility to try to go through life inflicting less trauma on others than we have had inflicted on ourselves. Iraqi perpetrators don’t get a pass from me, but the men responsible for our Administration’s embrace of torture have really nothing to justify their actions.
We owe it to ourselves as a nation to shine a light on dark recesses of US torture policy, and we need to understand – and make a majority of Americans understand – that torture is a crime. This is not an offense that we can let slide, and I hope we can all agree on the need for investigations and prosecutions. It’s not enough for men like John Yoo and Stephen Hadley to see their policies discredited. They advocated and supported policies that are illegal under both US and international law. The criminal justice system exists for men like them, and it is one of my greatest wishes that they find themselves indicited and in court, preferably in the US but if not, then before the ICC in Rome.
Nausea can be useful. We feel nausea when we need to purge poisons from our system, and although it’s unpleasant, the results are often therapeutic. The Bush Administration has adopted a "light touch" policy for the culinary arts, out of concern for their delicate stomachs. Good for them. I hope they enjoy their desserts now, while the rest of us nurse our nausea.
We know what we need to do to relieve the nausea and pain. We just need to get Congress to listen, and hopefully a future Democratic Administration follow up with investigations, indictments and a commitment to universal jurisdiction.