Torture Me Elmo — slapping a happy face on barbarism

October 5th, 2006

There are layers in Bush’s torture bill — the first is torture, itself … so let’s look at that for starters. It’s been around forever, sayeth the talking heads … [a]merican black ops have practiced without a license forever, sayeth the cynics … we needeth it, sayeth the sadistic and the fraidy-cat’s.

From a sociological point of view, we’ve spent the last couple of generations asking “Who am I?” Now we’re asking as a nation, “Who are we?” The timing is poor — we didn’t get the first drill right … we didn’t look within, we looked outside of ourselves to examine our roles and our form and our peculiarities … we didn’t find our soul. If our nation looks soul-less today … it’s because our own lethargy and confusion about who we are is still in play.

Sounds like a huge project, but it’s easier than that — we all* know what’s right and what’s wrong. Standing UP for it … ahhhh … there’s the confusion and lethargy. Getting that right is painful … it’s requiring soul surgery, entering through the brain and blasting open the heart. That’s our angst-driven, heart-wrenching and mind-boggling Work of the moment.

*ALL as in average citizens doing their lives — politico’s have lost their moral compass completely … it’s astounding how a little bit of snake oil can make toxic waste of a human conscience. If you missed Moyers Capital Crimes last night, you missed essential information — go here to catch up.

Jude

Number of years of hard labor a Japanese soldier was sentenced to for waterboarding a U.S. civillian in 1947?

15 years

This Is What Waterboarding Looks Like
David Corn, DavidCorn.com
http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/2006/09/this_is_what_wa.php

Waterboarding Republic
James Abourezk
October 05, 2006
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/10/05/waterboarding_republic.php

So, waterboarding is now okay . So is the suspension of one of our basic rights of freedom—the writ of habeas corpus. Habeas corpus—which guarantees prisoners the right to know the charges against them—according to the U.S. Constitution, can only be suspended in cases of invasion or rebellion. Our Supreme Court has held, “habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.”

Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ during the Civil War, and even then it was a questionable act. And even more hopeless is that part of the law that permits President George W. Bush to interpret Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Although Bush claims that the article is vague, no one before him has had any trouble understanding that torture is wrong, and in violation of intern ational law.

But the suspension of the writ in 2006 is not only unconstitutional because there is neither a rebellion nor have we been invaded. It is flat out wrong.

The only rebellion we were faced with was the one begun by three Republican Senators—John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John W. Warner. All three had served in the military, but McCain had actually spent time as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Many of us cheered when he stood up to the president to say that if we permitted torture, which is what Bush and Cheney were trying to legalize, our own soldiers, sailors and airmen would be subject to the same brutalization as Bush was hoping to inflict on his “terror suspects.”

But the rebellion was quickly quelled when McCain, Graham and Warner caved in and said that the compromise they worked out with the president would both preserve our morals and get valuable information from enemy combatants.

First, people who are experts in interrogation of the enemy pretty much agree that torture doesn’t work. Those being tortured will say anything they think their interrogators want to hear, just so the torture will stop. Secondly, the information, even if true, which is rare, in virtually every case is outdated by the time the torture is finished. Certainly no enemy would continue with plans known to someone who was captured.

But even more importantly, as former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell said, we lose our moral high ground if we torture prisoners. To me, that is a hundred times more powerful a statement than Bush’s repetitious rantings that “we are protecting Americans.” That phrase, of course, is born of polling that says Americans want to be protected, and delivered by the likes of Karl Rove, who, if nothing else, knows how to demagogue.

But the hottest place in political hell should be reserved for members of Congress, including the weak-kneed Democrats, who essentially went along with Mr. Bush’s “compromise.”

It did not seem to bother senators and representatives that the writ of habeas corpus is being suspended for enemy combatants. There is now no way to learn whether or not the prisoner is indeed an enemy, or just someone who was gathered up in a sweep of foreigners in Afghanistan, because, without habeas corpus, their detention cannot be tested in a court.

Senate Democrats, who in recent years have dug in to filibuster at the slightest provocation, this time merely stood up to record their opposition, knowing full well they would lose a straight up or down vote on the Bush compromise. But instead of really trying to stop the legislation, those who opposed it were content to make a speech and vote against it so they could later brag about their principled stand.

Everyone knew that was the Bush/Rove strategy—bring it up just before the elections so you can accuse the opposition of being soft on terrorism. It worked with the Iraq War resolution in 2002, so why not now?

My wife, who is from the Middle East and is in fact from a country that tortures its prisoners, was nearly in tears when, after hearing about the legislation, told me that everyone in her home country always looked up to America as a beacon of freedom. But those who loved America as an idea would now feel completely alone.

President Bush continually says that, “they” hate us because of our freedoms. That may explain why, in this legislation and in the PATRIOT ACT, he is, piece by piece, trying to remove our freedoms. If this is his idea of protecting Americans, we really can’t stand much more protection.

The public’s opposition to this Draconian law is the only thing that will give Congress the backbone to preserve our freedoms. ++

James Abourezk served as the a congressman and senator from South Dakota from 1973-1979. His memoir, Advise & Dissent: Memoirs of South Dakota and the U.S. Senate, was published in 1989. Abourezk founded the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, and he is a signer of the Call from World Can’t Wait-Drive Out the Bush Regime , which today is holding protests in over 150 cities.

Torture in contextSenate’s endorsement of torture is just business as usual for USA
Geov Parrish, WorkingForChange.com
10.02.06
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=21442

There has been and will be much hand-wringing and indignation over the Senate’s cowardly endorsement Thursday of torture as an official U.S. policy. Granted, it’s morally despicable, useless from an intelligence standpoint, and poses a grave new danger to both U.S. soldiers and ordinary Americans. Truly abominable. About the only thing torture is really useful for — aside from entertaining genuinely sadistic guards and interrogators (far more are probably traumatized than entertained by the experience) –- is, as I noted in a column last week, gathering the “evidence” to support official lies.

That said, let’s put this issue in context. Before this bill “legalizing” torture (it’s still a war crime, whether Bush and the Republicans want to acknowledge it or not), in the last five years the policies of the Bush cabal have already resulted in the torture of tens of thousands of people, many of them completely innocent, not just at Abu Ghraib but in many other Iraq prisons and in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo, and in the secret gulag of CIA and other prisons scattered throughout the globe.

It’s also worth noting that many of the torture techniques used, along with more than a few of the guards and interrogators using them, have been imported directly from federal and state prison systems in the U.S., where, especially in high-security “control units,” such techniques have been in vogue for a decade or more. Just ask Amnesty International, or Human Rights Watch.

Meanwhile, the CIA is also “rendering” victims to prisons in countries like Egypt and Syria, where the U.S. can be confident they’ll be tortured on our behalf. This is a major scandal in Canada, where an innocent Canadian citizen survived a nearly year-long, American-delivered descent into Syrian hell, and in Europe, where the E.U. is investigating whether both CIA prisons in Eastern Europe and overflights of rendered CIA prisoners constituted violations by member states of Europe’s rather more enlightened human rights laws.

And just last week, a report by the U.N. special investigator on torture had this to say about torture in Iraq:

“Detainees’ bodies show signs of beating using electric cables, wounds in different parts of their bodies including in the head and genitals, broken bones of legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns.”

Human rights groups welcomed the report but stated that it’s not just our client, Shiite-controlled government that’s torturing in Iraq; torture in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq continues to be endemic. Meanwhile, the report also had this to say, regarding Iraq’s death squads and bodies brought to the Baghdad morgue:

“[They] often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones (back, hands and legs), missing eyes and wounds caused by power drills or nails.”

Anyone surviving all this is, for their trouble, shot in the head.

The report also concluded that torture in Iraq is now more widespread than it was under Saddam Hussein. That’s a pretty low bar to crawl under. Is it coincidence that both the U.S. and the U.S.-backed Shiite government are torturing in Iraq? Of course not. Consider the man most commonly linked with those death squads, Bayan Jabr, who has now been part of the last three Iraq governments, members of each of which were hand-picked or vetted by the Bush administration. Jabr became Finance Minister earlier this year, even after, while the Interior Minister in 2005-06, Jabr’s ministry was discovered by U.S. troops last December to be running a secret torture prison with 169 brutalized, emaciated, mostly Sunni prisoners.

Allegations of a whole network of such prisons then emerged. Meanwhile, in mid-2005, parallel to Jabr’s assumption of the Interior post, Shiite death squads began targeting Sunni civilians, first in Baghdad and then throughout much of Shiite-controlled Iraq.

In the past 15 months, those death squads have killed many thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of mostly Sunnis. The squads frequently wear Iraqi police or military uniforms, often use government vehicles, and are widely believed to be originated through, if not outright run by, the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry, under first Jabr and now his successor. The squads have apparently spread to other Shiite-controlled ministries, too, particularly Health; most Iraqis, even those mortally wounded in Iraq’s ever-present random violence, now refuse to go to hospitals to get their wounds treated due to death squads that pull patients out of hospital beds, take them to a secluded place, and execute them. Often after torturing them.

Ken Silverstein, in the August 2006 Harper’s, had a fascinating piece on Jabr, especially his early history in post-Saddam Iraq. Previously, as an exile, Jabr worked closely with the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi. In 2004, while Jabr was Housing Minister, two senior CPA officials approached then-viceroy Paul Bremer with concerns that Jabr was not only frightfully corrupt (even by the standards of post-Saddam Iraq), but also showed strong tendencies toward both authoritarianism and sectarianism. They wanted him dumped. Bremer nodded, took it under advisement, and a few days later abruptly sacked the aides for being “unable” to work constructively with Jabr.

All this suggests that Jabr -– who has survived well-documented corruption, torture, and death squad allegations to serve in three consecutive governments, and has been protected enough that senior U.S. officials critical of him were once sacked –- is the Bush administration’s guy. Combine that, the rise of the death squads in mid-2005, and extensive reports earlier that year that the Bush team was secretly considering the “Salvador option”: creating indigenous death squads to target and hopefully disable the Sunni insurgency. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the U.S. government is at least tolerating, if not complicit in or outright operating, Iraq’s death squads.

Incidentally, the new U.S.-crafted Iraqi constitution has many flaws, but it does explicitly outlaw torture. But then, until Thursday, torture was considered illegal in the U.S., too.

However, the situation in Iraq is nothing new. It’s eerily reminiscent not only of El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and the Contras in Central America in the 1980s under Reagan, but U.S. support of thuggish allies in South America’s “Dirty Wars” of the 1960s and ’70s under both Johnson and Nixon. In other words, bipartisan torture. The only difference now is that when the CIA sends its instructors to our client states, they will have gained their real-life experience “legally.”

And torture is one thing; death is another. The respected epidemiologist who co-authored the 2004 Lancet article, then estimating 100,000 additional Iraqi civilian deaths caused by our invasion and occupation, in an interview earlier this year put the current figure at up to 300,000. And that’s before this summer, when the violence was so bad that an estimated two million Iraqis — one in 12 of the country’ population — fled the country, often in fear of their lives. (Elites having the resources to leave had already done so.) The result has been an enormous humanitarian and refuge crisis in Jordan, Syria, and other nearby countries.

The equivalent ratio in the U.S. would be if 25 million Americans suddenly left the country. Put another way, take the Pacific Northwest, where I live, and draw one line along the Canadian border, and another from the Pacific along the Oregon-California border all the way to the Illinois-Wisconsin border at Lake Michigan. Seattle to Milwaukee. Now, completely depopulate that entire land mass.

That’s what’s happened this summer in Iraq. Where’s the outrage?

Where’s the outrage over 300,000 (or, now, more) Iraqi dead? Where’s the outrage over tens of thousands tortured during the so-called War on Terror, and the scores of deaths that have resulted? Where’s the outrage over rape, another widespread and underreported consequence of our wars? Where’s the outrage over a decades-long American tradition, from Somoza and Brazil to “extraordinary rendition,” of using other countries’ thugs to provide deniability? Where’s the outrage over how the two million plus prisoners in U.S. prisons and jails are treated?

The Senate’s vote Thursday was despicable. But nobody, absolutely nobody, should be able to say that it was an aberration. ++

Now that you could be labeled an enemy combatant…
Heather Wokusch
Oct 4 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/1341

Since Congress recently handed Bush the power to identify American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” and detain them indefinitely without charge, it’s worth examining the administration’s record of prisoner abuse as well as the building of stateside detention centers.

As Texas governor (from 1995-2000) Bush oversaw the executions of 152 prisoners, and thus became the most-killing governor in the history of the United States. Ethnic minorities, many of whom did not have access to proper legal representation, comprised a large percentage of those Bush put to death, and in one particularly egregious example, Bush executed an immigrant who hadn’t even seen a consular official from his own country (as is required by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to which the US was a signatory). Bush’s explanation: “Texas did not sign the Vienna Convention, so why should we be subject to it?”

Governor Bush also flouted the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child by choosing to execute juvenile offenders, a practice shared at the time only by Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Significantly, in 1998 a full 92% of the juvenile offenders on Bush’s death row were ethnic minorities.

Conditions inside Texan prisons during Bush’s reign were so notorious that federal Judge William Wayne Justice wrote, “Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions.”

In September 1996, for example, a videotaped raid on inmates at a county jail in Texas showed guards using stun guns and an attack dog on prisoners, who were later dragged face-down back to their cells.

Funding of mental health programs during Bush’s reign was so poor that Texan prisons had a sizeable number of mentally-impaired inmates; defying international human rights standards, these inmates ended up on death row. For instance, a prisoner named Emile Duhamel, with severe psychological disabilities and an IQ of 56, died in his Texan death-row jail cell in July 1998. Authorities blamed “natural causes” but a lack of air conditioning in cells that topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit in a summer heat wave may have killed Duhamel instead. How many other Texan prisoners died of such neglect during Bush’s governorship is unclear.

As president, Bush presides over a prison population topping two million people, giving America the dubious distinction of having a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country. When considering that (based on 2003 figures) the US has three times more prisoners per capita than Iran and seven times more than Germany, the nation looks more like a Gulag than the Land of the Free.

The White House has also stifled investigation into the roughly 760 aliens (mainly Muslim men) the US government rounded up post-9/11, ostensibly for immigration violations. Amnesty International reports that 9/11 detainees have suffered “a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some corrections officers” and a denial of “basic human rights.”

Then of course, there’s Guantanamo, where the US is holding hundreds of detainees in top secrecy and without access to courts, legal counsel or family visits. Add to that the thousands of Afghans and Iraqis the US has imprisoned (including a large percentage of innocent civilians) and countless US secret prisons across the globe, and it looks as if incarceration is the nation’s best export.

While Abu Ghraib may have left administration officials falling over themselves with protestations of compassion, it’s worth remembering that the Bush White House has fought hard against the International Convention Against Torture, especially a proposal to establish voluntary inspections of prisons and detention centers in signatory countries, such as the United States.

Put it all together, and last week’s passage of the Military Commissions Act is ominous for those in the US. As Bruce Ackerman noted recently in The Los Angeles Times, the legislation “authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any protections of the Bill of Rights.” The vague criteria for being labeled an enemy combatant (taking part in “hostilities against the United States”) don’t help either. Would that include anti-war protestors? People who criticize Bush? Unclear.

In 2002, wacko former Attorney General John Ashcroft called for the indefinite detainment of US citizens he considered to be “enemy combatants,” and while widely criticized at the time, Congress went ahead and fulfilled Ashcroft’s nefarious vision last week. Ashcroft had also called for stateside internment camps, and accordingly, in January 2006 the US government awarded a Halliburton subsidiary $385 million to build detention centers to be used for, “an unexpected influx of immigrants or to house people after a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space.” New programs that require additional detention space. Hmm.

The disgraceful Military Commissions Act and the building of domestic internment camps are yet more examples of blowback from the administration’s so-called war on terror, and we ignore these increasing assaults on our civil liberties at our own peril.
Action Ideas:

1. Read the Military Commissions Act of 2006 for yourself. Find out how your congressmembers voted on this legislation, and raise the topic when they ask for your vote this November.

2. For more information on US prisoner abuse, check out BBC’s report from 2005 entitled “Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons.” Text and video versions are archived here. You can learn more about US prisoner’s rights from the American Civil Liberties Union.

3. To take action regarding “the plight of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other detainees held as part of the War on Terror,” visit Cageprisoners.com. ++

Fatal Vision: The Deeper Evil Behind the Detainee Bill
Chris Floyd, TruthOut UK Correspondent
Monday 02 October 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100206A.shtml

There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country - if the people lose their confidence in themselves - and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.
~ Walt Whitman

1.
It was a dark hour indeed on Thursday when the United States Senate voted to end the constitutional republic and transform the country into a “Leader-State,” giving the president and his agents the power to capture, torture and imprison forever anyone - American citizens included - whom they arbitrarily decide is an “enemy combatant.” This also includes those who merely give “terrorism” some kind of “support,” defined so vaguely that many experts say it could encompass legal advice, innocent gifts to charities or even political opposition to US government policy within its draconian strictures.

All of this is bad enough - a sickening and cowardly surrender of liberty not seen in a major Western democracy since the Enabling Act passed by the German Reichstag in March 1933. But it is by no means the full extent of our degradation. In reality, the darkness is deeper, and more foul, than most people imagine. For in addition to the dictatorial powers of seizure and torment given by Congress on Thursday to George W. Bush - powers he had already seized and exercised for five years anyway, even without this fig leaf of sham legality - there is a far more sinister imperial right that Bush has claimed - and used - openly, without any demur or debate from Congress at all: ordering the “extrajudicial killing” of anyone on earth that he and his deputies decide - arbitrarily, without charges, court hearing, formal evidence, or appeal - is an “enemy combatant.”

That’s right; from the earliest days of the Terror War - September 17, 2001, to be exact - Bush has claimed the peremptory power of life and death over the entire world. If he says you’re an enemy of America, you are. If he wants to imprison you and torture you, he can. And if he decides you should die, he’ll kill you. This is not hyperbole, liberal paranoia, or “conspiracy theory”: it’s simply a fact, reported by the mainstream media, attested by senior administration figures, recorded in official government documents - and boasted about by the president himself, in front of Congress and a national television audience.

And although the Republic snuffing act just passed by Congress does not directly address Bush’s royal prerogative of murder, it nonetheless strengthens it and enshrines it in law. For the measure sets forth clearly that the designation of an “enemy combatant” is left solely to the executive branch; neither Congress nor the courts have any say in the matter. When this new law is coupled with the existing “Executive Orders” authorizing “lethal force” against arbitrarily designated “enemy combatants,” it becomes, quite literally, a license to kill - with the seal of Congressional approval.

How arbitrary is this process by which all our lives and liberties are now governed? Dave Niewert at Orcinus has unearthed a remarkable admission of its totally capricious nature. In an December 2002 story in the Washington Post, then-Solicitor General Ted Olson described the anarchy at the heart of the process with admirable frankness:

“[There is no] requirement that the executive branch spell out its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy combatant,” Olson argues.

“‘There won’t be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this,’ Olson said in the interview. ‘There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances.’”

In other words, what is safe to do or say today might imperil your freedom or your life tomorrow. You can never know if you are on the right side of the law, because the “law” is merely the whim of the Leader and his minions: their “instincts” determine your guilt or innocence, and these flutterings in the gut can change from day to day. This radical uncertainty is the very essence of despotism - and it is now, formally and officially, the guiding principle of the United States government.

And underlying this edifice of tyranny is the prerogative of presidential murder. Perhaps the enormity of this monstrous perversion of law and morality has kept it from being fully comprehended. It sounds unbelievable to most people: a president ordering hits like a Mafia don? But that is our reality, and has been for five years. To overcome what seems to be a widespread cognitive dissonance over this concept, we need only examine the record - a record, by the way, taken entirely from publicly available sources in the mass media. There’s nothing secret or contentious about it, nothing that any ordinary citizen could not know - if they choose to know it.

2.
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush signed a “presidential finding” authorizing the CIA to kill those individuals whom he had marked for death as terrorists. This in itself was not an entirely radical innovation; Bill Clinton’s White House legal team had drawn up memos asserting the president’s right to issue “an order to kill an individual enemy of the United States in self-defense,” despite the legal prohibitions against assassination, the Washington Post reported in October 2001. The Clinton team based this ruling on the “inherent powers” of the “Commander in Chief” - that mythical, ever-elastic construct that Bush has evoked over and over to defend his own unconstitutional usurpations.

The practice of “targeted killing” was apparently never used by Clinton, however; despite the pro-assassination memos, Clinton followed the traditional presidential practice of bombing the hell out of a bunch of civilians whenever he wanted to lash out at some recalcitrant leader or international outlaw - as in his bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in 1998, or the two massive strikes he launched against Iraq in 1993 and 1998, or indeed the death and ruin that was deliberately inflicted on civilian infrastructure in Serbia during that nation’s collective punishment for the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic. Here, Clinton was following the example set by George H.W. Bush, who killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Panamanian civilians in his illegal arrest of Manuel Noriega in 1988, and Ronald Reagan, who killed Moamar Gadafy’s adopted 2-year-old daughter and 100 other civilians in a punitive strike on Libya in 1986.

Junior Bush, of course, was about to outdo all those blunderbuss strokes with his massive air attacks on Afghanistan, which killed thousands of civilians, and the later orgy of death and destruction in Iraq. But he also wanted the power to kill individuals at will. At first, the assassination program was restricted to direct orders from the president aimed at specific targets, as suggested by the Clinton memos. But soon the arbitrary power of life and death was delegated to agents in the field, after Bush signed orders allowing CIA assassins to kill targets without seeking presidential approval for each attack, the Washington Post reported in December 2002. Nor was it necessary any longer for the president to approve each new name added to the target list; the “security organs” could designate “enemy combatants” and kill them as they saw fit. However, Bush was always keen to get the details about the agency’s wetwork, administration officials assured the Post.

The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of an American citizen, along with several foreign nationals, by a CIA drone missile in Yemen on November 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred on December 4, 2005, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al-Qaeda figure. But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children, the houseowner’s son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani officials reported.

However, there is simply no way of knowing at this point how many people have been killed by American agents operating outside all judicial process. Most of the assassinations are carried out in secret: quietly, professionally. As a Pentagon document uncovered by the New Yorker in December 2002 revealed, the death squads must be “small and agile,” and “able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to … enter countries surreptitiously.”

What’s more, there are strong indications that the Bush administration has outsourced some of the contracts to outside operators. In the original Post story about the assassinations - in those first heady weeks after 9/11, when administration officials were much more open about “going to the dark side,” as Cheney boasted on national television - Bush insiders told the paper that “it is also possible that the instrument of targeted killings will be foreign agents, the CIA’s term for nonemployees who act on its behalf.

Here we find a deadly echo of the “rendition” program that has sent so many captives to torture pits in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere - including many whose innocence has been officially established, such as the Canadian businessman Maher Arar, German national Khalid El-Masri, UK native Mozzam Begg and many others. They had been subjected to imprisonment and torture despite their innocence, because of intelligence “mistakes.” How many have fallen victim to Bush’s hit squads on similar shaky grounds?

So here we are. Congress has just entrenched the principle of Bush’s “unitary executive” dictatorship into law; and it is this principle that undergirds the assassination program. As I wrote in December, it’s hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an “enemy.” It’s hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is exactly what the great and good in America have done.

But this should come as no surprise. They have known about it all along, and have not only countenanced Bush’s death squad, but even celebrated it. I’ll end with one more passage from that December article, which sadly is even more apt for our degraded reality today. It was a depiction of the one of the most revolting scenes in recent American history: Bush’s state of the Union address in January 2003, delivered live to the nation during the final warmongering frenzy before the rape of Iraq:

Trumpeting his successes in the Terror War, Bush claimed that “more than 3,000 suspected terrorists” had been arrested worldwide - “and many others have met a different fate.” His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: “Let’s put it this way. They are no longer a problem.”

In other words, the suspects - and even Bush acknowledged they were only suspects - had been murdered. Lynched. Killed by agents operating unsupervised in that shadow world where intelligence, terrorism, politics, finance and organized crime meld together in one amorphous, impenetrable mass. Killed on the word of a dubious informer, perhaps: a tortured captive willing to say anything to end his torment, a business rival, a personal foe, a bureaucrat looking to impress his superiors, a paid snitch in need of cash, a zealous crank pursuing ethnic, tribal or religious hatreds - or any other purveyor of the garbage data that is coin of the realm in the shadow world.

Bush proudly held up this hideous system as an example of what he called “the meaning of American justice.” And the assembled legislators … applauded. Oh, how they applauded! They roared with glee at the leering little man’s bloodthirsty, B-movie machismo. They shared his sneering contempt for law - our only shield, however imperfect, against the blind, brute, ignorant, ape-like force of raw power. Not a single voice among them was raised in protest against this tyrannical machtpolitik: not that night, not the next day, not ever.

And now, in September 2006, we know they will never raise that protest. Oh, a few Democrats stood up at the last minute on Thursday to posture nobly about the dangers of the detainee bill - but only when they knew the it was certain to pass, when they had already given up their one weapon against it, the filibuster, in exchange for permission from their Republican masters to offer amendments that they also knew would fail. Had they been offering such speeches since October 2001, when the lineaments of Bush’s presidential tyranny were already clear - or at any other point during the systematic dismantling of America’s liberties over the past five years - these fine words might have had some effect.

Now the killing will go on. The tyranny that has entered upon the country will grow stronger, more brazen; the darkness will deepen. Whitman, thou should’st be living at this hour; America has need of thee. ++

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves