Cockburn
/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
Now Available!
Today's
Stories
June 19 / 20, 2004
Brian Cloughley
A Profound Disruption of the Senses
June 18,
2004
Chris
Floyd
Blood Victory
Dave Zirin
Danielle Green, Basketball Player &
Disabled Vet, Speaks Out Against War
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Christian Question in American Politics
Gary
Leupp
The "Long-Established" Link?:
Iraq, al-Qaeda, and al-Zarqawi
June
17, 2004
Noel
Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People
of Palestine
Kurt
Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum
Ed
Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz
Ron Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They Do
Dave
Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"
Greg
Moses
Geneva Ignored
Norm
Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical
Weapons
June
16, 2004
Lenni
Brenner
A Question for Kerry Supporters
Davey
D
Hip Hop Reflections on Reagan
Daniel
Wolff
Why Did Michael Moore Withhold Video Evidence of US Prisoner
Abuse?
Bruce
Jackson
Harry Levin and the Penultimate Manuscript of Finnegans Wake
Patrick
Cockburn
Boom! Boom! Out Go the Lights: Bombings Target Oil and Power
Facilities
Gary
Handschumacher
Mourn Ben Linder, Not His Killer: Reagan's Death Squads
JG
Turning Haiti into One Big Sweatshop
Mario
Benedetti
Obituary with Cheers
Vicente
Navarro
Meet the New Head of the IMF: Who
is Rodrigo Rato?
Website
of the Day
Iraqi Oil Revenue Watch
June
15, 2004
Harry
Browne
Ireland Adds a Brick to Fortress Europe
Neve
Gordon
The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
David
Palmer
Richard Armitage, Abu Ghraib and CACI
John
Blair
Lovelock's Misguided Call: Nukes Are No Solution to Global Warming
Dave
Lindorff
God Wins in TKO
Bill
Quigley
Blood-Pouring Peace Activists: State Charges Dropped; Feds Step
In
Patrick
Cockburn
Carbombs and Street Dances: 13 More Killed in Baghdad Blast
John
Chuckman
John Kerry, Political Placebo
June
14, 2004
John
Stanton / Wayne Madsen
Torture, Inc: Oliver North Joins
the Party
Kathy
Kelly
Requiems: What Happens When Compassion Dies?
Bruce
Jackson
Bush Gets Testy About Torture
Lee
Sustar
Strikers Defy Visteon's Company Thugs
Kurt
Nimmo
The Desperate Censors: the Republican Plot to Kill Farhenheit
9/11
Jim
Davis
Hard Right Nativism
Eliot
Katz
Death and War
Uri
Avnery
The Nightmare Comes True
Website
of the Day
Instruments of Statecraft
June 12 / 13, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto
and Runnymede
Team
CounterPunch
CP's Favorite Albums
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Troy, Now and Then
Gary
Leupp
Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq?
Brian
Cloughley
US Military in Crisis
Antonio
Ponvert, III
Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection
Ben
Tripp
The Polls Get Stupider
Joe
Bageant
Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash"
Ron
Jacobs
The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency
Forrest
Hylton
Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés
Christopher
Brauchli
Federal Bureau of Errors
Kurt
Nimmo
Going After Qaddafi, Again
Wayne
Madsen
Israel's Slap at Reagan
Anthony
Loewenstein
Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World
Michael
Donnelly
A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous
Greg
Moses
Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah?
Susan
Davis
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
Joseph
Ramsey
Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The 18th Brumaire in the 21st
Century
Wayne
Saunders
The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup
Poets'
Basement
Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert
Website
of the Weekend
Insurgent Music
| June
19 / 20, 2004
Lying by
Divine Right?
A Profound
Disruption of the Senses
By
BRIAN CLOUGHLEY
“For
drugs or procedures to rise to the level of ‘disrupting profoundly
the senses or personality’ they must produce an extreme effect.
And by requiring that they be calculated to produce such an effect,
the statute [US Law] requires for liability [that] the defendant has
consciously designed the acts to produce such an effect”.
US Department
of Justice advice to the White House, August 1, 2002, concerning “Standards
of Conduct for Interrogation”
So it is the declared opinion of the US Justice Department that perpetrators
of drug-induced, mind-bending torture and unspecified ‘procedures’
are not guilty of law-breaking if they say they didn’t mean it.
And it is impossible to prove that they might have meant it. That’s
the way things are in Washington, these days.
In one
of the Wizard of Id cartoon strips the Wizard and a peasant are looking
at the retreating view of an obviously sleazy slob. The peasant asks
“Who was that?” and the Wizard tells him that it was Larsen
E Pettifogger, the King’s lawyer. “Ah,” says the peasant,
“in what area of the law does Mr Pettifogger specialize?”,
to which the Wiz replies : “The gray area.” And there are
lots of gray areas in pettifogging Bush Washington, especially where
torture and truth are concerned. To the rest of us these would be black
or white, moral or immoral, bad or good, right or wrong ; but the White
House has different standards.
Hardly
a week passes in which there is not another major revelation of Bush
administration deceit concerning its assaults on some facet of human
dignity, at home or abroad. But the Bush machine remains resolutely
aloof from ongoing exposure of its astonishing lies.
Even some
formerly tub-thumping, war-supporting, mainstream US newspapers are
now plucking up courage and are publishing material that in most European
countries would lead to grave consequences for those in government.
But in Bush Washington there is no fear of retribution. It is firmly
believed that Bush will be elected in November. The combined influence
of deeply-rooted respect for the Office of the President and reluctance
to be thought of as disparaging the Military in any way are considered
to be decisive factors. The atrocities in Iraq will be forgotten, and
US casualties will decline, because orders have been given to avoid
conflict as much as practicable. (That’s what Iraqisation is all
about; forget the nonsense about sovereignty.)
There
is no longer any question of US troops being ordered to kill the extremist
militant Shia commander, Muqtada al-Sadr (and he really is a nasty bastard),
which is somewhat confusing. After all, the commander of occupation
forces in Iraq, Lt-General Ricardo Sanchez, said on April 12 (CBC News)
that “The mission of US forcesis to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr
. . . That is our mission.”
Many people
are of the opinion that Sanchez was grossly over-promotedwhen he was
made a major, but the fact remains he was speaking with the voice of
the commander-in-chief when he told his troops that their mission was
to kill or capture al-Sadr. He was speaking to the world when he declared
publicly that this was the mission he had given to his troops. He now
looks a pusillanimous fool in the eyes of his own soldiers, because
he has failed to confirm their Mission or to explain why it hasbeen
abandoned. “Kill or capture” is, after all, a precise command,
and sudden reversal of such a major and much-publicized objective must
have a sound political or military reason behind it. Well . . . up to
a point ; because it is obvious that if Sanchez had proceeded with his
off-the-cuff Mission there would have been hundreds of US casualties
in direct fighting at the time and many more, later, when the entire
Shia population rose even more ferociously against the occupiers, following
the death or capture of al-Sadr. This would not have played well in
Peoria, or anywhere else that Bush is standing for election.
This humiliating
policy reversal is but one of the consequences of the present administration’s
lack of ability to see the world through any eyes but their own. The
US has been taken over and is being ruled by a coterie of zealots whose
ferocious obsession with power has almost destroyed America’s
international credibility while deliberately polarizing the nation through
exercising a policy of vicious and antagonistic confrontation. ‘You
are with us or against us’ has become the mantra of Bush loyalists,
who mistake lickspittle political fealty for genuine patriotism.
The current
American Presidency has taken unto itself the role of undemocratic monarchy,
while its macabre riffraff of courtiers, advisers and manipulators wield
and relish power for which they do not have to account to the representatives
of the people. The privileges and autocracy enjoyed by supreme monarchs
centuries ago have their life and being in the Bush White House, and
are fashioned by those whom Macaulay wrote of as “zealots for
the doctrine of divine right”.
In his
History of England Macaulay described the Divine Right of Kings as requiring
that “no human power. . . could deprive the legitimate prince
of his rights; that his authority was necessarily always despotic; that
the laws by which . . . the prerogative was limited were to be regarded
merely as concessions which the sovereign had freely made and might
at his pleasure resume ; and that any treaty into which a king might
enter with his people was merely a declaration of his present intentions,
and not a contract of which the performance could be demanded . . .
this theory, though intended to strengthen the foundations of government,
altogether unsettles them.”
Many elected
representatives of the people of the United States are being used and
manipulated by the imperial presidency to provide support from their
positions in the very foundations of government. Those on the Bush side
of the political spectrum (you are with us or against us) are regarded
as a convenience to be employed or discarded as whim might dictate.
Their abject slavishness is pathetic. But their colleagues of different
political complexion, who express opinions at variance with those of
the ideologues, are reviled, attacked or contemptuously dismissed, as
ordered by obnoxious political tricksters whose dedication is to survival
of the president in office and not to the American people.
Sometimes there is bipartisan activity on the part of the White House.
As when its Attorney General, Ashcroft, contemptuously refused to provide
information to the country’s legislators, both Democrat and Republican.
Ashcroft did not just rebuff and defy Democrats : he publicly scorned
Republicans when he appeared in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee
on June 8. But loyalty to Bush, if you are a Republican representative
of the people, demands no more nor less than that you embrace humiliation
in the cause of the greater good, which is to have Bush elected in November.
All else : all probity, all decency, humanity, independent-mindedness
and, alas, integrity, must be subordinated to the Divine Right of Bush.
It is imperative he be told what he wants to hear. Those Republicans
who dared disagree with the fundamentalist ideology of the Bush administration
have long since been forced out of positions of influence.
The recent
weird ‘Memorandum for Alberto R Gonzales, Counsel to the President,
on the Standards of Conduct for Interrogation’ from the Department
of Justice has been analyzed by many wise authorities, and it would
be pointless to make much further comment other than to observe that
only a soulless robot, an amoral unthinking machine in human shape,
could coldly decide that “Because the acts inflicting torture
are extreme, there is significant range of acts that though they might
constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, fail
to rise to the level of torture.”
The people
who composed that advice for the President of the United States are
the devil’s spawn who have not a compassionate brain cell between
them. But they exemplify the ethos of grubby, pettifogging Bush Washington.
If you need a lawyer to explain to you what constitutes torture, you
are terminally benighted and should be limited in daily decision-making
to choice of sock color. And if you are a lawyer who is happy to provide
comfortable, relaxing, legal-Muzak advice about what constitutes torture,
you are suffering from profound disruption of the senses and are in
urgent need of care.
But the
memos roll in, the memos roll out, and we are fortunate that at least
some of the bizarre and intellectually corrupt papers produced by morally
defective goblins have been revealed to us by people in official Washington
who still have functioning consciences. Every time a leaked memorandum
appears there are attempts at damage control, of course ; but these
are becoming increasingly divorced from reality. It is as if the Bush
administration has its existence in a separate world ; one in which
facts are flexible and where declared beliefs cannot be questioned,
no matter what evidence is provided to establish truth. Facts, for the
Bush devotees, are what the people can be made to believe.
The insouciant
acknowledgement by Rumsfeld that he acted illegally in every aspect
of law by ordering concealment of an Iraqi prisoner from the Red Cross
has caused scarcely a ripple of condemnation, and none is expected.
Why bother? It is the divine right of Washington to rule. As the New
York Times observed on June 17 : “Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba,
the Army officer who in February investigated abuses at the Abu Ghraib
prison, criticized the practice of allowing ghost detainees there and
at other detention centers as ‘deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine,
and in violation of international law’.” But nothing will
happen, because Rumsfeld is above the law.
Further,
it is deeply disturbing that there was no consideration given to establishment
of precedent. (Where were all the clever lawyers, one wonders?) When,
in future wars (and if Bush stays in power, there will be some of these),
a US soldier vanishes after being taken prisoner, what then? What possible
condemnation can there be by the US, now, of those who spirited him
(or her) away from the keep-them-honest, humane scrutiny of the Red
Cross? The United States of America, by the illegal actions of its Secretary
of State for Defense, has forfeited the right to international, neutral,
protection for its prisoners of war. Does nobody in the administration
care that this is a development of immense significance for future generations
of American citizens and the world at large?
The recent
poll of Iraqis indicating their belief that “all Americans behave
like the military prison guards” shown in the Abu Ghraib torture
photographs, and recording their entire dissatisfaction with the occupying
power was concealed from the US public. It was then leaked ; but there
has been no official acknowledgement that the results of the poll, which
was undertaken at the order of Bremer and his people, might actually
be food for thought. The Bush administration doesn’t care about
public opinion in Iraq or anywhere else, because it imagines that everything
will blow over by November. The zealots are suffering from profound
disruption of the senses, and consider it is their divine right to rule,
no matter what the consequences of their bungling might be.
There
is one matter, however, that might not go away, if only because it has
arisen in a more emotional context : that of the 9/11 Commission’s
report. The fact that the panel found no connection between Saddam Hussein,
al-Qaeda and 9/11 is being contradicted in a preposterous fashion by
the Bush machine, but this time the zealots might not get away with
bluff, bluster, smears and lies.
It is
vital for Bush’s election that the American population should
continue to believe the myth about the al-Qaeda connection, because
after the WMD bubble was pricked, there was no other possible justification
for going to war on Iraq. As The Guardian (UK) put it on June 18 : “The
administration's obstructive attitude to the fact-finding efforts of
the commission, which it only set up reluctantly, under pressure from
the families of September 11 victims, is hardly surprising. Mr Bush
has a vested interest in keeping the American public confused. Most
US soldiers in Iraq believe they are fighting the enemy which attacked
the twin towers, and this belief may account for some of their abusive
behavior; a Harris poll in late April found that 49% of Americans at
home believe there is ‘clear evidence’ of Iraqi support
for al-Qaida.”
That says
it all. But the White House spokesman declared “We stand by what
was said publicly” by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and the rest
of them concerning non-existent bonds between Iraq and al-Qaeda. He
had to say that black was white. They all have to pack together to deny
the truth, otherwise the Bush presidency will collapse. It is now imperative
for Bush that the plainest facts be rejected, if they are inconvenient
for the political agenda.
There
is profound disruption of the senses in the Washington of Bush, and
the situation becomes more depressing day by day. The divine right to
rule continues to be assumed, and the American people continue to be
deceived. Even if Bush is voted out in November (and this is by no means
certain), it will take years to re-establish international trust in
US policies and decisions. It is a bleak future, but the American people
have overcome disasters before, and surely they will do it again.
Brian
Cloughley writes on military and political affairs. He can
be reached through his website www.briancloughley.com
Weekend Edition June 12 / 13, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto and Runnymede
Team CounterPunch
CP's Favorite Albums
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Troy, Now and Then
Gary Leupp
Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq?
Brian
Cloughley
US Military in Crisis
Antonio
Ponvert, III
Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection
Ben
Tripp
The Polls Get Stupider
Joe Bageant
Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash"
Ron
Jacobs
The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency
Forrest
Hylton
Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés
Christopher
Brauchli
Federal Bureau of Errors
Kurt Nimmo
Going After Qaddafi, Again
Wayne
Madsen
Israel's Slap at Reagan
Anthony
Loewenstein
Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World
Michael
Donnelly
A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous
Greg Moses
Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah?
Susan
Davis
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
Joseph
Ramsey
Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The 18th Brumaire in the 21st Century
Wayne
Saunders
The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup
Poets'
Basement
Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert
Website
of the Weekend
Insurgent Music
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax--Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links / |