Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
February 24,
2005
Diane Christian
Bad
Blood: Ritual & Sexual Torture in Iraq
February 23,
2005
Werther
The
Poisoned Well: What the CIA's Nazi Files Can Tell Us About Iraq
W. John Green
A Salvador Option for Iraq? How Negroponte Changes the Ground
Rules
James Petras
A New Face to Bush Foreign Policy?
Conn Hallinan
Cornering the Dragon: the Return of the China Lobby
Joe Pietri
Cannabis: the Goose that Lays Golden Eggs (For Consumers and
Cops)
Louis Proyect
Hunter Thompson and the "New" Journalism
Alexander Cockburn
Hunter
S. Thompson and Gonzo
Website of
the Day
Did You Make the Blacklist? Why Not?
February 22,
2005
Naseer Aruri
The
Politics of the Hariri Assassination: Remapping the Middle East
Richard Manning
The
Economy of Hunger: Starvation is Part of the Economic Plan
William A.
Cook
Righteous
Racism Running Rampant
Paul Craig Roberts
The Agents of Instability
Ken Krayeske
Dr. Thompson is Out
Dave Zirin
How the Owners Destroyed the NHL
Kirkpatrick
Sale
Imperial
Entropy: the Collapse of the American Empire
February 21,
2005
Hunter S. Thompson
"He
Was A Crook"
John Ross
Mexico:
the Pentagon's Proxy Army in Iraq
Ward Churchill
What Did I Really Say? Why Did
I Say It?
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Military Recruiting on Channel One: Geometry 101, Brought to
You by the US Navy
David Swanson
Fighting for a Living Wage, State by State
Dave Lindorff
All the News That's Fit to Fake
Stew Albert
Fear and Loathing: HST
Michael Neumann
Strategies
in Palestine: a Shrinking Pie in the Sky
February 19
/ 20, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Back
to Salem: Paul Shanley and the Return of "Recovered Memory"
Kathleen Christison
Struggling
for Justice in Palestine
Ted Honderich
On Being Persona Non Grata
Gary Leupp
Self-Hating Gays: Welcome to the White House & Welcome to
Commit Suicide
Don Santina
Reparations for the Blues
Jennifer Roesch
John Negroponte: Dirty Warrior
Scott Richard
Lyons
Ward
Churchill and the Identity Police
Chris Clarke
Ward Churchill and Liberal Outrage
George Beres
Censorship in the Land of Wayne Morse: Gagging W. Churchill in
Oregon
Harry Browne
The Belfast Heist: the Plot Unravels
Manuel García,
Jr.
Who Killed Rafik Hariri?
Mark Scaramella
Lessons from the Hidden Afghan War
Michael Donnelly
Whatever Happened to John Edwards?
John Pilger
First, They Attack the Past
Norman Madarasz
Death Wish for Reform in Brazil?
Surendra Devkota
The Monarchy in Nepal
Deborah Rich
How Anti-GMO Ballot Measures May Miss the Mark
Fred Gardner
When Dr. Tod Met Merle Haggard
CounterPunch
News Service
About King Mswati: Political Developments in Swaziland
Richard Oxman
CounterPunching Arthur Miller
Poets' Basement
Albert, Giebel, Tripp, Engel and Orkin
February 18,
2005
Ben Moxham
In
East Timor, the Nightmare Continues
Dave Lindorff
The
Scum Also Rises: the Bloody Career of John Negroponte
Larry Birns
Negroponte: a Resume of Death Squads, Deceptions and Bribery
Gregory Elich
N, Korea's Phantom Nukes and the US's Subversion of Diplomacy
Samuel Logan / John Meyers
The Future of Colombia's Paramilitary Death Squads
Nicole Colson
Shock and Awe on Civil Liberties: From Lynne Stewart to Ward
Churchill
Suzan Mazur
Whose National Security Are We Talking About?
Mickey Z.
"One
Man Has Stopped Killing"
February 17,
2005
Joshua Frank
Hogtying
of the Deaniacs
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
Willing Sychophants: the Conservative Media
Robert Fisk
Under
the Shadow of Death in Lebanon
Christopher
Brauchli
Where
Time Stands Still: Kinsey and Darwin in Cobb County, GA
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Military
Recruitment TV: Why Send Them to College, When Your Kid Can be
Cannon Fodder?
Alison Weir
Russia, Israel and Media Omissions
Ahrar Ahmad
A Review of Shahid Alam's "Is There an Islamic Problem?"
Saul Landau
An
Interview with Cuban VP Ricardo Alarcon: "The US Tramples
the Laws It Wrote"
Website of the Day
Petition to Support Ward Churchill
February 16,
2005
Robert Fisk
Lebanon:
a Battlefield for the Wars of Others
Kevin Zeese
Creating a Real Ownership Society: Share the Wealth; Protect
Retirement
Gary Leupp
Meanwhile, in Nepal...
Ron Jacobs
Why the Iranian Opposition Should Not Trust the Bush Administration
Jessica Leight
Oil-Flush Chavez Begins to Strut His Stuff
Greg Moses
Houston, You've Got a Problem: Documenting Voting Irregularities
in Texas
Mark Engler
The Last Porto Alegre
Jack McCarthy
Where's the Outrage About Pat? Buchanan Does a Churchill
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy Dangerously Slanted Toward Israel
Website of the Day
The
World is Melting: a Photo Survey by Gary Braasch
February 15,
2005
CounterPunch
News Service
Dean
a "Safe" Moderate, Says NYT Citing CounterPunch
Robert Fisk
The
Killing of Mr. Lebanon
Uri Avnery
"Sharm-al-Sheikh,
We Have Come Back Again"
Stan Cox
Fighting Big Pharma in Little Digwal
Mickey Z.
Radio
Active North of the Border: an Interview with Chris Cook
Dave Zirin
Bashing Bush: Jose Canseco Comes Clean
Nadia Martinez
Ending
World Poverty? Opening at the World Bank, Apply Now
Lila Rajiva
"Little Eichmanns" and the 'Harijan': the Danger of
Magical Thinking in Politics
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
American Job Sell Out
February 14,
2005
Robert Jensen
Ward
Churchill: Right to Speak Out; Right About 9/11
Brian Cloughley
Kuwait's Freedom, Bush-style
Patrick Cockburn
Outcome
of the Iraqi Elections: Shortages, Corruption, Guerrilla War
Gary Leupp
Post-election Iraq: What Next?
Michael Donnelly
Sacred Nature: Just Another Commodity?
Dave Lindorff
When Bush Came to My Neighborhood
Elaine Cassel
The
Lynne Stewart Verdict
February 12
/ 13, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ward
Churchill's Genes
Saul Landau
Alarcon
Speaks: an Interview with the Vice President of Cuba
Paul Craig
Roberts
Nothing
to Fear But Bush Himself
Patrick Cockburn
Two Years After the Fall of Saddam, the Resistance Controls All
Major Roads into Baghdad
John Feffer
Bush
v. N. Korea: Round Two
Mickey Z.
Right to Remain Silent; Duty to Speak
Kurt Nimmo
Viva la Cucaracha!
Fred Gardner
Waiting for Raich
Dave Zirin
Fighting the New Republic(ans)
John Chuckman
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Ben Tripp
A Leftist on the Bush Payroll
Carol Norris
"Buddy, Can You Spare a Dwarf?"
Robert Fisk
No Middle East Peace Without Justice
Frank / Chowkwanyun
Muzzled Activist in an Age of Terror: the Case of Sherman Austin
Mike Whitney
Condi's Euro Tour
Deborah Frisch
A Psychologist's Defense of Ward Churchill
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Reading Khomeini in Colorado
Christine TenBarge
What's So Special About Ward?
Ron Jacobs
Curtis Mayfield's Train to Jordan
Dr. Susan Block
Chemistry of Love: a Valentine's Greeting
Poets' Basement
Louise, Smith-Ferri, Ford and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Free Sherman
February 11,
20055
Manuel Garcia,
Jr
The
Eight Percent War
Kurt Nimmo
Ann
Coulter's Racism: Where's Geronimo When You Really Need
Him?
Dave Lindorff
Guckert
or Gannon? The Perfect Plant; He Fit Right In
Larry Birns
War is Peace; Slavery is Freedom: Democracy According to Elliott
Abrams
Bill Quigley
Twenty Questions: a Social Justice Quiz
Tom Barry
Bush's State of Delusion
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Lynne
Stewart's Conviction Hurts Us All
February 10,
2005
Dave Lindorff
What
Academic Freedom?
Christopher Brauchli
The Love of Slaughter: From Rwanda to Iraq
Patrick Cockburn
In Baghdad, It's Easy to Get Killed
Nicole Colson
Have the Democrats Surrendered on Abortion Rights?
Suzan Mazur
More
on the Assassination of Lumumba from Mr. Garsin of Kinshasha
Michael Donnelly
Salvaging an Opposition
Mike Stark
Driving Ossie Davis: "Give Them a Little Truth, a Little
Hope"
Greg Moses
Taking
Jesus Back from the Hijackers
Website of
the Day
The Missionary Positions
February 9,
2005
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Duck
and Cover Redux: Bunker Busters and City Levellers
Mickey Z.
What Ward Churchill Didn't Say
John Ross
Hecho
en Mexico: the Iraqi Election
Tom Barry
Ambassador of Lies: Elliott Abrams, the Neocon's Neocon
Conn Hallinan
The
Coup in Nepal: Nursing the Pinion
Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Vision for Iraq: Cricket is Fine, But Chess is "Absolutely
Forbidden"
Steen Sohn
Danish PM Says It's OK for Israel to Violate UN Resolutions
Tim Wise
Reflections on Empire and Uppity Indians
Website of
the Day
Support Antiwar.com
February 8,
2005
Patrick Cockburn
Shia/Kurd
Coalition to Dominate New Iraqi Govt.: "It's an Electoral
Pact, Not a Party"
Brian Cloughley
Out
of the Mouths of Generals: "It's Fun to Shoot Some People"
Steve Breyman
Against the Selfishness of the "Ownership Society"
Harry Browne
"Don't
Get on that Plane!": Soldiers Seek Asylum in Ireland
Doug Giebel
"We Love Free Speech in America": the People, the President
and Ward Churchill
Nate Collins
The Censorship of Ward Churchill and Dancehall Reggae: It's the
Same Beast
Dave Lindorff
It's Time for a Labor-Oriented Newspaper
David Smith-Ferri
Sanctions and the Health Crisis in Iraq
February 7,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
War on Jobs
Carolyn Baker
The New McCarthyism on Campus: Churchill and the Attack on Higher
Ed
Joshua Frank
Marc Cooper's Hit List: First Mumia; Now Ward Churchill
Mickey Z.
Warning: More Hate Speech from W. Churchill
Patrick Cockburn
The
Kidnapping Gangs of Iraq
Mike Whitney
Tom Friedman: Scribe for New Age Imperialism
Stacie Jonas
Pinochet: Fit to be Tried
Dave Zirin
A Miserable Super Sunday: Clinton, Bush and the FBI
Tariq Ali
Imperial
Delusions
February 5
/ 6, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ward
Churchill and the Mad Dogs
Kurt Nimmo
A Ward Churchill Kind of Day
Joshua Frank
Liberals Trash Ward Churchill
P. Sainath
Mumbai's Man-Made Tsunami
Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Triumph; Allawi's Bust
Laura Carlsen
Bush, Rice and Latin America
Dave Lindorff
How the NYT Killed the Bush Bulge Story
Pamela Olson
West Bank Story
Behzad Yaghmaian
The Future of Sudanese Refugees in the West
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
A Threatened UN in King George's Court
Roger Burbach
World Social Forum: a Tale of Two Presidents
Robert Fisk
History by Laptop
David Swanson
James Forman and the Liberal-Labor Syndrome
Justin E.H. Smith
Gay Marriage: a Report from Canada
Cacie Hart
The "State" of the Union: More War and a Ban on Love
Ron Jacobs
Chairman Bob Avakian: a Revolutionary Life
Mickey Z.
Viewing America from the Outside
Ben Tripp
Republican Heroes: a New Breed of Good Guy
Ben Sonnenberg
France at the End of the Devil's Decade: Renoir's Rules of the
Game
Poets' Basement
Smith-Ferri, Davies, Collins, & Albert
Website of
the Weekend
John Trudell: How to Earn a 17,000 Page FBI File
February 4,
2005
Brian Cloughley
The
Army Symphonist: "Sometimes the Only Way to Change the Behavior
of Someone Like That is to Kill Them"
Bill Christison
Election
Parallels: Vietnam, 1967; Iraq, 2005
Elaine Cassel
Did Zoloft Make Him Do It?
Jacob Levich
Chomsky and the Draft
Kanak Mani Dixit
Return of the Royalists in Nepal
Ron Jacobs
The
Downward Spiral in Iraq
February 3,
2005
Ward Churchill
On
the Injustice of Getting Smeared: a Campaign of Fabrications
and Gross Distortions
Sharon Smith
Resisting
Soldiers Need Our Support
Mickey Z.
Leslie
Gelb Asks Iraq: Who's Your Daddy?
Mike Whitney
President of Alienation: a Desperate State of the Union
Jenna Orkin
9/11 the Sequel: the Toxic State of Lower Manhattan
Saul Landau
Elections Won't Prevent Civil War in Iraq
Yitzhak Laor
Strange is the Silence
Dave Lindorff
The
Assault on Social Security: a New Campaign of Lies
February 2,
2005
David Domke
/ Kevin Coe
Bush's
Brand of Christianity
Noam Chomsky
Iraq
After the Elections
M. Shahid Alam
O'Reilly's
Fatwah on "Un-American" Professors: FoxNews Puts Me
in Its Crosshairs
Richard Oxman
Ringing in 1984 with Ward Churchill and Derrick Jensen
Joshua Frank
The Suckering of Howard Dean
Dave Lindorff
A History Lesson from the NYT
Nina Hartley
Feminists for Porn
Website of the Day
War is a Racket
February 1,
2005
Joshua L. Dratel
The
Torture Memos
Patrick Cockburn
New Doubts About Allawi
Robert Fisk
"The Only Decent Food We Get is at Funerals"
Uri Avnery
The Stalemate
Col. Dan Smith
"W" Stands for Withdrawal
Alison Weir
Making America as "Secure" as Israel
Alan Farago
Heaven and Hell in the Everglades
Ray Hanania
Low Voter Turnout of Iraqi Expatriates: Less Than 10% of Qualified
Voters
Paul Craig
Roberts
American
Police State
Website of the Day
Statisticians Refute Official Rationale for Exit Poll Errors
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
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Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
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Impeach
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Here for More Stories.
|
February 24, 2005
Abu Ghraib, a Year Later: What's Changed?
Torture
Nation
By
TOM WRIGHT
If you want a vision of the
future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face...forever.
George Orwell
Nearly a year has passed since the lurid
photographs of Abu Ghraib first surfaced, briefly capturing the
attention of the nation. Even to a public saturated by every
imaginable form of transgression, the bizarre images of "Hooded
Man," the piles of naked bodies and sordid sexual domination
stood out, whether because they seemed like demons lurching from
the Puritan unconscious, or just because they were so baldly
at variance with the fairy tales through which much of the nation
had been sleepwalking since September 11. But in no time, the
opinion managers mounted the ramparts. Medallioned four-star
generals were duly paraded before Congressional committees, hat
in hand. Sober-minded Establishment figures were dispatched
to contain the damage, fronting the various committees of investigation
of the appalling practices that had been unveiled. It was all
the fault of a few low-ranking reservists, lasting only a few
weeks, we were assured.
By now the official reports
have all been completed, a number of important books have been
published, and the release of a great number of internal documents
has been compelled by the federal courts. We are an open society,
for the time being at least, and the raw, unvarnished reality
of the military's interrogation system is there for anyone to
see.
That is both the good news
and the bad news.
Good, because the fact of public
exposure is ultimately the only real limitation to criminal violence
by the state. And bad, if the public either chooses not to know
about the crimes, or comes to accept them, and goes back to the
Shopping Channel.
Now the public, it is true,
has a lot on its plate these days, what with the SpongeBob controversy,
and with JLo's new fashion line coming out, so perhaps a short
overview is in order.
The first paving blocks on
the road to Abu Ghraib were laid on November 13, 2001 with President
Bush's declaration of a Military Order. This order, signaling
the extent to which the Administration would feel encumbered
by international law or by archaic constitutional notions like
the separation of powers, authorized unlimited secret detention
of any non-citizen (arrested either abroad or on U.S. soil) based
only on the President's declaration of grounds for suspicion.
"Trial" would be without the right to counsel, using
secret evidence, and would be held by military tribunal, i.e.,
by agents under Bush's chain of command. Secret execution would
be possible, and no right of appeal to civilian court would be
recognized (see Secret Trials and Executions by Barbara Olshansky.)
As attorney David Cole argues
in his book Enemy Aliens, such infringements of liberty are customarily
first test-fitted on "aliens", then ultimately extended
to citizens, as, for example, many elderly Japanese-Americans
could explain. But in the present case, only five months passed
before the order was extended to U.S. citizens, in the case of
Yasser Hamdi. (One can only imagine what Bush might have done
if he hadn't sworn to "preserve, protect and defend the
Constitution").
This bold assertion of what
should be frankly called totalitarian powers was met with little
opposition, or even much public awareness, and was promptly followed
by a declaration in January 2002 that captured prisoners in Afghanistan
and elsewhere were to be transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
and classed as "unprivileged combatants". As David
Cole explains, the wartime power to detain "enemy combatants'
is well established, but the Geneva Conventions, he writes,
"require that all combatants
be treated presumptively as 'privileged', and held as 'prisoners
of war.' The underlying rationale is that it is not illegal
to fight a war, and therefore enemy soldiers are 'privileged
combatants' and should not be tried for their combat actions.
Those who violate the laws of war-by, for example, targeting
civilians, or failing to wear a uniform that distinguishes them
from civilians-may be classified as 'unprivileged' combatants.Where
there is any doubt about an individual's statusthe Geneva Conventions
requirea hearing before a 'competent tribunal' to determine the
individual's status."
Where this gets sticky is in
Bush's declaration of war, not on any particular nation or its
soldiers, in or out of uniform, but rather on the noun "Terror."
Thus anyone on earth potentially becomes an "enemy combatant",
and faces a possible life sentence without charge or trial, without
recourse to the Geneva Convention's protections, which our new
Attorney General has described as "quaint."
For soldiers and military interrogators,
the distinction between captured al-Qaeda operatives and the
unlucky prisoner who happens to be in your prison cell at the
moment is one that is quickly elided.
Human Rights Watch has detailed
the sense of impunity among U.S. interrogators that began with
the Afghan war. At least six detainees are known to have died
in American custody there, although only two people have ever
been charged in the killings, and the inquiries have stalled.
In one of these cases, Jamal Naseer, a soldier in the U.S.-backed
Afghan Army, was mistakenly arrested by U.S. forces, severely
beaten, and killed in March 2003. The deaths of two Afghan men
in 2002 were ruled homicides by American investigators. Internal
Pentagon documents report the 2002 killing of another Afghani
prisoner by four American soldiers, in which there was no prosecution.
With the extension of war to
Iraq, the scope of prisoner abuse had become endemic throughout
the network of military prisons, and was descending to bizarre
forms of cruelty and sadism. The best starting point for anyone
who wants to explore this inspiring period of U.S. history is
Mark Danner's new book, Torture
and Truth. He includes 500 pages of documents at the core
of the dispute: from the Alberto Gonzales and Jay Bybee memos
on torture to the final reports of the Schlesinger, Taguba, and
Fay/Jones investigations. He includes the affidavits of the Abu
Ghraib prisoners, who describe the much-publicized cruelties
imposed on them by Spc. Charles Graner and his crew. But he
also provides context that usually gets ignored or downplayed.
In Iraq, a big part of why people are willing to look the other
way on torture is the assumption that the victims were trying
to harm "our side's" troops. But Danner emphasizes
that by the estimates of military intelligence officers themselves,
between 70% and 90% of the thousands of people rounded up in
Iraq are arrested by mistake. The prisons in Iraq are
mostly full of ordinary people who did nothing.
Danner also includes the full
February 2004 report from the International Committee of the
Red Cross, detailing torture and abuse and given to the U.S.
government, please note, well before the scandal broke. Danner
notes that torture was employed even "under the gaze of
Red Cross investigators, whose confidential reportswere handed
over to American military and government authorities and then
mysteriously "became lost in the Army's bureaucracy and
weren't adequately addressed." Or so three of the highest-ranking
military officers in the land blandly explained to senators of
the Armed Services Committee on May 18, 2004. On that same day,
as it happened, an unnamed "senior Army officer who served
in Iraq" told reporters for The New York Times that
in fact the Army had addressed the Red Cross report-"by
trying to curtail the international organization's spot inspections
of the prison." (emphasis added)
The meaning of this is that
military and civilian commanders were perfectly well aware of
the use of torture, and had every intention of continuing its
use.
Just as they do today.
Danner's book went to print
before the release in December (delayed, that is, until after
the election) of nearly 10,000 more pages of documents obtained
under court order through a Freedom of Information Act request
by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and others.
In their totality, they are an astonishing revelation of war
crime, from prisons in Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq, with plenty
more still to come.
In one report, a Marine said
he and two others were ordered to kill three Iraqis in early
April 2003. He said he was threatened with death if he did
not carry out the order, which they did then carry out, dumping
the bodies of the dead Iraqis in a hole. In another report,
an Army specialist shot to death an Iraqi prisoner who had been
"verbally harassing guards" in August 2003. Although
an investigation found probable cause to charge him with murder,
he was instead demoted to private, and discharged.
In addition to murder, a great
many other atrocities are detailed. Prisoners are tortured with
electric transformers. They are shackled in painful positions
for days without food and water. Iraqi children are subjected
to mock execution. One marine used a flame to severely burn a
detainee's hands. Prisoners are "water-boarded"-strapped
to a board and submerged until they believe they will drown.
Doctors are employed to tailor a prisoner's torture to specific
medical conditions.
One of the surprises in the
huge document release was that agents from the CIA and the Defense
Intelligence Agency and especially the FBI had been complaining
about the prisoner abuse, beginning in 2002 and continuing through
2004. "You won't believe it!" wrote one FBI agent
to a colleague. Agents assigned to Guantanamo complained of
"strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into
the detainees' ear openings and unauthorized interrogations."
One FBI official complained "I saw a detainee sitting on
the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around
him, loud music being played and a strobe flashing." Another
reported soldiers were "beating (a prisoner) and grabbed
his head and beat it into the cell floor" until he was unconscious.
Another one wrote in July 2004 "on a couple of occasions,
I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and
foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or
water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves,
and had been left for 18-24 hours or more." "On another
occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature
in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The
detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of
hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his
own hair out throughout the night."
These are complaints coming
from multiple government agencies, spanning a 3 year period,
in some cases going so far as to urge war crimes prosecutions.
As the New York Times pointed out, these documents make clear
that "such activities were known to a wide circle of government
officials." But White House spokesman Scott McClellan could
say only that "we're becoming aware of more information
as it becomes public, as you are." The Pentagon, he assured
us, takes any abuse allegations "very seriously."
This is nonsense. Of 137 people
who have faced disciplinary action, only 14 have been convicted
by courts-martial. 46 faced only demotion or fines. A Marine
that performed torture with electricity was sentenced to one
year's confinement, and the mock execution of children earned
only 30 days' hard labor. Even in the Abu Ghraib scandal, while
one investigation named the two top officers at the prison and
34 military intelligence soldiers, only three faced punishment,
and the two officers weren't charged.
Apparently none of this was
really torture. Now, the 1987 Convention Against Torture bars
the U.S. government from "any act by which severe pain or
suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted
on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third
person information or a confession" But thanks to Bush's
top law enforcement officer, we now understand that pain is actually
not "severe" unless it is "of an intensity akin
to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death
or organ failure."
Sure, Gonzales had to publicly
repudiate this language at his confirmation hearing, but no one
at all believed it. Michael Chertoff will take over "Homeland
Security" even though he abetted the torture of a U.S. citizen,
John Walker Lindh. Jay Bybee, the Torture Memo author, has been
nominated to the liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (new
motto: "Give me organ failure, or give me death!")
And most recently, John Negroponte, who will be remembered by
any attentive citizen older than 40 as the Mafia don of the 1980s
atrocities in Central America, will now serve his country as
the first Director of National Intelligence.
Welcome to the Torture State.
Of course, the U.S. government
has supported, financed and directed torture for a long time.
It has propped up torture states in Iran, Iraq, Israel and Indonesia,
and that's just the I's. But it used to have to keep it at arm's
length, to keep the U.S. public in the dark. What's new is that
it has become normalized.
And there's no retreat here
to the comfy feeling that all will be fine again when we get
the Dems back in power. John Kerry and his party are guilty
too. As Naomi Klein said, Kerry gave Bush the gift of impunity.
If it had mattered to the Democrats, they could have run a campaign
that impeded the apparatus of torture and the growing violence
and lawlessness of the American state. But that was not as important
as their desire to "win," so they kept silent about
the atrocities, and vowed an expansion of the war. As H.L.
Mencken once observed, "the saddest life is that of a political
aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his
success is disgraceful."
Meanwhile, we live under one-party
domination with an enfeebled "opposition" party trying
to appeal to the snake-handling and clinic-burning crowd before
the next election. And the U.S. military is in Iraq, not to
spread the virtues of punch-card voting or high-fructose corn
syrup, but to dominate the planet's central energy supplies.
This it will do by any means necessary, employing torture, leveling
more Fallujahs, or whichever atrocities people will accept back
in the "homeland."
In the coming years, world resources such as oil, natural gas
and fresh water will decline amidst over-consumption and environmental
despoliation. As competition for these resources intensifies,
the technological means of surveillance, control and physical
domination will increase in sophistication, and will be employed
by those sectors of society able to use them. These changes
we accept by degrees. And we have just passed through one of
them. We can only hope that there will be a corresponding evolution
along a moral dimension in the complex world we are bequeathing
to our children.
Tom Wright lives in Olympia, Washington. He
can be reached at: tomwright59@yahoo.com
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