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An
unbecoming US self-portrait for
2005
By Tom Engelhardt
NEW YORK - Here we are, because time has
some of the qualities of a tsunami, deposited in
2005, whether we like it or not. As the year
changed, nature trumped the administration of US
President George W Bush in an appropriately, if
horrifyingly biblical, way with a preemptive
strike against shorelines jammed with rich
tourists and poor peasants alike. And even in the
midst of the collective horror, much of what the
Bush administration is, much of whom we Americans
now are becoming, showed through unbecomingly.
Only one small spot in the vast Indian
Ocean basin seems to have received full advance
warning of the waves to come - the ostensibly
British island of Diego Garcia, which is actually
a sizable US military base, a stationary "aircraft
carrier" for the war in Iraq. It also houses "Camp
Justice", one of the secret little hideaway
resorts the Bush administration has set up, or
contracted out for, on prime global real estate to
hold "high value" prisoners in the "war on
terror". The camp, named by someone who must have
had a yen for the Orwellian, is part of an
offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice set up by
the administration - two interlinked prison
systems, in fact; one run by the Pentagon and the
other by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
both meant to keep prisoners and practices far
from the prying eyes of the US public and its
court system; both, as it now turns out, anchored
in that jewel in the crown, Guantanamo (or Gitmo
to devotees) - a grim prison camp set up on
territory in Cuba that is close at hand,
US-controlled, and yet - or so Bush officials
hoped until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise last
year - beyond the reach of US courts.
On
military bases such as Diego Garcia and in special
military- or CIA-controlled prisons such as
Guantanamo, the "war on terrorism" was to be
carried to its informational climax by whatever
methods US intelligence officials felt might
"break" whatever prisoners we had. Whether in
Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, on Bagram Air
Force Base in Afghanistan, on US Navy ships at
sea, or outsourced to the friendly jails of allied
nations whose interrogators practice torture, this
varied and ever-developing mini-gulag was never
meant to be a system of criminal imprisonment -
hence the lack of charges, no less trials of any
sort, anywhere in the imperium. It was to be an
eternal holding operation for "World War IV", the
war after the Cold War and expected by neo-con
devotees to last at least as long. Now, according
to a recent report from Dana Priest of the
Washington Post, the administration is considering
exactly how to turn forever into a series of
post-penal establishments capable of coping with
the realities of life imprisonment beyond all
charges and to the end of time.
Devil's
Island, USA
There's something, I suppose,
that just hates a secret - and so, as the year of
Abu Ghraib ended, more of America's secret world
of torture (generally called "abuse" in the US
press) has been tumbling out of the darkness and
into the news - thanks largely to leaks from
anonymous but obviously angry sources inside the
military and the intelligence "community". For
instance, in December we learned from Dana Priest
and Scott Higham of the Washington Post, which has
been doing the best of this reporting in the
mainstream, that deep in the heart of our
Guantanamo prison camp was a super-secret CIA wing
built in the past year for high-value prisoners
previously being passed from place to place
globally, "a detention facility for valuable
al-Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in
public".
Consider it mentioned. And how
were they being passed around the CIA's planetary
holding areas? Well, as the year ended, Priest
revealed that the CIA had its own, possibly
one-jet air arm for shuttling these peripatetic
prisoners around the planet - "a Gulfstream V
turbojet, the sort favored by CEOs and celebrities
[that] ... since 2001 ... has been seen at
military airports from Pakistan to Indonesia to
Jordan, sometimes being boarded by hooded and
handcuffed passengers". It's registered to a dummy
corporation officered and directed by dummy humans
and it has "permission to use US military
airfields worldwide". A list of where it's been
spotted offers a suggestive, though hardly
complete, little map of America's shadowy system
of secret imprisonment: "Since October 2001 the
plane has landed in Islamabad; Karachi; Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia; Dubai; Tashkent, Uzbekistan;
Baghdad; Kuwait City; Baku, Azerbaijan; and Rabat,
Morocco. It has stopped frequently at Dulles
International Airport, at Jordan's military
airport in Amman and at airports in Frankfurt,
Germany; Glasgow, Scotland; and Larnaca, Cyprus."
Egypt and Thailand, for example, are
missing from the list, although it's believed that
prisoners have been held by the CIA in the jails
of both countries as part of the agency's program
of "extraordinary rendition" - a tortured
euphemism that stands in for a policy going back
deep into the Clinton years but that really hit
its stride after September 11, 2001, in which the
US contracts out the torture of its prisoners to
countries previously better known for such
practices.
Meanwhile, by year's end, the
American Civil Liberties Union, wielding the
Freedom of Information Act (which the Bush
administration has tried hard to limit), had pried
loose a series of stunning e-mails and memoranda
from disturbed and angry Federal Bureau of
Investigation agents who had observed
interrogation sessions at Guantanamo. They were
writing their bosses back on the mainland,
complaining of the nature of the "humane" methods
military interrogators were using at Guantanamo,
not to speak of the fact that some of those
military or intelligence interrogators were
impersonating FBI agents. (By the way, isn't it
curious that it was the ACLU and not the media
that did the necessary work to spring these
documents?)
When it came to Guantanamo,
what we had previously were largely the claims of
former prisoners, most of which turned out to be
all too accurate but were more easily dismissible;
now the FBI has nailed the government on what's
been happening, despite endless denials, in
America's own Devil's Island. These documents are
a clear indication that torture, mistreatment and
abuse in US-controlled prisons, holding areas,
military camps and interrogation cells add up to a
stunning set of contraventions of the Geneva
Conventions ("To this end the following acts are
and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any
place whatsoever with respect to the
above-mentioned persons: [a] violence to life and
person, in particular murder of all kinds,
mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; [b]
taking of hostages; [c] outrages upon personal
dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading
treatment ..."); and that, in a phrase used for
the first time recently in a recent headline on a
Washington Post editorial, "war crimes" are being
committed routinely out there in the imperium.
Let's recall for a moment what the US
president had to say at a news conference about
such accusations of torture last June: "Look, I'm
going to say it one more time. Maybe I can be more
clear. The instructions went out to our people to
adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a
nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on
the books. You might look at these laws. And that
might provide comfort for you. And those were the
instructions from me to the government."
"A nation of law" and that should comfort
us. The United States, of course, signed on to the
Geneva Conventions and, as a signatory, is fully
bound by them because, according to Article 6 of
the US constitution, "all Treaties made, or which
shall be made, under the Authority of the United
States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land". It
doesn't get any higher, does it? And that remains
true no matter how many times the US
attorney-general designee and former overseer of a
series of tortured legal documents meant to give
the administration the ability to torture more or
less at will, refers to the Conventions as
"quaint" documents.
Throw in a slew of
other recent torture revelations, including a
claim by a British prisoner in Guantanamo, for
instance, that "the 'strappado', a technique
common in Latin American dictatorships in which a
prisoner is left suspended from a bar with
handcuffs until they cut deeply into his wrists",
was used on him, and you end up with a Grand
Guignol menu of interrogation techniques. These,
in turn, add up to something like a self-portrait
for the rest of the world of Bush-administration
America in 2005.
A partial list of methods
of torture recently reported (or reported yet
again) would include: detainees chained hand and
foot to the floor in a fetal position for up to 24
hours without food or water and left to lie in
their own fecal matter; detainees beaten and
kicked while hooded; paraded naked around a
courtyard while photos were being snapped; left in
extreme hot or cold temperatures for extended
periods; wrapped in an Israeli flag while loud rap
music played and strobe lights flashed; or
possibly even having fingernails torn out;
placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees'
ear openings; sleep deprivation; partial
strangulation; death threats during interrogation;
the use of dogs to force frightened prisoners to
urinate; the holding of wires from an electric
transformer to a detainee's shoulders, so that the
man "danced as he was shocked"; mock drowning or
"waterboarding"; mock executions of Iraqi
juveniles; severely burning a detainee's hands by
covering them in alcohol and igniting them;
holding a pistol to the back of a detainee's head
while another marine takes a picture; fake (and
real) acts of sexual assault and sodomy; being hit
with rifle butts; suffering electric shocks and
immersion in cold water; being beaten to death.
These and other crimes against very specific
humanity have taken place from Guantanamo to Iraq,
Afghanistan to the CIA's secret prisons around the
world.
Once you take certain kinds of
restraints away, once you open up certain
possibilities, these tend to be transformed into
acts at a staggering speed and then to multiply
like so many computer viruses. Offshore, torture
as a way of life spreads, it seems, with a
startling rapidity. It begins with a sense of
impunity at the top and soon infects the most
distant nooks and crannies, the farthest outposts,
fire bases and holding cells of distant lands like
Afghanistan. It moves like quicksilver all the way
down to those "bad apples" manning the night shift
and taking digital photos for future screen-savers
in the Abu Ghraibs of our world. It has already
become an American way of life and, having been
initiated at home, it will certainly return to the
Homeland.
Take as just one tiny example of
how widespread and commonplace such practices may
be: During the recent assault on Fallujah, US
troops came upon Mohammad al-Jundi, the Syrian
driver of two kidnapped French journalists (since
released elsewhere). This was presented in US news
as a tiny act of liberation of a prisoner held by
terrorists. So what do you imagine was the first
act of this former driver, when freed? According
to Agence France-Presse, he's now suing his
American liberators for torture and ill-treatment.
His French lawyer Jacques Verges "said that after
being found by American troops, al-Jundi was taken
in handcuffs to a military base where he was
beaten and kicked. Verges said al-Jundi claimed to
have been thrice threatened with mock executions
and tortured with electric shocks." Ho-hum. Life
on the frontier.
Militarism as
religion
The question, of course, is
responsibility. Where exactly does it rest? Among
the more striking of the ACLU revelations (and the
least dealt with in the US press) was a single FBI
e-mail sent from Guantanamo to senior FBI
officials in the US that "makes 11 references to
an Executive Order 'signed by President Bush' that
authorized these abusive interrogation methods ...
that permitted military interrogators in Iraq to
place detainees in painful stress positions,
impose sensory deprivation through the use of
hoods, intimidate them with military dogs and use
other coercive methods". Other e-mails link
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Under
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to the extreme
methods used in Guantanamo. (Note, by the way,
that while the US press generally will not use the
word "torture" when describing such acts at
Guantanamo and elsewhere, the FBI agents don't
hesitate to do so.)
Whether there was such
an order - the White House denies it, but at this
point that no longer means a thing - there was
certainly a powerful sense among the
interrogators, torturers, abusers at Guantanamo
and elsewhere that their course had been set at
the very top of the system, and in this they
couldn't have been more right.
But I get
ahead of myself. I was talking about the
extraordinarily spared island of Diego Garcia when
I wandered off into the imperial dark side. We
only know what the military tells us - no damage -
about the effects of the tsunami on that very
low-lying island, only on average 1.2 meters above
sea level, but that's not so odd. The island has
been a blacked-out area, a zone of silence in the
Indian Ocean ever since, to oblige us Yanks, the
Brits shipped all the Diego Garcians off into
misery and poverty on the island of Mauritius,
clearing the decks for us.
In normal
Internet fashion, some on the web quickly
concluded that there was something deeply
conspiratorial about Diego Garcia alone getting
the tsunami news in a prompt fashion. But the
reason was simple: Unlike the governments of South
Asia, the Pentagon was keyed into scientific
early-warning networks, as it is now keyed into
just about everything that matters on this planet.
The Pentagon is increasingly like that famed
creation of 1950s sci-fi, the Blob; an alien life
form capable of absorbing anything that crosses
its path. It has swallowed, for instance, many of
the functions of the State Department and, having
divided the globe into five commands (the latest
being - gulp - Northcom, which means us Americans)
and with the heavens tossed in as well (Spacecom),
its top commanders now travel the world like
planetary plenipotentiaries.
Here, for
instance, is how Washington Post columnist David
Ignatius described the global processional of our
latest Centcom commander:
General John Abizaid probably
commands the most potent military force in
history. The troops of his Central Command are
arrayed across the jagged crescent of the Middle
East, from Egypt to Pakistan, in an overwhelming
projection of US power. He travels with his own
mini-government: a top State Department officer
to manage diplomacy; a senior CIA officer to
oversee intelligence; a retinue of generals and
admirals to supervise operations and logistics.
If there is a modern Imperium Americanum,
Abizaid is its field general. Indeed.
The US military has become not just America's
war-fighting and occupying force, but its main
"nation-building" force, its major diplomatic
force (now that military-to-military relations
have become the essence of foreign policy), its
preponderant intelligence force, a major
propaganda outfit (or call it public diplomacy, if
you will), its central ministry for advanced
research and basic science, the only part of the
government seriously preparing for a
global-warming world, and its planetary rescue
outfit as well - to name just a few of its roles.
With more clearly to come.
Take, for
instance, intelligence. That CIA jet may seem
extravagant, but in fact it's a pale shadow of the
airborne CIA of the Vietnam era when the agency
covertly operated a full-scale airline, Air
America. The Pentagon now controls an estimated
80% of America's US$40-billion-plus intelligence
budget and it's clearly eager for more. Perhaps
the most curious news report of the pre-holiday
season was a front-page piece in the New York
Times by Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt ("Pentagon
seeks to expand role in intelligence-collecting").
It focused on a plan being put together by the
now-infamous Christian fundamentalist
lieutenant-general, William G Boykin ("George Bush
was not elected by a majority of the voters in the
United States, he was appointed by God."), that
gives a lovely twist to the concept of
"intelligence gathering":
Among the ideas cited by Defense
Department officials is the idea of "fighting
for intelligence", or commencing combat
operations chiefly to obtain intelligence. The
proposal also calls for a major expansion of
human intelligence, which is information
gathered by spies rather than by technological
means, both within the military services and the
Defense Intelligence Agency, including more
missions aimed at acquiring specific information
sought by policymakers. Fighting for
[you fill in the blank]. That sums up our present
Bush moment. In fact, little that the US does from
diplomacy to torture to foreign aid is any longer
imaginable absent the military. We are a nation
whose public face - however we may still think of
ourselves - is no longer a civilian one, not just
in Iraq but in the world at large. This is in
essence because, if the Bush people could be said
to have a religion, it would not perhaps be
fundamentalist Christianity so much as a deep and
abiding belief in the ability of a militarized
superpower to impose its views and desires on the
world through military strength alone.
Militarism in the United States has long
been a strange bird, since US society lacked most
of the normal trappings of a militarized state.
But it's an even stranger creature post-September
11. After all, the militarists driving policy are
a group of men almost none of whom were ever in
the military (no less saw service in a war) and
many of their policies have been opposed by
honorable (and horrified) military and
intelligence officials who recognize madness,
stupidity and illegality when they see it and have
little interest in having their names or services
dragged through the imperial mud. (Hence all those
leakers to the press.)
Long before
September 11, the Bush administration had made its
approach clear in the National Security Strategy
of the United States, a key document released in
2002, as well as in various presidential speeches
which emphasized the administration's reliance not
on preemptive but "preventive" war; its intense
desire to go it alone internationally (no "global
tests" long preceded John Kerry); the importance
it placed on maintaining eternal US military
dominance in an otherwise superpower-less world
against any conceivable future combination of
powers; and its insistence on putting forward
force without constraints as a first principle - a
position from which torture, which is, after all,
force without constraints in the context of an
interrogation cell, flows so naturally. It was
this collective stance that was put into practice
on September 11, 2001, and that has determined
just about every major act of the administration
since.
Note, for instance, the Bush
administration's response to the catastrophic
Sumatran tsunami. Though from its early hours the
event was visibly near-apocalyptic and the body
count bound to be astronomical, Bush spent three
days on vacation cutting brush at his ranch in
Crawford, Texas, in glorious silence (just as his
junior partner Tony Blair would continue to
vacation in sunny Egypt). After all, the losses
weren't American; terrorism had played no role;
and it hadn't happened in New York City, but
largely in Muslim countries. And so minuscule
amounts of aid were announced by a minor
administration figure at a moment when, as Juan
Cole pointed out at his Informed Comment website,
the US was unsuccessfully spending a blinding $1
billion a week to impose its will on a
recalcitrant Iraq.
When the criticism and
embarrassment became too much - it turns out that
even this president is subject to "global tests" -
George emerged from hibernation to praise American
generosity ("we're a very generous, kind-hearted
nation") and to announce that we would indeed
mount a mighty relief effort to be led by ...
don't be surprised now ... the Pentagon. ("We're
dispatching a marine expeditionary unit, the
aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, and the Maritime
pre-position squadron from Guam to the area to
help with relief efforts."). The very concept of a
civilian relief effort naturally never came to
mind, except - for an administration intent on
stripping civil government of its role in society
- in terms of private charity for which two former
presidents would later be mobilized. The US then
largely ignored the various global relief outfits
(including the United Nations), civilian in
nature, with extensive experience in such things,
sent Hurricane Jeb and the increasingly pugnacious
exiting secretary of state off to do an American
assessment of Asian needs; we declared our own
coalition of the willing (Australia, Japan, India)
willy-nilly, and generally rushed unilaterally
into the breach.
(The Bush administration,
by the way, wasn't alone in sticking to character.
As Bill Berkowitz, the thoughtful columnist at the
Working for Change website, commented, Christian
fundamentalist organizations such as the Family
Research Council, the Christian Coalition, Focus
on the Family, and Concerned Women for America, in
the manner of the president, suffered from an
instant "compassion deficit", their websites
remaining for days tsunami-less; while Doug
Ireland, whose provocative as well as entertaining
blog should be a stop on anyone's passage through
the Web, pointed out to me that the Westboro
Baptist Church website was already declaring the
tsunami God's response to vacationing Swedish
gays. "Thank God for the tsunamis - and for 5,000
dead Swedes!!! God is laughing, mocking and
taunting Swedes, and Sweden, even as they mourn
& weep over their dead!")
None of this
is exactly surprising. When an administration
committed to a form of armed imperial isolationism
(a bizarre inversion of the old Party of Taft
heartland isolationist tradition, now married to
imperial dreams and driven deep into the heart of
the world) and completely committed to the idea of
dominating the planet by force acts, it's almost
bound to do so in predictable ways.
Taking off the gloves
While news
story after news story - and I can barely keep up
with, no less adequately summarize, them - has
driven torture ever deeper into the ordinary life
of the imperium, we also know ever more about how
and where this all began, about, you might say,
the moment of creation. As with extraordinary
rendition in the Clinton era, or neo-con plans
laid out in the 1990s to take down Saddam Hussein,
or the establishment of a national-security state
in the early years of the Cold War, or (as former
Latin American prisoners from the 1960s to the
1980s can attest) torture methods employed or
taught by CIA or US military interrogators, much
of what's happened since September 11, 2001, has a
good deal of history behind it. The Bush
administration hardly created our American world
from scratch. But it certainly accelerated the
trend toward militarism, brought torture out of
the closet - making it something close to official
state policy - began to build a small-scale global
gulag to go with it, melded extremes of US
political and religious expression in new ways,
and established what might be called a National
Insecurity Homeland in the process.
Each
of us has a personality or character developed
over a lifetime which asserts itself in reasonably
expectable ways under pressure; so, it might be
said, does an administration. The assaults of
September 11, 2001, were such a moment of
pressure. You could look on that day and the few
weeks that followed as a kind of administration
Rorschach Test. What instantly floated to the
surface of the Bush collective brain, under the
pressure (and the developing possibilities) of
that moment, would in fact define the years to
come; and I would say that two things above all
came to mind. The first was obviously Iraq - the
urge to take down Saddam Hussein's regime and
forcibly reconstruct the Middle East along lines
the neo-cons had long dreamed of; the second was,
in the spirit of Janus, the two-faced Roman god of
war, a two-sided urge: to elevate the president as
a wartime leader, stripping him of all constraints
and restraints, domestic or international, and to
free him to order acts previously seen as heinous.
The executive's freedom to order torture would,
after all, be the ultimate proof of the
administration's freedom to do anything.
This helps explain, at least in part, what
William Pfaff, columnist for the International
Herald Tribune, recently called "the most striking
aspect of its war against terrorism", an
"enthusiasm for torture" among the land's highest
officials, for making it part of public policy.
After all, while Guantanamo was meant to be beyond
the reach of the law, and what went on there
beyond all sight or oversight, it was also an
intensely public creation in which the
administration invested much pride.
On
Iraq, we know that, according to notes taken by
his associates (as CBS reported a year later),
"barely five hours after American Airlines Flight
77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary
Donald H Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up
with plans for striking Iraq", even though he was
already certain that al-Qaeda had launched the
attack. ("'Go massive,' the notes quote him as
saying. 'Sweep it all up. Things related and
not.'") At that moment, the Pentagon would still
have been smoking. Later that same day, Richard
Clarke, the counter-terrorism expert who was in
most of the key meetings, recalled, "Rumsfeld was
saying that we needed to bomb Iraq ... And we all
said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We
need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there
aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there
are lots of good targets in Iraq." The president
on returning to the White House later that day,
"dragged me into a room", Clarke recalled, "with a
couple of other people, shut the door, and said,
'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he
never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire
conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that
George Bush wanted me to come back with a report
that said Iraq did this."
In mid-2003, the
reliable Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service reported
(see Iraq: Schemers have their way,
Asia Times Online, July 17, 2003):
It appears increasingly clear that
key officials and their allies outside the
administration intended to use the September 11,
2001, terrorist attacks as a pretext for going
to war against Iraq within hours of the attacks
themselves. Within the administration, the
principals appear to have included Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney, and
his national security adviser, I Lewis Libby,
among others in key posts in the National
Security Council and the State
Department. Only nine days after
September 11, the No 3 man at Defense, Douglas
Feith, suggested "hitting terrorists outside the
Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps
deliberately selecting a non-al-Qaeda target like
Iraq". And but two weeks after the attacks, Under
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was already
implicitly fingering Saddam Hussein's Iraq before
a meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization
ministers and the game, as they say, was publicly
afoot.
In the meantime, as we've learned
only recently thanks to Newsweek's Michael
Isikoff, within two weeks of the September 11
attacks, then Justice Department lawyer John Yoo
was already writing a secret memo to White House
legal counsel Alberto Gonzales' assistant, titled
"The President's Constitutional Authority to
Conduct Military Operations against Terrorists and
Nations Supporting Them", which suggested a
staggering new interpretation of the reach of
presidential power: "In the exercise of his power
to use military force, 'the president's decisions
are for him alone and are unreviewable'." This
memo, as Isikoff explains, "lays out a line of
argument about broad presidential wartime powers
that would be repeated time and again in a series
of secret memos to the White House about
controversial decisions in the war on terror. The
arguments pushed by Yoo, a prolific conservative
scholar who has since left the Justice Department,
reached what many view as its apex nearly a year
later when, in another memo written by a colleague
Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel concluded
that the president's powers were so expansive that
he and his surrogates were not bound by
congressional laws or international treaties
proscribing torture during the interrogation of
detainees."
Torture's path was well paved
by the time, in July 2002, Gonzales and his
colleagues convened in a White House office to
consider CIA torture techniques and how to put a
foundation of "legality" under them. By that time,
Gonzales had already created a whole new category,
"enemy combatant", that was meant to do an end-run
around the Geneva Conventions and had laid the
"legal" foundations for taking those
out-of-category combatants and putting them in
Guantanamo where conventions of any kind could be
suitably ignored. That July, according to Isikoff,
his main worry was: "'Are we forward-leaning
enough on this?'... 'Lean forward' had become a
catchphrase for the administration's offensive
approach to the war on terror."
As Pfaff
puts the matter succinctly:
Proposals to authorize torture were
circulating even before there was anyone to
torture. Days after the September 11 attacks,
the administration made it known that the United
States was no longer bound by international
treaties, or by American law and established US
military standards, concerning torture and the
treatment of prisoners. By the end of 2001, the
Justice Department had drafted memos on how to
protect military and intelligence officers from
eventual prosecution under existing US law for
their treatment of Afghan and other prisoners.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Bush
administration is not torturing prisoners
because it is useful but because of its
symbolism. It originally was intended to be a
form of what later, in the attack on Iraq, came
to be called ‘shock and awe.' It was meant as
intimidation. We will do these terrible things
to demonstrate that nothing will stop us from
conquering our enemies. We are indifferent to
world opinion. We will stop at
nothing. Extraction of information was
always secondary at the highest levels to the
freeing of the president from all constraints. A
confidant of the president, Gonzales was certainly
in close touch with high administration officials,
including evidently the vice president's office,
over taking the legal restraints off torture. But
he was, after all, only a lawyer. By then, top
officials had already demonstrated their
"enthusiasm" on the subject, their desire to be
involved. Take Donald Rumsfeld. As Richard Serrano
of the Los Angeles Times has written, "After
American Taliban recruit John Walker Lindh was
captured in Afghanistan, the office of Defense
Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld instructed military
intelligence officers to 'take the gloves off' in
interrogating him ... In the early stages, his
responses were cabled to Washington hourly, the
new documents show ... What happened to Lindh, who
was stripped and humiliated by his captors,
foreshadowed the type of abuse documented in
photographs of American soldiers tormenting Iraqi
prisoners at Abu Ghraib." That was 2001. By
December 2002, Rumsfeld had personally approved a
list of extreme "interrogation techniques" for
Guantanamo right down to the use of dogs to
intimidate prisoners.
It's a grim tale and
one of the main figures who made it possible will,
in the coming days, be given a pass by Democratic
senators. Imagine that. Alberto Gonzales, the
lawyer who sponsored a regime of torture for his
president, will soon become the nation's attorney
general. Perhaps it's fitting. Then the Justice
Department can enter the same world of twisted
names as Camp Justice, saved from the tsunami's
surprise impact by a special Pentagon warning.
When you think about it, we are still living in
the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the
Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular
antidote to the mainstream media"), is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of The End of Victory Culture, a
history of the collapse of American triumphalism
in the Cold War era, as well as a novel, The
Last Days of Publishing. This article first
appeared on Tomdispatch and is used with
permission.
(Copyright 2005 Tom
Engelhardt.) |
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