Tomgram: Self-Portrait
in a Tortured World
American Gothic:
Self-Portrait with Shackles for the Year 2005
By Tom Engelhardt
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 Bush
administration 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 now are becoming, showed
through unbecomingly.
Only one small spot
in the vast Indian Ocean basin
"seems to have received full advanced warning of the waves to
come -- the
ostensibly British island of Diego Garcia, which is actually a
sizeable U.S. military base, a stationary "aircraft carrier" for the war
in Iraq. It also houses "Camp Justice," one of the secret little hideaway
resorts the 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 Bush
administration -- two interlinked prison systems, in fact; one run by the
Pentagon and the other by the CIA, both meant to keep prisoners and
practices far from the prying eyes of the American 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, U.S.-controlled, and yet -- or so
Bush officials hoped until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise last year --
beyond the reach of our courts.
On military bases
like Diego Garcia and in special military- or CIA-controlled prisons like
Guantanamo, the "war on terrorism" was to be carried to its informational
climax by whatever methods American 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 U.S. 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 neocon devotees to last at least as long. Now,
according to
the latest 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, ever more of America's secret world of torture (generally called
"abuse" in our 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 last 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 U.S. military airfields worldwide." A
list of where it's been spotted offers a suggestive, though hardly
complete, little map of our 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 9/11 in which we contract out the torture of our
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 emails and memorandums from disturbed and
angry FBI 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 our own Devil's Island. These
documents are a clear indication that torture, mistreatment, and abuse in
American-controlled prisons, holding areas, military camps, and
interrogation cells add up to 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…"); 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
our President had to say at a news conference about such
accusation 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 onto the
Geneva Conventions and, as a signatory, is fully bound by them because,
according to Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, "[A]ll 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 our 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 Falluja, American troops came upon Mohammad al-Jundi,
the Syrian driver of two kidnapped French journalists (since released
elsewhere). This was presented in our 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 our press)
was
a single FBI e-mail sent from Guantanamo to senior FBI
officials in the States which "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 the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and
Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to the extreme methods used in
Guantanamo.
(Note by the way that, while our 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 rendited 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 4 feet 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 5 commands (the
latest being -- gulp -- Northcom, which means us) 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:
"Gen. 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 U.S. 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 military
has become not just our war-fighting and occupying force, but our main
"nation-building" force, our major diplomatic force (now that
military-to-military relations have become the essence of foreign policy),
our preponderant intelligence force, a major propaganda outfit (or call it
public diplomacy, if you will), our central ministry for advanced R&D
research and basic science,
the only part of the government seriously preparing for a
global-warming world, and our 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 the nation's $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 policy makers."
Fighting for [you
fill in the blank]. That sums up our present Bush moment. In fact, little
that this country 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 essentially 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 America
has long been a strange bird, since our society lacked most of the normal
trappings of a militarized state. But it's an even stranger creature
post-9/11. 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.)
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 at the time
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 American 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 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, the President spent three days on vacation
cutting brush at his ranch in Crawford 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 in Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist
countries. And so miniscule amounts of aid were announced by a minor
administration figure at a moment when, as Juan Cole pointed out at his
Informed Comment website, we were unsuccessfully spending a
blinding $1 billion a week to impose our 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, kindhearted 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. We then largely ignored the various global relief outfits
(including the UN), civilian in nature, with extensive experience in such
things, sent Hurricane Jeb and our increasingly pugnacious exiting
secretary of state off to do an American assessment of Asian needs;
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 like 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 neocon 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 U.S. 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 American 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 9/11 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 neocons 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 counterterrorism
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:
"It appears
increasingly clear that key officials and their allies outside the
administration intended to use the Sep. 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 Pres. 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 9 days after
September 11,
the number three 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, Undersecretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz was already implicitly fingering Saddam Hussein's Iraq
before a meeting of NATO 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 9/11, then
Justice Department lawyer John Yoo was already writing a secret memo to
White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzalez's assistant, entitled
"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, Gonzalez 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, Gonzalez 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 Sept. 11 attacks, the administration made it known
that the United States was no longer bound by international treaties, or
by American law and established U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
Copyright C2004 Tom
Engelhardt
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