It Was Torture

by Richard B. Simon

Allow me first to come clean.

When I heard that U.S. troops had captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I fantasized about his torture.

So I am complicit. This is a democracy. I shouldn't expect its leaders to be any better than I, nor any smarter, or any wiser.

The International Committee of the Red Cross is essentially the arbiter of war crimes. Red Cross observers are allowed to examine a host country's detention facilities, to check on the status of the prisoners, and issue report back to that nation's government.

The report back to the Bush Administration on the treatment of prisoners in the "War on Terror," leaked to author Mark Danner, who reports on the report in the New York Review of Books, ruled that the treatment amounted to "torture."

Torture is illegal, under international law, and under United States law.

The Bush Administration made it "legal" -- partly by claiming for the executive branch a dictatorship, wherein anything goes, so long as the President wills it.

Regardless of the travesty done to U.S. law, this means that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, perhaps John Ashcroft, and all other top officials who came up with the Bush Administration's interrogation policies appear to be guilty of international war crimes.

If the were any other country, we'd denounce its rulers, call them demented villains, drag them into court. Demand regime change. Now we know for certain why the Bush Administration wouldn't join the International War Crimes Tribunal.

I will never in my life forget the Thanksgiving -- a handful of years ago -- when I announced to parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and their inlaws that the Bush Administration and its Republican Party would be remembered by history in the same breath as Nazis of Germany and the Communists of the Soviet Union. You could hear their jaws hit the floor.

All except my grandfather. He knew. He actually served in Italy, fought the fascists up close. He knows from dictatorship. My uncle later complained that my Granfather pretended to spit at his big-screen television set -- "Ptui!" -- when Bush appeared therein, as if this were some unfathomably insane response.

You've heard in this space for a long time that the United States was torturing detainees; that that torture was not limited only to al Qaeda suspects, nut that it had been exported to Iraq, to Abu Ghraib.

And so my good brother Emilio sends me a brilliant op-ed by the sometimes weaselly political shill Paul Begala, that discussed Bush lawyer John Yoo's approval of the crushing of a terrorist suspect's child's testicles -- and says "this reminded me of you."

Because over the weekend, up pops the noble gentlemen Dick Cheney, who can't help but attack the fledgling Obama Administration as it attempts to remantle the country.

Of course, we should have known that the Bushists, after breaking all of America's moral codes, would not be able to help but defy precedent and attack its successors during a national crisis.

No one from the Democratic Party, and no one from the Clinton Administration, leapt up to attack Bush and Cheney's handling of 9/11. But the Bushists emerge from their torpor to raise doubts about Obama's policies -- particularly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially on the handling of detainees.

That's because they know, in what's left of their hearts, that in a just world, the gallows awaits them, just like it awaited Saddam.

Dick Cheney and George Bush have killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq.

They have presided over rape rooms and tortures.

They have devastated your country's economy, attacked their own people, and courted environmental disaster on behalf of your corporate allies.

They destroyed the rule of law in a country founded solely on the rule of law.

They couldn't help it. They would do it again. It was the only choice, you see.

George Orwell writes

[W]hen the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

We had to stay in Iraq forever, Cheney has argued for years, because if we were to leave, bin Laden would think we are weak.

And here comes Cheney, unaware that he is bin Laden to Obama's Bush.

Every time bin Laden popped up with a new tape, he told us that we must do the exact opposite of what the Bush Administration was doing -- essentially reenforcing Bush's arguments that we needed to "stay the course." (The disastrous course, which would have continued unimpeded had the Democrats not taken control of Congress in 2006. Only then did Bush sack Rumsfeld and institute "the surge." Until that "accountability moment," everything had gone just exactly perfectly.)

The new, self-styled boogeyman is Cheney, popping up once a month, telling us that Obama's rollback of the Bush Cheney lawlessness will endanger America. Ignoring that torture and asinine detention policies have led ex-Guantanamo detaineed to come back as Taliban commanders and suicide bombers. Would these guys have been returned to the battlefield if they'd been detained as simple prisoners of war, rather than in the lawless Bush "War on Terror" detention system?

No. They would still be in detention, until bin Laden formally surrenders.

But we would not have been able to torture them.

In the same week, Ari Fleischer begins the parade of Bushist thugs crawling out from under their rocks, where they are unemployed (the return of poetic justice), untouchable by decent folks running clean operations, arguing the same.

And now Cheney is arguing that the damage done to the economy was not Bush's fault, but the result of 9/11, essentially handing bin Laden the propaganda victory he sought from the beginning -- to bankrupt the U.S. as the mujahedin did the U.S.S.R.

What has become clear in recent months is the psychopathology of the Bushists.

Bush and Cheney were supposed to be a gang of toughs, oil wildcatters from Wyoming and Tejas, the kinds of places you don't want to be caught after dark if you're queer or brown or funny-looking, or you have long hair or funny clothes, or you drink strong coffee or drive a car built in Scandinavia.

9/11 happened on their watch.

The terrorists aimed a plane for the White House.

They missed on the latter count, but Cheney and Bush were obviously shaken, and remained so. They swore this would never happen again, if they had to destroy the country themselves to prevent bin Laden from humiliating them again.

And that's what they did. The United States suffered seven and a third long long years the ravages of governance by men and women wracked with post traumatic stress disorder.

It's no way to run a country.

But now that Bushism has been totally discredited, even by their own ideological allies, who enabled their every single move, and threw the system of checks and balances out the window (just listen to Republican Senators Arlen Specter and John Cornyn, complaining that Vermont Senator Leahy's Truth Commission to investigate terror War lawlessness would be an abdication of Congress' oversight function, as if they hadn't abdicated it nearly a decade ago) they're back, trying to salvage a legacy that they don't seem to even understand is in total shambles, to save themselves from the harsh verdict of the historians, who rank Bush 36th out of 42 former Presidents.

But we now know that the arbiter of war crimes found that the leaders of our democracy engaged in them. Just like Milosevich, just like Saddam, just like Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini and Bashir and Stalin and the worst of history's actors. And just like all of them, they did it in the name of Protecting the Homeland.

This is a democracy. We are responsible. Our leaders represent us. We choose them. We must bring them to justice, or else how are we any better from Ahmedinejad who says that the Holocaust never happened?

Leahy's Commission is a way to remove it from the Republican vs. Democrat frame. The Republicans don't want that, because then they can't assert that for every truth ("The Bush Administration instituted torture"), there is an equal and opposite Republican version ("it's not torture if we have a piece of paper from Bush and Cheney's personal lawyers that say it isn't").

The Bushists are reemerging to muddy the ethical waters. It's what they do best -- disseminate misinformation and disinformation, to confuse the electorate.

Just as America is beginning to get its moral footing, they seek to pull the rug out, to protect their own asses.

What else is new?