With each passing day, the Bush administration gives
us new reasons to be ashamed. But nothing these people have done has
damaged America as much as the torture and murder of prisoners at Abu
Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. With Alberto Gonzales as the attorney
general of the United States, what until now has been treated as a
disturbing scandal will be official state policy. The slimy architect of
the American gulag will now be its overseer.
It was Gonzales, while serving as White House legal
counsel, who concluded that the Geneva Conventions were
“quaint” and who redefined torture as procedures that would
produce pain “akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury
such as death or organ failure.” Anything short of that, as far as
the Bush administration is concerned, is just fine.
That includes a lot. We know that
“water-boarding” has been and continues to be a favorite
technique among American torturers. Prisoners are tied to a board and
dunked under water until they are convinced that they will drown. We now
know that some have indeed drowned. Prisoners have been attacked with dogs,
beaten, and sexually abused. Prisoners have been stripped and exposed to
extremes of cold and heat, forced to undergo sleep and sensory deprivation,
left tied up to defecate on themselves, and held in so-called stress
positions. Other prisoners have been flown to client states such as Egypt
to undergo torture even more extreme than that allowed by the Bush
administration. We also know that prisoners as young as 13 have been held
at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and supposedly underwent the same
treatment as the older inmates.
What we are talking about is the United States of
America’s departure from Western civilization. Other nations have
gone off the deep end, and the results have been devastating. During the
Cultural Revolution, the People’s Republic of China essentially went
crazy and massacred or imprisoned much of its literate population. The
French had beheaded a large swath of their nation before they awoke from
the vicious stupor of their revolution. Germany went from being the
world’s center of learning to a nation of rabid murderers under the
Nazis. Today the Christo-fascists, our homegrown brownshirts, are taking us
down the same path.
It is possible to argue that there are times when the
execution of certain individuals is justified. I’m not sure I agree
with those arguments, but I can respect the logic. There is never a time
when torture is legitimate — not for any reason. It is cowardly,
morally repulsive, and counterproductive. There is now no argument at all
why captured American soldiers shouldn’t be treated the same way.
If torture is a legitimate method of preventing bad
events and gaining intelligence, why not torture drunken drivers, parents
who smoke around their children, or any other “evildoers”?
Perhaps somebody from the Department of Faith-Based Initiatives can respond
to this question. I’m trying to understand what’s happened to
our country.
This article appears in Feb 3-9, 2005.
