Global Eye
Sick Days
By Chris Floyd
Published: March 10, 2006
It was, by all reports, the most heinous terrorist act in history. A
ruthless gang of religious extremists, driven by an insatiable hatred for
Western civilization, killed multitudes of innocent people in a merciless
surprise attack. The perpetrators -- who posed as ordinary citizens,
members of a law-abiding ethnic minority going about their daily business
-- took advantage of the burgeoning global economy to move easily across
borders as they brought their vast conspiracy to its poisonous fruition.
But Western leaders, though they did sleep, finally roused themselves to
action. One by one, terrorist operatives fell into their hands. In the
face of such an unprecedented threat, the "gloves came off." Captives were
subjected to strenuous interrogation as officials worked feverishly to
forestall any further attacks. Soon the hard evidence of guilt emerged:
the words of the conspirators themselves, set down in black and white,
confessing all.
That's how 14th-century Europe "learned" that the Black Death, the
rat-borne plague that killed 25 million people across the continent in
just four years, had been "caused" by the Jews. Vague rumor and ancient
prejudice were "confirmed" by evidence extracted from captured Jews who
had been "put to the question" -- the medieval spin-word for "torture."
The story that emerged was full of concrete detail, like a pre-war New
York Times report on Saddam Hussein's WMD: names of the terrorist leaders,
the methods used to poison wells, specific locations, the composition of
the various toxins, etc.
Armed with such legalistic reports, earnestly delivered by trusted
officials, Europe embarked on a frenzy of pogroms. In country after
country, the Jews were rounded up, burned alive, beheaded, beaten to
death, slaughtered in every way imaginable. All of it justified in the
name of security -- and all of it based on lies, on desperate nightmares
wrung from innocent people tormented into madness. The plague pogroms
marked a watershed in European anti-Semitism, notes author John Kelly in
his sweeping history, "The Great Mortality": A new element of outright
eliminationism entered into the traditional religious disputes and
cultural frictions. The seeds of the Holocaust were sown by the inhumanity
of sanctioned torture.
Who knows what seeds of future horror are being sown this very day in the
vast, sprawling hive of torture that President George W. Bush and his
chief minions, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, have spread across the
planet? How many lies condemning how many innocent people are being
extracted by "stress techniques," by "sensory disorientation," by electric
shocks and sexual humiliation, by waterboarding and snarling dogs, by the
infliction of pain just short of "organ failure or impairment of bodily
function" and other refinements devised by the perverters of law in the
White House and Pentagon?
Each week brings fresh confirmation of the continuing atrocities --
carried out as deliberate state policy, at the order of top officials --
in the Bushist hellholes of Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and other
sites still hidden from the sun. This week, it came from Amnesty
International, which documented the plight of 14,000 prisoners held
without charges by U.S. occupiers and their native proxies in Iraq: limbo
denizens, some incarcerated for years, many of them horribly tortured.
Last week, it came from the Bush administration itself, which declared in
court that the much-ballyhooed "anti-torture" law signed by Bush last
month is a dead letter, The Washington Post reports. The Bushists say that
the law's protections cannot be applied to the Guantanamo captives,
because a backdoor provision in the bill stripped those subhumans of their
habeas corpus rights: They have no standing before any court to address
any aspect of their eternal detention -- until they have gone through the
guts of Bush's extra-constitutional "military tribunals."
And there they will find that the evidence against them may have been
extracted by torture, Agence France Presse reports. Colonel Peter
Brownback, presiding over one of the kangaroo sessions last week, refused
to issue a blanket ban on torture-derived testimony, basing his decision
on quintessential Bushist reasoning: "What you and I mean by torture might
be different." Indeed, that's the crux of the matter; Bush and his minions
have simply defined torture out of existence. Anything short of deliberate
murder or, in Brownback's formulation, "a red-hot needle in the eye," is
simply a "strenuous interrogation technique." (However, "accidental"
murder of those "put to the question" is OK, according to the White House
legal briefs that undergird the gulag, The Washington Post reports.)
Thus, when Rumsfeld issued an official memo in 2003 authorizing Abu
Ghraib's inquisitors to use "stress positions," humiliation, hunger, sleep
deprivation and sensory assaults to break the minds of prisoners,
decorating the page with his hand-written exhortations ("Make sure this
happens!"), as prison commandant Brigadier General Janis Karpinski has
testified, he wasn't actually committing a war crime by ordering torture.
There is no such thing as torture, you see -- if a Bush official orders
it. No torture, no crime; just the broken minds, broken bodies and, in
dozens of cases documented by Amnesty and others, the battered corpses of
Bush's gulag guests.
Torture is the new plague, the real poison, spreading the toxins of
untruth and brutality throughout the society that embraces it. The
well-documented reality of Bush's ghastly system is now obvious for all to
see. There can be no more excuses. Anyone who ignores this spreading evil
is willfully blind; anyone who defends it is morally corrupt.