by Dennis Loo
When you are trying to acclimate
a people to a new normal – in this case, the new normal means routine
torture, with international law, and the law more generally, all subject
to subordination and disregard as “military necessity” dictates
– you start out by denying that you would even think of doing such terrible,
illegal things as torture. For a long time, Bush claimed that he had
approved an “alternative set of procedures” that were not,
heaven forbid, torture, but that the exact details he couldn’t reveal
because it would give aid and comfort to the enemy. He assured the American
people that all the relevant laws and procedures were being safeguarded.
Remember his famous lines? “We do not torture.”
As time goes on, you carefully
and progressively build the case for justifying extreme measures. Eventually,
you shift from denying that you’re doing these things to admitting that
you’re doing it, but, as Schwarzenegger’s character in the film “True
Lies” admits to his wife, yes, I have killed some people, “but
they were all “bad.” This is now what has happened.
The moment we are now in is
critical because the cat’s now definitively out of the bag – it’s now
been admitted in full view in mainstream media – and the question before
us is whether we will permit this or fight these war criminals and drive
them from office. There will be those that say, “Oh, but Zubaydah
was a bad man and you have to do these things to get information out
of them.” People who accept such logic are showing us three things.
From Jason Leopold’s 12/19/07 article entitled: “Chertoff
Concealed Role in Tape’s Destruction:” First, they are demonstrating
their utter credulity to the outrageous fictions of proven liars.
Second, they are demonstrating
their inability to judge the overall direction of events. Today our
government is torturing Arabs and converts to Islam (such as American
citizen Jose Padilla). Tomorrow, our government will be torturing more
Americans and anyone else they can stick the terrorist label on.
Third, they are demonstrating
their narrow-minded national chauvinism, concluding that it is OK to
torture others as long as it supposedly makes
them safer.
What kind of people are we
really? How will history judge us?
History will not be kind to
those who say that they did not act because they were relying upon the
Democrats to “do” something or that they waited for months
and months hoping that a new president in 2009 would stop these
practices.
History will ask: why did you
remain silent? You knew. You had a moral responsibility to act and you
didn’t. You cannot hide behind the inactions of those you expected to
do the right thing. You are responsible, not the complicit Democrats
and the complicit mass media. You.
The story from ABC News below
incorrectly states that Abu Zubaydah gave up important information after
being watertortured. The truth is something else. As New York Times
reporter Ron Suskind says, Zubaydah was a low-level operative with nothing
of real value to reveal.
In his book “The One Percent
Doctrine,” author Ron Suskind said Zubaydah was not the “high
value detainee” the CIA had claimed. Rather, Zubaydah was a minor
player in the al-Qaeda organization, handling travel for associates
and their families, Suskind says.
Abu Zubaydah’s captors soon
discovered that their prisoner was mentally ill and knew nothing about
terrorist operations or impending plots. That realization was “echoed
at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice
President,” Suskind writes.
But Bush portrayed Zubaydah
as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction
on the United States.
“And, so, the CIA used
an alternative set of procedures” to get Zubaydah to talk, Bush
said in the spring of 2002, after Zubaydah was captured.
Suskind writes that Zubaydah
became one of the first prisoners in the wake of 9/11 to undergo some
of the harshest interrogation methods at the hands of American intelligence
officials.
Suskind says that, despite
the fact that Bush was briefed by the CIA about Zubaydah’s low-level
al-Qaeda status, the president did not want to “lose face”
because he had stated his importance publicly.
“Bush was fixated on how
to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes. Bush questioned
one CIA briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”
Zubaydah was strapped to a
waterboard and, fearing imminent death, he spoke about a wide range
of plots against a number of US targets, such as shopping malls, the
Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. Yet, Suskind writes, the
information Zubaydah had provided under duress was not credible.
Still, that did not stop “thousands
of uniformed men and women [who] raced in a panic to each … target.”
And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally
disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
Dennis Loo is an awards
winning sociologist, co-editor of Impeach
the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney,
Cal Poly Pomona Associate Professor of Sociology, WCW National Steering
Committee Member, Declare It Now originator.