Is America a Sick Country or What?

By Dave Lindorff

You see, here's the thing. When you hear about the sick, twisted
things that America's torturers have been doing, courtesy of President
George W. Bush and Vice President Darth Cheney, you have to remember
that the US military and the CIA were not really all that reliable when
it came to picking up the real terrorists. In fact, their batting
average was pretty lousy.

According to even the Pentagon's own reckoning, for example,
probably 85% of the captives being held at Guantanamo over the past
eight years were not terrorists at all, and a fair number--probably the
majority--weren't even fighting anyone when they were captured. I'm
sure that the averages at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or at the
secret prison in Iraq are no better. The military was offering bounties
in Iraq and Afghanistan for alleged terrorists, you see, and probably
still is, but in both of those lawless, tribal countries, many people
have used the offer to settle old feuds, turning in people they wanted
to punish or dispose of, and many others just turned in random people
to get the reward money.

Remember this when you hear about torture tactics that we are
learning were used by our side--things that make waterboarding sound
like a walk in the park. We're now getting confirmation of things that
we journalists were hearing rumors of earlier: faked executions using
blanks, faked executions in neighboring rooms, followed by threats of
the same to a person who had just heard the screams and a shot in the
cell next to him, threats with an electric drill, and now perhaps the
worst yet--the threat to kill a captive's children. And of course there
is the already disclosed case of a captive who had his genitals cut
with a razor, and generous use of tasers in places on the body designed
to cause maximum pain. That, and of course there are a lot raped
captives (including young boys), and a lot of bodies yet to be dug up
of captives who were simply killed during torture.

We've got a litany of horror and abuse here that sounds like the
worst kind of stories that used to come out of Saddam Hussein's Iraq,
or the Argentine Junta or Idi Amin's Uganda. About the only thing
missing is word that the military and CIA torturers were eating their
victims, or feeding them their own genitals, but who knows? Maybe we'll
get there yet. It's hard at this point to rule anything out.

What has become of the US? We started out the victims
of an attack in 2001, with the whole world rallying to our side, and
within a matter of weeks, our government, acting in our name, had
secretly embarked on a wholly unnecessary and totally criminal descent
into the barbarity of Middle Ages.

And now? The new administration has claimed to have put a stop to
the atrocities, but it remains adamant that it is not going to root out
the evil that was already done to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.

President Barack Obama says he does not want to look back at any
crimes that were committed. He wants to go "forward." This is not the
voice of justice, though. This is the voice of political gutlessness
and of big power exceptionalism. The same America that demands the
prosecution of war criminals in little countries like Cambodia or
Serbia or Sudan, considers itself exempt from criminal liability for
its own crimes.

Attorney General Eric Holder says he may be ready to appoint a
prosecutor to investigate cases where CIA or private contract torturers
"overstepped" the rules set by the White House and Justice Department,
but he has said he will not allow the investigation to go beyond that
to pursue the people who enabled those acts of torture--people like
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who personally instructed
torturers in Afghanistan to "take the gloves off" in one case, or
Assistant Attorney Generals John Yoo and Jay Baybee (now a federal
judge), who ruled that anything short of the destruction of bodily
organs or of a pain level equivalent to death was okay. Nor will he
allow any investigation to look at acts of torture that were
authorized, like waterboarding, if they had the sanction of the
Bush/Cheney White House.

This position taken by the new administration should sicken us all.
Worse, it should be broadly condemned, because if the descent into
barbarity which occurred with the highest White House sanction is not
investigated thoroughly, and punished fully, there is no way we can say
it will not happen again. In fact, it's safe to say that it will happen again,
the next time another charlatan gets into office and uses fear to blind
the American people to all that is right and decent, and to the
importance of maintaining the rule of law.

I know there are terrible things happening right now which demand
our attention and action--an escalating, endless war in Afghanistan
that increasingly resembles Vietnam in 1966 or 1967, a presidential
cave-on on health care reform, a sell-out on real action against
climate change, and on and on--but this particular crime--the crime of
failing to act to punish violations of the Geneva Conventions on
treatment of prisoners of war, which is being committed today by the
Obama administration--is so obscene, so directly in our faces, and is
such a stain on the whole nation, that it demands action.

We will probably never know how many innocent lives have been
destroyed by America's eight years of officially sanctioned torture,
but we can at least see to it that the people who sanctioned it, and
not just those who engaged in it (and that goes right up through the
chain of command to the Commander in Chief and to the real power behind
the throne, Dick Cheney), are put in the dock like the criminals at
Nuremberg, to face the charge of war crimes. and crimes against
humanity.

As the citizens of what we call a democracy, we can demand nothing less.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadeelphia-area journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net