Triumph of the Beast

This article by Dahr Jamail - an independent journalist in Iraq - is riveting. If you are not acquainted with him, you can read more about him and his site here. Few articles I have seen have laid it out regarding torture as this one.

As one man said: “We are not the doctors. We are the disease.”

A must read.

Triumph of the Beast

The torture of Iraqi detainees by US military forces is undeniable. We now know the Bush administration condoned torture even before Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched upon Afghanistan and Iraq, in this post-9/11 hysteria of terrorist infiltration on American soil.

During a recent trip to Panama, President Bush pontificated that Americans “do not torture”—his deployment of executive authority to keep Congress from imposing rules on prisoner treatment notwithstanding. With the implementation of the Patriot Act of 2001, President Bush was given express power to declare anyone suspected of having a connection to terrorists or terrorism an “enemy combatant” and thereby suspend his right to habeas corpus. The Senate diligently voted to cast innocent people into pain and darkness without recourse or rights.

U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, in his confirmation hearing proceedings, represented the American way in matters of torture to be waterboarding, use of dogs to induce stress, forced nudity, hooding, sensory deprivation, food and sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, a face or stomach slap, the forcible injection of mood-altering drugs, mock executions, and threatening to send detainees to countries where they would be tortured, “might… be permissible in specific circumstances, if appropriately limited, depending on the nature of the precise conduct under consideration.”

The Senate Judiciary members failed to question Gonzalez about a March 2003 Associated Press report referring to the “the (U.S.) military listening closely to Israeli experts and picking up tips from years of Israeli Army operations in Palestinian areas and Lebanese towns.”

BBC’s Caroline Hawley in Baghdad reported the discovery of 173 Iraqis imprisoned in the central Jadiriya district of Baghdad by Iraqi security forces.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim concurred with the Hawley’s report that the detainees appeared malnourished, and may have been “subjected to some kind of torture. “In order to search for a terrorist, they used to detain hundreds of innocent people and torture them brutally,” Abdul-Hamid, added, an apparent precondition of democracy in Iraq.

Seymour Hersh has said that the U.S. government has videotapes of children being raped at Abu Ghraib prison. “Some of the worst things have happened you don’t know, okay?

Why the compulsion to torture? Roger Burbach and Jim Tarbell wrote in their book, Imperial Overstretch: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire, as “an imperial nation flagrantly imposing its will on others.” Torture demonstrates a righteousness based on the conviction that the virtues of democracy need to be promoted with the real intention to “ensure that the US penetrates other countries’ economies” – the same purpose that animates the US policy in Central and Latin America. The catchphrase, “free market democracies” is deconstructed as “controlled democracies that would recognize the prerogatives of international conflict.” And what better way to emerge as an unchallenged world empire under the guise of the “war on terrorism” as the means to promote a “petro-military complex” than by perpetuating armed conflict and torturing others into compliance.

If one senses a beast bearing on the world, it is a familiar one; it came from the darkest organic forces in American Cold War politics.

The terrorist attacks, however misguided and criminal, can be directly traced to US military presence in Arab countries, and as an effort to stop foreign corporate takeover and a seemingly unending Bushist totalitarian military crusade. Tariq Ali writes in Planet Porto Alegre of Bush’s warmongering, “It is a multi purpose mantra. The first aim is to convince the public that the terrorists are crazed Muslims who are bombing modernity/democracy/freedom/ ‘our values’, etc.”

Much more to read here...