Tangos With Torture
15 September 2006 8:00 pm by Taylor Marsh
Tangos With Torture
guest post by Ed Encho
\”The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe.
-Bertrand Russell
George W. Bush and top capos Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have their hackles up after yesterday’s Senate Armed Services Committee smackdown of their latest attempt to advocate for the divine right of the United States government to torture, sexually humiliate and illegally imprison whoever in the hell that they damned well please and screw the damned quaint rules of the Geneva Convention. After the much hyped triad’s visit to Congress to engage in a session of brutal partisan arm-twisting to ensure that the rubber stamp one party Republican legislature would allow for an end run around Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and ex post facto immunity from potential complicity in any future criminal trials for administration high officials a few \’confused\’ people just had to have the audacity to question the efficiency and clarity of one-party rule.
Then there was the added sting of a rebuke from former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a man who as McCain knows what it is like to serve (and who actually is a former POW) and is respectful to the implications of broadening the definition of torture.
‘‘The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism”
Powell’s criticism enraged the Bushists and sent administration spinners into full damage control mode. Unsurprisingly, it was Powell’s successor, the always reliable Condi Rice who was rolled out to issue rebuttals with that trademark Ollie North style hitch in her voice. Onsite FOX/White House mouthpiece Tony Snow called Powell “confused” and then launched the following weasel worded questioning of his intentions:‘‘I know that Colin Powell wants to beat the terrorists, too”Which when run through the Rovian translator comes out as:
Colin Powell certainly didn’t mean to sound like a TERRORIST COLLABORATOR no matter how much it may have seemed like he said that he was down with appeasing our ideological enemies.
Today Bush convened a Rose Garden press conference to lash out from behind the bully pulpit and to once again use standard fear-mongering to intimidate and paint opponents as somehow being facilitators of terror. Bush specifically singled out Powell for attack:
It’s unacceptable to think there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.
The punditry and the hate radio goon squads will no doubt vilify Powell as they do all others who dare to step out of line. Why the sudden desire to go to the mattresses if some serious hidden agenda is not in jeopardy?
The Bush-Rove-Cheney Axis of Evil has been so successful in framing the debate on this most important of all issues just as they are with nearly every other one in the face of a timorous and divided opposition that is continually put at a disadvantage due to the vast media control and information infrastructure that the right has assembled. Where the most abysmal of failures lies however is in the inability of a counter message or any courageous voice who is able to emphatically state that the torture of ‘terrorists’ is not the issue that is truly at stake here. The real subject is to ask the vital question of once we begin to break down our guarantees of human rights that are an American tradition just where will it end?
The primary question should be why in the hell are we even having this debate? This is NOT a partisan issue, it is fundamentally an American issue and it defines who we are as a nation. Are we to be that ‘shining city on the hill’ again or are we to continue our mapless journey down the darkest alleys of the dankest slums of the torture state that this rogue administration and the vilest elements of it’s base have dragged us?”
This is not about the metaphorical ‘War on Terror’ it is about something that is much deeper and darker and the choices that we make from now until November 7th will be those that will forever define this country for the remainder of our lives. The question is not about setting what are ‘acceptable’ guidelines for torture and the revocation of Habeus Corpus it is about the incremental erosion of our civil liberties as well as the disinterested acceptance of the practices of an authoritarian state that makes no distinction between ‘terrorists’ and ‘dissidents’.
As the old story goes if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water it will immediately jump out, if you put the same frog into a pot of warm water and very slowly increase the temperature in unnoticeable increments it will sit there until it inevitably cooks to death. What people fail to realize is that the frog is us.
Americans should be very wary of ceding our rights to any legislation backed by a regime whose open contempt of the law in seeking to establish an unaccountable ‘unitary executive’ is as relentless as it is antithetical to American tradition and values.
Americans should also be terrified of the prospect of granting unfettered, sweeping police state powers to a party with a hard core loyalist base largely comprised of those who wish to see the wall of separation between church and state demolished and a cruel biblical law based on Christian Reconstructionism implemented once secular liberalism has been banished from the courts.
There are also elements of the Republican party base who would relish the prospects of adding state sanctioned torture as another tool with which to use to further their cruel persecution of racial and ethnic minorities as well as those whose sexual preference or lifestyles they frown upon. The spirit of those who once tortured and murdered a young man named Emmett Till still runs deep in the red states where it lurks only slightly beneath the roiling surface of our political discontent. It will take little to spring the demons from their cages in fact it has been standard GOP operating procedure from Nixon through Karl Rove. This is why November 7th is so very critical as a referendum on the ruinous policies of the Bush administration.
When looking at today’s social and political trends it is fairly easy to extrapolate forward several years and when taking into consideration our fascist bent as well as the desire of theocrats to roll back the clock to the good old days of the Inquisition as well as an abundant supply of desperate, destitute, dumbed down, reality television addicted zombies and it could only be a matter of time until the new ABC/Disney network smash hit reality show will be American Torquemada where any liberal or moderate could become the featured guest. It would be a huge ratings pull for sweeps week.
2005 debate with former Bush Justice Department official John Yoo:
Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
America needs to scream now and scream loudly in unified righteous outrage in order to stop this decline into despotic barbarism. Silence in November only increases the chances that you will be screaming much louder if it is ever you who finds yourself strapped to the torture table.
