Friday, December 19, 2008
“Words are loaded pistols.”
~Jean-Paul Sartre
·
The Torture Report
Editorial
New York Times
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Torture Starts at the Top
Editorial
Boston Globe
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Does It Matter If You Call It "Torture"?
by Daphne Eviatar
Washington Independent
If
Only US Law Applied to the US Government
December
8, 2008 |
The
U.S. government does not have a monopoly on hypocrisy, but no other
government can match the hypocrisy of the U.S. government. It is now well documented and known all over
the world that the U.S. government tortured detainees at Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo and that the U.S. government has had people kidnapped and
"renditioned," that is, transported to Third World countries, such
as Egypt, to be tortured. Also documented and well known is the fact
that the U.S. Department of Justice provided written memos justifying the
torture of detainees. One torture advocate who wrote the DOJ memos that gave
the green light to the Bush regime's use of torture is John Yoo, who
somehow secured a U.S. Justice Department appointment and a tenured
professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of
Law. Members of Berkeley's city council believe that
Yoo should be charged with war crimes. The U.S. government has charged lesser
offenders than Yoo with war crimes. Yoo helped the DOJ achieve the Bush
regime's goal of finding a way around the torture prohibitions of both U.S.
statutory law and the Geneva Conventions. The way around the law that Yoo provided for
the sadistic Bush regime was closed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which
voided Yoo's arguments, and Yoo's torture memo was rescinded by the
Department of Justice. Nevertheless, Yoo's obvious constitutional
incompetence, which in Yoo's case is total, has not affected his position as
professor of constitutional law at Berkeley. Can you imagine the harm Yoo is
doing by teaching future cadres of lawyers and government officials that
torture is consistent with the Constitution and the law of the land? How many
of us will suffer from this ignorant man's teachings? But I digress. Even as the U.S. government
was torturing people, the U.S. government was prosecuting the son of Charles
Taylor, the former ruler of Liberia, for torturing political opponents of his
father's government. The U.S. government did not employ the Yoo torture memo
to justify Liberia's use of torture against those who wished to overthrow the
Liberian government or commit terror against it. The U.S. government's
position is that Liberia's government had no right to use torture to defend
itself. Only an "indispensable nation" such as the U.S. has the
right to torture people who are imagined to threaten it. I use the word "imagined" because
approximately 99 percent of the detainees tortured by America were totally
innocent people picked up at random or sold to the stupid Americans by
warlords as "terrorists." (The U.S. government offered rewards for
terrorists, like the bounty offered for outlaws in the "Wild West."
The result was that warlords in Afghanistan and Pakistan grabbed whoever was
not one of them and sold their captives to Americans as
"terrorists.") According to Carrie Johnson, a Washington Post staff writer, on Oct.
30, 2008, a federal
jury in Miami convicted Charles Taylor's son, Chuckie, of torture.
Chuckie will be sentenced by the indispensable Americans in January for
torture, conspiracy, and firearms violations. He may spend the rest of his
life in an American prison. While Chuckie's trial was underway, the Bush
regime was torturing people. The Washington
Post writes that Chuckie's conviction is "the first test of
an American law that gives prosecutors the power to bring charges for acts of
torture committed in foreign lands." In other words, U.S. law against
torture applies to the entire world, to every other country except the United States. The hubris is
unimaginable – no country can torture except the U.S. Anyone else who tortures gets life, or, in
the case of Saddam Hussein, gets hung by the neck until dead. Isn't it great to be an American? Our laws
don't apply to us, only to every other nation. This is what it means to be
the moral light of the world, the unipower, the salt of the earth. Neither poor Carrie Johnson nor her editors
at the Washington Post see the
irony or the paradox. Johnson writes that the U.S. prosecutors "accused
Taylor of taking part in atrocities and directing subordinates to torture
victims using … electrical devices from 1999 to 2002." That charge practically overlaps in time with Bush's, or
Cheney's, or Yoo's, or the DOJ's, or Rumsfeld's, or whoever's direction to subordinates to torture
people detained by Americans at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and in various CIA
rendition sites. By now everyone in the world has seen the photograph of the
hooded Iraqi with electrical wires attached standing on that box in Abu
Ghraib. If only American laws applied to the
American government. Then the criminals who have been in charge for eight
years could be prosecuted for their extreme violation of United States laws.
But, of course, the great, moral American government is far above the law.
American law only applies to dispensable nations. America is not answerable
to law, not to its own law and not to international law. U.S. Attorney
General Michael Mukasey
affirmed that the U.S. government is above all law when he told the Senate
Judiciary Committee that there would be no investigation or prosecution of
those Bush regime officials who authorized torture and those who carried out
the sadistic acts. The American government, the government of
the great, indispensable nation, has a free pass. The strong do what they
will. The weak suffer what they must. |