Global Eye, July 8, 2005.

[Guest guest]

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/07/08/120.html

 

Friday, July 8, 2005. Issue 3204. Page 112.

 

Global Eye

By Chris Floyd

 

Last Friday, the former physician of ex-President George H.W. Bush

wrote a guest column for The Washington Post. Two days later, the

attorney general appointed by current President George W. Bush made a

surprise visit to Baghdad. These seemingly unrelated events are not

only inextricably linked; together they form a portrait of a nation

gone wretchedly astray, hurtling into a moral void from which there

may be no return.

 

There was nothing unusual about the physician, Dr. Burton Lee III,

doing a piece for the Post, of course; the paper is the house organ of

the U.S. political elite, and a whole troop of loyal Bush Family

retainers make regular appearances in its editorial pages, lauding the

son who has now ascended the throne. What is remarkable is that Lee

came not to praise the younger Bush, but to bury him -- with hard

truths about the torture regime he has installed in his " terror war "

gulag.

 

Lee, a former military doctor, denounced Bush's use of military

medical personnel to help " set the conditions for interrogation " :

withholding treatment from tortured prisoners, breaking medical

confidence to tell interrogators of prisoners' physical and

psychological weak spots, and other heinous practices approved by the

White House and codified in Pentagon directives for military medical

staff.

 

 

The good doctor is right to be shocked: The shadow of Josef Mengele

hovers over these deliberate perversions of medical ethics. Yet Bush

has not only countenanced these crimes against humanity -- he has

commanded that medical personnel commit them. This level of open,

legalized barbarity has not been seen in the U.S. government since the

days of slavery and the Indian wars.

 

Lee also shredded the big lie that the noble " terror war " had only

been temporarily tainted by a few " bad apples, " now removed from the

wholesome barrel. In denouncing the " systematic, government-sanctioned

torture and excessive abuse of prisoners in the war on terror, " Lee

noted the true extent of the criminality -- and those who bear the

ultimate responsibility for it. He wrote:

 

" The widespread reports of torture and ill-treatment -- frequently

based on military and government documents -- defy the claim that this

abusive behavior is limited to a few noncommissioned officers at Abu

Ghraib or isolated incidents at Guantanamo Bay. When it comes to

torture, the military's traditional leadership and discipline have

been severely compromised up and down the chain of command. Why? I

fear it is because the military has bowed to errant civilian leadership. "

 

Here Lee cited the literally thousands of pages of evidence produced

by the Army's own investigators detailing systematic torture and

murder throughout Bush's world-engulfing gulag. In a separate

interview that followed his column, Lee pointed readers to the new

report by Physicians for Human Rights, or PHR, titled " Break Them

Down: The Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by U.S. Forces. " As

Lee explained, psychological torture can be even more damaging and

long-lasting than a bout of physical abuse -- something he learned

firsthand from treating the victims of French torture in Algeria.

 

The graphic horrors of physical torture, captured in the infamous

pictures from Abu Ghraib, have understandably garnered most of the

attention in the media's occasional glances at Bush's concentration

camps. And here, under pressure, the White House has reluctantly made

a few cosmetic changes, limiting to some extent the knuckle-work that

interrogators can use -- although PHR notes that many of these

ballyhooed " reforms " have never been implemented. In any case, these

restrictions can be suspended in cases of " military necessity, " as

Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld always notes carefully in his

instructions to the cadres. And of course, none of the published

restrictions on military interrogators apply in the super-secret CIA

quadrants of the gulag, as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed

Congress this year.

 

But while eighty-sixing the brass knucks -- in mixed company, at least

-- Bush and Rumsfeld have continued to implement a range of

mind-breaking psychological tortures, the official documents show.

These are practices that PHR notes are " immoral and ... illegal under

the Geneva Conventions, ... [u.S.] domestic law and the Uniform Code

of Military Justice. " These codified crimes are spread across the

gulag's 42 prisons, where some 11,000 men are now caged -- many of

them innocent of any wrongdoing, all of them held without charges in

an endless legal limbo.

 

This nightmare machinery was set in motion by Gonzales, who, at Bush's

order, led the White House legal team in drawing up official memos

justifying the use of torture to the very point of death, and

declaring that Bush was not bound by any laws in his role as

" commander-in-chief. " This monstrous perversion of justice was a

virtual coup d'etat, establishing the president as a military autocrat

and fostering an atmosphere of lawlessness and brutality " up and down

the chain of command. "

 

After Lee's article appeared, Gonzales was suddenly sent to Baghdad,

The Associated Press reports: a headline-grabbing diversion that not

only obscured Lee's hard truths but also buried the Observer's

breaking stories about the torture and murder being dealt out by

Bush's disciples in the new Iraqi government. There, Gonzales -- the

ghostwriter of Bush's torture opus -- simply erased the mountains of

evidence cited by Lee and PHR, reducing the ongoing, worldwide

atrocity to a single aberrant episode: " From the best we can tell, it

really related to the actions of the night shift at one cell block at

Abu Ghraib. "

 

This breathtaking lie, regurgitated in the face of undisputed fact,

shows how far the Bush gang has fallen into the void of radical evil.

Lost to honor, law and truth, unmoored from reality, they are sailing

into madness -- with no end yet in sight.

 

Annotations

 

The Stain of Torture

Washington Post, July 1, 2005

 

Break Them Down: The Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by US Forces

Physicians for Human Rights, 2005

 

Medical Care and Detainees: A Discussion with Dr. Burton Lee III

Washington Post, July 1, 2005

 

Revealed: Grim World of New Iraqi Torture Camps

The Observer, July 3, 2005

 

Iraqi Government Admits Abuses by Security Forces

Reuters, July 3, 2005

 

Gonzales Visits Troops in First Iraqi Trip

Associated Press, July 3, 2005

 

Practices Undercut Nation's Principles

Montgomery Advertiser, July 2, 2005

 

UK Aid Funds Iraqi Torture Units

The Observer, July 3, 2005

 

Where Has All the Money Gone?

London Review of Books, July 7, 2005