Above the Law: How Bush Became the Torture President

Thanks, Ted Rall
Bush pokes fun at the concept of international law in those instances in which he is in clear violation of it but supports it when it suits his own malevolent, imperial purposes. Bush was outraged recently when Iran took British sailors into custody. This is the same Bush who pokes fun at those laws that clearly apply to him.

“International law? I better call my lawyer.”

Who is the bigger hypocrite -Bush or his poodle, Tony Blair? Bush regards the UN Charter ban on aggressive war a "...goofy experiment". Multilateralism, he calls it. But Blair, who should have known better, bowed low to help Bush attack and invade Iraq. Blair knew that there were no WMD to be found. He knew that Bush was lying. Blair knew that the war against Iraq is and remains a war crime under Nuremberg, US Codes, and Geneva. So disdainful of any principle of justice that might apply to Der Führer, Bush insisted that the US Congress exempt him from US laws.

It is not only the war of aggression against Iraq that dogs Bush, it is US torture at Abu Ghraib, GITMO, and throughout the "secret" Eastern European archipelago.

Every single underpinning of law that restrains the conduct of the government in dealing with detainees, they are destroying. And what are they leaving in its place? Chaos. They're looking for a way to justify torture.

-Scott Horton, a New York City bar association expert

It's hard to tell just how long Bush has been trying to put himself above the law, to exempt himself and his evil henchmen from torture charges. The year 2004 -a geological age in this nightmare administration that simply will not end -the Bush cabal of gangsters, liars, crooks, henchman and toadies were before the nation's high court, trying to make the case that Bush was above the law, specifically, he could not be prosecuted for war crimes if he should order torture. Was he planning to? Had he, in fact, already done so and sought to cover his ass ex post facto?

At that hearing, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked:

Suppose the executive says, 'Mild torture we think will help get this information.' ... Some systems do that to get information."

The answer from government lawyer, Paul Clement, was most surely disingenuous: Declaring that Bush would not, he insisted that the US would stand by its international commitments. In other words, the known liars would have the high court believe them when they had lied so many times before. It had been over a year that Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers crafted, nay, conspired to get around the international prohibitions against torture. Bluntly, they conspired to put Bush above the law. George W. Bush, they said, could legally authorize torture.

In December 2005 the U.S. Congress passed the McCain amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act, a result of an admission by Alberto Gonzales that the Bush administration did not regard laws and treaties prohibiting cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment to be applicable to prisoners in U.S. custody outside the United States. Aside from the fact that the admission reeks of "loophole", it led to additional disclosures about a secret gulag archipelego of US torture and detentions centers. The McCain amendment was meant to close this loophole, explicitly stating that “no individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.”

But, Bush made a preemptive move to pardon himself, issuing a "signing statement" indicating that interrogation restrictions could be waived ".. if the president, as commander-in-chief, thought the waiver would assist in preventing terrorist attacks." I submit that legalizing torture, placing a dictator wannabe above laws applicable to everyone else, guarantees that terrorism will increase. Throughout his incompetent and criminal administration, George W. Bush has handed terrorists a cause on a plate. Just as terrorism against the United States increased exponentially under Ronald Reagan, the final numbers will prove that, once again, terrorism has gotten worse under the GOP.

By September 2006, the Defense Department issued a new Army Field Manual that applied the Geneva Conventions to all detainees, not just those classified as prisoners of war. The new manual also banned specific interrogation techniques or other controversial methods, such as using dogs to threaten detainees, placing prisoners in solitary confinement for long periods, and waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning.

But the following month, Bush struck again. He signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, granting immunity to any U.S. officials accused of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of detainees during the period prior to passage of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. That just happened to have been the period in which the very worst abuses took place. How bloody convenient that criminals and perverts can get the law changed to excuse them, after the fact, for knowingly committing crimes that were known to be crimes at the time they commit them.

And, as if to ensure that torture will continue, this draconian measure allows evidence obtained through coercion prior to 2005 to be be admitted into trial if a military judge finds it "reliable and serving the interests of justice". The words "justice" and "torture" in the same sentence makes this "law" bogus on its face. Besides -torture does not serve the interests of justice. It subverts them. My head swims.

What has America become? A rogue nation. A criminal enterprise. A poke in the eye to anyone who might, in these most horrible of times, revere the principles of justice. Bush has plunged the world into a new dark age of religious superstition, hate, torture, and endless war.

In any case, there is absolutely no credible evidence that torture works. None! Moreover, the most prominent practitioners of torture, Torquemada and Richard Topcliffe, were perverts whose methods were chosen for purposes of personal gratification. Torture opponents argue persuasively that throughout history torture has proven itself ineffective as a means by which reliable information is derived. The Nazi Gestapo discovered that tortured resistance fighters rarely gave accurate information under torture. Anyone who is tortured will simply tell his/her tormentor whatever they want to hear. Would you want to be convicted upon a tale exacted under such duress? Would Bush himself support torture if, under torture, Dick Cheney spilled the beans about 911?

Besides, even information obtained through torture must be verified. A time consuming task. What is gained but perverted gratification? The U.S. Army’s Field Manual notes:

Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.

Even the FBI favors a more effective technique, that of eliciting a suspect’s cooperation.

Critics have said that torture is a "...slippery slope" which opens the door to worse abuses. But, the issue here is greater even than torture. The methods by which torture has become the law of the land typify a lawless and illegitimate administration. At last, torture, in this context, is but one of many abuses when a regime runs amok, when the government rides roughshod over the rule of law. Bush has become a rogue "President", an illegitimate and unaccountable regime.

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Why Bush Cannot Leave Iraq

Sadly, America tasted victory in 1945 and has been fascinated since by war. The US won World War II but failed to learn the lessons of victory. And, again, in 1975, the US lost Viet Nam but failed to the learn the lessons of defeat.

We must not forget Korea, officially ending in stalemate in 1953. Since WWII, then, the US has played at war - Grenada, Panama - hoping recently to undo Viet Nam, hoping to recapture the magic of VE Day. Thomas Wolfe said it best: you can't go home again.

Wouldn't it be easier if Bush suddenly went sane and withdrew from Iraq? He cannot. He cannot do so for several reasons: his metastized ego and effeminate machismo among them. Most importantly, Bush cannot leave because he has not won. Bush cannot leave because the US cannot live with the political vacuum that will be left in its wake. For the same reasons, the US cannot stay.

Let's set the scene. In those halcyon days just prior to the collapse of the Third Reich, it was clear that victory would be complete if shared with Britain and the Soviet Union. The end of Hitler's Reich topped even Wagnerian opera for its Sturm und Drang. As a novel, it would have been over the top. As opera, it is tolerated. We might even have tolerated a thickly orchestrated score. But what of the libretto: a mad dictator holes up to commit suicide after having murdered several million people. What a log line! Who but a opera fan could believe it?

Like a noble Collie that develops a taste for sheep, America got a whiff of blood, a taste of war and liked it. Tragically, nothing since that time has bothered to follow script. Nothing about World War II prepared the US for Viet Nam. Nothing about Viet Nam prepared the US for Iraq.

Having supposedly learned the lessons of Viet Nam, the US would not repeat the mistakes. Bushies assured us that a civil war was unlikely, the US would be greeted as liberators, and, after drafting a Constitution, all would be well. Emperor Bush would wear an embarassingly ill-fitting flight suit.

But the real story in Iraq is one of Bush ineptitude and delusion. The Civil War did break out. We were greeted, eventually, by a resistance not as liberators but as occupiers. The drafting of a Constitution excluded the Sunnis and hardened the resistance. Moreover, if there were no terrorists in Iraq prior to the US invasion, Iraq is now a breeding ground for terrorists:

As the war against Iraq created a political vacuum, the nation has been busy sorting itself out along sectarian lines. Bush had not wanted to take sides but is, in fact, defending with his "surge" a Shi'ite regime against a Sunni insurgency. Thus, Bush has committed the biggest, the worst blunder that he could have made. A regional proxy war is not only a very real possibility, it is extremely likely.

Civil wars are hard to end. In my lifetime, the average length of a civil war has been some 10 years. Civil wars are primarily guerrilla wars or, in the lexicon of Viet Nam, asymetrical conflicts. They are fought by loosely organized resistance groups using tactics best described by Che Guevara (See: Fundamentals of Guerrilla Warfare). The US Civil war was a prominent exception consisting, as it did, of conventional armies and well-defined fronts. Modern conflicts resemble the more recent wars in Algeria, Viet Nam, Colombia, Sri Lanka, and Sudan.

It seems unavoidable at this point. As Juan Cole reports, a Saudi official recently admitted that Riyadh will intervene in Iraq if the US withdraws its troops. This will be the case if Sunnies believe themselves threatened by a US puppet, Shi'ite regime. But that's only part of the story. Iraqi Kurds have all but declared their independence. It is prudent to ask whether Turkey will invade what is now Kurdish territory. And what of Iran? It will most certainly ally with Iraqi Shi'ites.

I am inclined to say that Bush has no options. Events on the ground are completely out of his control. Anything done by Bush now will only confirm the disastrous nature of his decision to go to war. It illustrates the moral value of truth itself. Bush could only have gone to war, as he did, upon a pack of malicious, blackhearted, treasonous lies. A single truth would have prevented a human tragedy of biblical proportions.

But faced with ignominious and humiliating defeat, Bush will try to force the various parties to reach an accommodation. How is he to do this, having lost all credibility? In the weeks ahead, however, you can expect the Bush gang of liars to come up with yet another novel rationale for "staying the course". Withdrawing now, they will say, will divide Iraq. That is GOP-speak for we will have to negotiate with whomever gets the oil. The better alternative is an honest broker negotiating a peace along the lines of Northern Ireland or Lebanon. But it would require a statesman in the White House to pull that off. We haven't had such a man since Jimmy Carter.

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Bush is on a mission from God

Many if not most fundamentalist Christians have believed for some time now that Bush is on a mission from God. Typically, Bush encourages this belief. There is evidence that like all cults, the GOP, communicates to its base in code words designed to assuage the base and dupe the rest of us. The attack on Social Security was of this form. So, too, the war of aggression in Iraq.

There is only one reason a political party would want to communicate with its membership using "code words": it wants to hide its real agenda. It wants to keep non-members in the dark. That the GOP has eschewed good English for propaganda and "code words" is a dead give away: the GOP is not a political party. It's a kooky cult.

A very recent use of "code words" to communicate covertly with a cultist base, was found in a statement by Condi Rice:

"What we're seeing here ... are the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we are pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old one."

"Birth pangs" is found prominently in scripture:

And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth-pangs."

(Matthew 24:3-8 RSV)

It is fair to ask if Condi Rice, a "self-professed evangelical" is, in fact, communicating a message to Bush's whacked-out, Republican base, many of whom have tried to justify the US war against Iraq with scripture and vague, weird references to rapture. Was Condo re-assuring the dogs of war who still support Bush? It would be alarming to know just how many of these folk truly believe that Bush is on a "Mission from God" to bring about Armageddon and, hence, the rapture.

The GOP has been taken over by hard core extremists and religious ideologues. I became aware of this in the early eighties. A state rep race used the term dynamic conservative to describe its candidate. I was curious -never having associated the word "dynamic" with conservatives. In this case, the code word dynamic conservative had been the product of a Chicago based political consulting firm that had been associated, at some point, with Congressman Phil Crane who had been, until his defeat in the elections of 2004, the longest-serving Republican member of the US House of Representatives. Interestingly, Crane went to Congress in 1969, succeeding Donald Rumsfeld who had been appointed to a position in the Nixon administration.

I had thought the phrase -dynamic conservative -an oxymoron. Was the candidate dynamic? Or was he conservative? Contradictory? Well, focus groups don't have a problem with that. And neither, apparently, do cults. There is a difference between mere jargon and code words, used by the GOP to both reveal and conceal. A code word is a signal to initiates, but a mask to everyone else.

Code words are designed to keep the public in the dark while GOP cultists communicate in code with one another. When Bush tried to destroy Social Security, he wished to reassure his radical base of robber barons and fanatics while concealing that fact from normal, hard working folk who depend upon Social Security. How to do it? Bush uses code words, understood by the base for what they are, but taken at face value by the rest of us. In this case, Bush's solution was the code word: privatization!

Admittedly, more odious and overt bigots have gone underground. And that is Bush's problem: how to communicate with them without giving the game away, without revealing to the world what he really is. Both dynamic conservatism and compassionate conservatism deserve special mention. Neither label, of itself, is a sure indicator of cultism. Both, however, serve a single purpose. They are the face the candidate shows his base; they are the glitzy store front he shows the world.

It is significant that both labels came into being at about the same time -a post Watergate world when the GOP began to realize that if they simply told the truth, they would lose. Lying, therefore, became GOP strategy. It must be kept in mind that the GOP had been under siege during Nixon's Watergate scandal and again when Ford pardoned Nixon. The bunker mentality born of those times is most certainly a defining characteristic of cults. There are others.

A cult is unquestioning in its commitment to a leader just as the GOP rank and file were unquestioning in their support of George W. Bush. Indeed, there were numerous billboards, presumably paid for by local GOP groups, which proclaimed Bush "Our Leader" or "The Leader". In another language that is "Der Führer".

‪As with any cult, the GOP leadership dictates how members think, act or speak. Until Iraq fell utterly apart, it was verboten to question, doubt, or disagree with "Der Führer". This was a time of "freedom fries", the Dixie Chicks boycott, and the orchestrated demonization of Michael Moore.

At this time many fundamentalists considered Bush to be "the Messiah" who had come again on a special mission from God to save humanity, or perhaps, to start Armegeddon. Even if that were true, I prefer the Blues Brothers. The sound track is better.

Blues Brothers: Soul Man

Cab Calloway: Minnie the Moocher

Like many another cult, the GOP is elitist -but to point this out is called culture war, a code word understood by the GOP's elitist base. ‪ There are two senses in which the term culture war or cultural war is used. It was Pat Buchanan who first used the term cultural war to assure the religiously inclined that the opposition -liberals and Democrats -are evil:

There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.

-Pat Buchanan, 1992 Republican Convention

Hitler used the same, simple-minded tactic. Aryan good; Jew bad!

There is yet another sense in which the GOP uses the term culture war to assure the affluent base that "greed is good". In this sense of the term, culture war immunizes Gordon Gekko wannabes from evil liberals, indeed, anyone possessing a concscience.

Michael Dougles aka "Gordon Gecko": Greed is Good!

Interestingly, the movie "Wall Street" was a hit during the administration of Ronald Reagan. Most of us saw the Gecko speech for what it was --a brilliant portrayal by Michael Douglas of a corporate raider in an era which celebrated to our chagrin and, of late, our ruin an utterly failed economics, an utterly failed mentality.

It is a warning to those who might be inclined to blow the whistle on GOP economic policy. To criticize improvident tax cuts as benefiting only the super-wealthy, for example, is labeled culture war. Merely labeling is enough to make weak-kneed Democrats fear and tremble.

In the GOP, as in any cult, "der Führer" is thought to be above the law. Nixon said "...if the President does it, it is not illegal". Bush has claimed similar "executive privileges" that are equally cultist in tone and effect, equally absurd. Because Bush is thought to be above the law, exempt from the restrictions of the US Constitution, the GOP has internalized an "us-versus-them" mentality. In smaller cults, this often leads to conflicts with society as a whole. The situation is complicated, however, when the cult leader, der Führer, occupies the Oval Office.

A cult will teach or imply that its ends justify any means. Means, for Bush and the GOP that enables and assists him, means trashing treaties, breaking international law, committing war crimes, perpetrating torture, waging wars of naked aggression. Like other cult leaders, Bush has often claimed that his "higher mission" justifies the various tortures and atrocities that have their origins inside the Bush bunker...uh..White House. For example, Bush could only have been referring to tortures and/or summary executions in his 2003 State of the Union address:

All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way -- they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies. (Applause.)

-George W. Bush, State of the Union, 2003

As far as anyone knows, none of those referred to by Bush received a trial. If so, it was a secret trial and therefore, a violation of international law and treaty. Or, Bush was simply lying through his teeth as he most certainly lied in his first debate with John Kerry. It was at the end of one of John Kerry's stronger moments when he explained that George W. Bush would prefer the people believe that it was Saddam Hussein who attacked the US. Bush snapped petulently: “Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that.” Then he stumbled:

“Of course we’re after Saddam Hussein -- I mean bin Laden. He’s isolated. Seventy-five percent of his people have been brought to justice.”

Oh really? The fact is there is no credible data on al Qaeda at all. Then or now. The CIA had estimated at the time that al Qaeda consisted of about two dozen operatives. 75 percent of two-dozen doesn't sound very impressive. But it does raise new questions about the US capture, detention and torture of the 3,000 detainees referred to by Bush in his address. We have only Bush's word that any were connected in any way with al Qaeda.

Since Bush made his remarks, the tortures of Abu Ghraib have come to light. It is fair to ask if Bush had merely communicated to his understanding base, his cult of torture and atrocity. In any case, true to the cultist nature of this illegitimate regime, Bush would justify both lie and atrocity on these grounds: he was on a mission from God. Again, I prefer the Blues Brothers. They didn't murder or torture anyone.

If Bush is on a mission from God so, too, the GOP which makes it all possible with its money and support. Those cult members in danger of getting caught are often thought to be justified in lying in order to protect "der Führer". This occurred during the Watergate scandal to protect Richard Nixon and it has happened during Bush's illegitimate occupation of the Oval Office.

There are many other characteristics of cults. I am confident that all apply to the GOP, a society apart where members are encouraged to obey "der Führer" without question even as his policies have proven disastrous for the people of America, indeed, the world.

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