Bush justifies torture

The U.S. government once pretended that it treated prisoners humanely, while its enemies were unspeakably cruel. Of course this was just propaganda. Whenever U.S. interrogators felt it was required, they would use whatever means was at hand to get information. If necessary, the CIA or the Pentagon would train puppet troops to use cattle prods, electric shock and other forms of torture. The School of the Americas trained generations of Latin American military in these techniques.

Still, even having to pretend humanity is a restraint. It means the torture has to be done secretly or farmed out. It means those who torture illegally have to be careful they don’t get caught.

The Bush administration prefers to declare that it tortures legally. The Bush gang says it has the right to waterboard, starve, humiliate, sleep-deprive, isolate, terrify and otherwise make life miserable for its prisoners. Then they will not only reveal secrets but will confess to anything the interrogators want them to. It has declared that its prisoners held at Guantánamo are outside U.S. and international law and have no right to be protected by the Geneva Conventions, those international agreements that regulate the treatment of prisoners of war.

Thus the Bush administration sorely resented the Supreme Court ruling in June last year on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. That ruling stated that all prisoners held in U.S. custody—no matter what nationality they were, no matter which country they were held in—were protected at least minimally by the Geneva Conventions. Then last fall Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which instructed the Bush gang to issue an executive order stating that any further interrogations would comply with U.S. and international law.

On July 20, Bush issued his order. But instead of heeding Congress’s intent to curb some of the more blatant torture techniques, he kept the order as vague as possible. No more defacing the Koran at Guantánamo, it said, but waterboarding—nearly drowning the prisoner repeatedly—would not be ruled out. No more sexual humiliation, but vagueness on sleep deprivation.

Even Human Rights Watch, which more often than not serves as a U.S. foreign policy tool, took Bush to task on the July 20 pronouncement. The HRW said Bush’s order tries to approve an explicitly illegal operation the CIA has been carrying out: the detention and interrogation program, which has “disappeared” suspected U.S. enemies or held them for years in secret prisons.

Just as with Vice President Dick Cheney’s secret meetings with oil executives, the pardon of “Scooter” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz’s maneuvers at the World Bank, Donald Rumsfeld’s administration of Abu Ghraib, and now Bush’s insistence on his right to torture prisoners, the administration has been marked by an attitude that it can do whatever it likes, no matter what the law is, no matter what the opposition says in Congress.

It should be no surprise, then, that there is such a groundswell in the country asking that Cheney and Bush be impeached. People are beginning to see that only a direct confrontation with the criminals in the White House can stop the crimes. Every word out of Bush’s mouth makes that confrontation more and more necessary.