Bush Has Created The New Black Plague Infecting The Planet

By Chris Floyd
Posted: March 14, 2006

It was, by all reports, the most heinous terrorist act in history. A ruthless gang of religious extremists, driven by an insatiable hatred for Western civilization, killed multitudes of innocent people in a merciless surprise attack. The perpetrators -- who posed as ordinary citizens, members of a law-abiding ethnic minority going about their daily business -- took advantage of the burgeoning global economy to move easily across borders as they brought their vast conspiracy to its poisonous fruition.

But Western leaders, though they did sleep, finally roused themselves to action. One by one, terrorist operatives fell into their hands. In the face of such an unprecedented threat, the "gloves came off." Captives were subjected to strenuous interrogation as officials worked feverishly to forestall any further attacks. Soon the hard evidence of guilt emerged: the words of the conspirators themselves, set down in black and white, confessing all.

That's how 14th-century Europe "learned" that the Black Death, the rat-borne plague that killed 25 million people across the continent in just four years, had been "caused" by the Jews. Vague rumor and ancient prejudice were "confirmed" by evidence extracted from captured Jews who had been "put to the question" -- the medieval spin-word for "torture." The story that emerged was full of concrete detail, like a pre-war New York Times report on Saddam Hussein's WMD: names of the terrorist leaders, the methods used to poison wells, specific locations, the composition of the various toxins, etc.

Armed with such legalistic reports, earnestly delivered by trusted officials, Europe embarked on a frenzy of pogroms. In country after country, the Jews were rounded up, burned alive, beheaded, beaten to death, slaughtered in every way imaginable. All of it justified in the name of security -- and all of it based on lies, on desperate nightmares wrung from innocent people tormented into madness. The plague pogroms marked a watershed in European anti-Semitism, notes author John Kelly in his sweeping history, "The Great Mortality": A new element of outright eliminationism entered into the traditional religious disputes and cultural frictions. The seeds of the Holocaust were sown by the inhumanity of sanctioned torture.

Who knows what seeds of future horror are being sown this very day in the vast, sprawling hive of torture that President George W. Bush and his chief minions, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, have spread across the planet? How many lies condemning how many innocent people are being extracted by "stress techniques," by "sensory disorientation," by electric shocks and sexual humiliation, by waterboarding and snarling dogs, by the infliction of pain just short of "organ failure or impairment of bodily function" and other refinements devised by the perverters of law in the White House and Pentagon?

Each week brings fresh confirmation of the continuing atrocities -- carried out as deliberate state policy, at the order of top officials -- in the Bushist hellholes of Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and other sites still hidden from the sun. This week, it came from Amnesty International, which documented the plight of 14,000 prisoners held without charges by U.S. occupiers and their native proxies in Iraq: limbo denizens, some incarcerated for years, many of them horribly tortured.

Last week, it came from the Bush administration itself, which declared in court that the much-ballyhooed "anti-torture" law signed by Bush last month is a dead letter, The Washington Post reports. The Bushists say that the law's protections cannot be applied to the Guantanamo captives, because a backdoor provision in the bill stripped those subhumans of their habeas corpus rights: They have no standing before any court to address any aspect of their eternal detention -- until they have gone through the guts of Bush's extra-constitutional "military tribunals."

And there they will find that the evidence against them may have been extracted by torture, Agence France Presse reports. Colonel Peter Brownback, presiding over one of the kangaroo sessions last week, refused to issue a blanket ban on torture-derived testimony, basing his decision on quintessential Bushist reasoning: "What you and I mean by torture might be different." Indeed, that's the crux of the matter; Bush and his minions have simply defined torture out of existence. Anything short of deliberate murder or, in Brownback's formulation, "a red-hot needle in the eye," is simply a "strenuous interrogation technique." (However, "accidental" murder of those "put to the question" is OK, according to the White House legal briefs that undergird the gulag, The Washington Post reports.)

Thus, when Rumsfeld issued an official memo in 2003 authorizing Abu Ghraib's inquisitors to use "stress positions," humiliation, hunger, sleep deprivation and sensory assaults to break the minds of prisoners, decorating the page with his hand-written exhortations ("Make sure this happens!"), as prison commandant Brigadier General Janis Karpinski has testified, he wasn't actually committing a war crime by ordering torture. There is no such thing as torture, you see -- if a Bush official orders it. No torture, no crime; just the broken minds, broken bodies and, in dozens of cases documented by Amnesty and others, the battered corpses of Bush's gulag guests.

Torture is the new plague, the real poison, spreading the toxins of untruth and brutality throughout the society that embraces it. The well-documented reality of Bush's ghastly system is now obvious for all to see. There can be no more excuses. Anyone who ignores this spreading evil is willfully blind; anyone who defends it is morally corrupt.



Annotations


The Great Mortality
John Kelly, Harper Perennial, February 2006

Embedding Torture as Policy from Guantanamo to Iraq
TomDispatch, March 5, 2006

Abu Ghraib General Lambastes Bush Administration
Truthout, Aug. 24, 2005

Beyond Abu Ghraib: Detention and Torture in Iraq
Amnesty International, March 6, 2006

The Pentagon Archipelago
Empire Burlesque, Feb. 28, 2006

U.S. Cites Exception in Torture Ban
Washington Post, March 3, 2006

'War on terror' trials could allow evidence obtained through torture
Agence France Presse, March 3, 2006

The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib
TomDispach, Sept. 9, 2004

Notes From Underground: Exposing the Maw of Bush's Gulag
Empire Burlesque, Sept. 30, 2005

14,000 Detained Without Trial in Iraq
The Guardian, March 6, 2006

'Driller Killers' Spread a New Horror in Iraq
The Sunday Times, March 5, 2006

Voices Baffled, Brash and Irate in Guant_namo
The New York Times, March 6, 2006

Scandal of Force-Fed Prisoners
The Obsever, Jan. 8, 2006

Bush Adviser Says President Has Legal Power to Torture Children
Information Clearinghouse, Jan. 8, 2006

George Bush's Rough Justice
The Guardian, Jan. 12, 2006

Amnesty Releases New Gitmo Torture Testimony
Amnesty International, Jan. 10, 2006

Wrongful Imprisonment:Anatomy of a CIA Mistake
Washington Post, Dec. 3, 2005

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2005

Seized, held, tortured: six tell same tale
The Guardian, Dec. 6, 2005

A Secret Re-Writing of Military Law
New York Times, Oct. 24, 2004

Apologia Pro Tormento
Discourse.net, June 9, 2004

Loyal to a Fault?
Slate.com, Nov. 11, 2004

Memo Offered Justification for Torture
Washington Post, June 8, 2004

Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner Rights
New York Times, May 21, 2004

2001 Memo Reveals Push for Broader Presidential Powers
Newsweek, Dec. 18, 2004

Gonzales Excludes CIA from Rules on Prisoners
New York Times, Jan. 20, 2005

They Would Beat Us Hard Before Interrogations
Mother Jones, Dec. 8, 2005

Revealed: The Grim New World of Iraqi Torture Camps
The Observer, July 3, 2005

Lost Amid the Rising Tide of Detainees in Iraq
New York Times, Nov. 21, 2005

Die Laughing: The Bush Way of Rehabilitation
Empire Burlesque, Aug. 29, 2003

Guantanamo Inmates to Lose All Rights
The Observer, Nov. 13. 2005

Who They Are: The Double Standard that Underlies our Torture Policies
Slate.com, Nov. 11, 2005

Court Rules Military Panels to Try Detainees
Washington Post, July 16, 2005

Domination by Detention
Deep Blade Journaly, July 16, 2005

Alberto Gonzales' Tortured Arguments for Reigning Above the Law
LA Weekly, Jan. 14-20, 2005

Torture Treaty Doesn't Bar `Cruel, Inhuman' Tactics, Gonzales Says
Knight-Ridder, Jan. 26, 2005

Bush Has Widened Authority of CIA to Kill Terrorists
New York Times, Dec. 15, 2002

Gonzales Excludes CIA from Rules on Prisoners
New York Times, Jan. 20, 2005

The Torture Memos: A Legal Narrative
CounterPunch, Feb. 2, 2005

Review: Torture and Truth and The Torture Papers
The New Statesman, March 7, 2005