Reply #16: This is not something Bush started [View All]

[davekriss]

This from the start of the American Holocaust in the 1980's:

...And so, you say, you've learned a little
about starvation; a child like a supper scrap
filling with worms, many children strung
together, as if they were from paper
and all in a delicate chain. And that people
who rescue physicists, lawyers and poets
lie in their beds at night with reports
of mice introduced into women, of men
whose testicles are crushed like eggs.
That they cup their own parts
with their bedsheets and move themselves
slowly, imagining bracelets affixing
their wrists to a wall where the naked
are pinned, where the naked are tied open
and left to the hands that erase
what they touch. We are all erased
by them, and no longer resemble decent
men. We no longer have the hearts,
the strength, the lives of women.
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left.

-- Carolyn Forche, The Return, 1980 (I suggest reading it in its entirety, a great piece)

Carolyn wrote this piece in response to her return to the States after spending time (iirc) as an Amnesty International observer in El Salvador in 1979 (note, prior to the Reagan-GHWB escalations).

The Bush Regime uses torture for the same reasons GHWB and Reagan used torture during the American Holocaust in the Central America of the eighties -- i.e., to terrorize a target population for the purpose of breaking its will toward freedom and self-determination. The idea is to create fear, apathy, and silence while the USG furthers its own self-serving agenda.

The USG is not stupid; they know very well about the ineffectiveness of torture as a means to uncover information. The history of the USG and torture, as with all regimes that deploy such means, is one of unleashed terror -- again, it's a means to instill terror into an insurgent population, to create fear and submission, to get one's way. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are not exceptions except we've dropped the pretense of proxy. Now we do it ourselves. And why not? We have a half-century's experience teaching technique to the world's most vile right there in Ft. Benning, Georgia (SOA).

USG foreign policy is in major part about punishing those that show signs of opting out of neo-liberal arrangements that benefit our owning class (this the legacy of Nitze, Kennan, et alia). We don't invade Panama, escort a leader out of Haiti at gunpoint, mine the harbors of Nicaragua, or illegally bomb Baghdad because anyone perceives them, in themselves, to be a genuine threat. It's all about crushing the example of alternate models. The capitalist says Greed is Good in one breath and whispers apathy is better in the next -- it's all the more easy to exploit those who have no hope for a better future! Bush is furthering a long tradition in post-WWII American history.

While I agree that the Bush Regime is something extra special -- again, with Bush we for the most part drop the pretense of proxy, up till now we've generally just funded, equipped, trained, and coached -- but you have to acknowledge that torture has been part of the clandestine arsenal for some time. And it is meant to destroy the community from which the tortured are snatched. For example (from Torture: State Terror vs. Democracy, by Orlando Tizon, 2002),

Modern torture is designed to destroy the personality of the individual and by extension the community. Ultimately, it is a strategy designed to defeat democratic aspirations at the root, which makes it a tool of choice for unpopular regimes around the world.

<snip>

Torture as practiced today is primarily for the purpose of maintaining unpopular governments in power. "We therefore refer to torture as an instrument of power. Our research has shown that the torturers who work for governments try to break down the victims' identity, and this affects the family and the society as well." Thus the main purpose of torture is not to extract a confession but to break the individual's humanity and make an example of the victim before the community and thereby suppress all political opposition. Torture is the ultimate weapon for terrorizing and controlling the individual human being and the community. When members of a community are made powerless and lose trust in themselves and in one another, building a democratic community is rendered extremely difficult and complex. Torture then is an instrument to destroy democratic aspirations and actions, as history has clearly shown.

I completely agree with this assessment. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, too, are good sources for the history of how torture is used by the United States and other repressive states. You're aware, of course, about the School of the Americas, about the roles of John Negroponte and Elliot Abrams in the eighties while U.S. trained fiends tortured and disappeared labor leaders, students, peasants interested in better schools and hospitals. The fact that people like Negroponte, who denied that El Mozote ever occured, and Abrams who looked the other way while Batallion 3-16 was on the loose, the fact that they and others were invited back to positions of power in this Regime told me where Bush stood with regards to use of torture before we ever heard of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. None of this surprises me -- and the fact that Negroponte is now National Intelligence Director scares me. If we, the American public, are meant to be hearers of this violent narrative of torture along with its customary audience (today, the latter are those with a thirst for freedom and justice in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, etc.), it can only be the beginnings of intended serious repression here at home. Maybe we can understand a little why the Regime spends a third of a billion dollars just to keep Halliburton prepared to build detention camps on a moments notice.

Torture, in my opinion, is terrorism in microcosm; the Bush Regime engages in the very thing they purport to fight. Whether a primary or secondary tool, it is public narrative, intended to intimidate, and it is despicably immoral. Recall Carolyn Forche's poem (at the start of this post), we in the U.S. have NO RIGHT to feel powerless to stop the evil being done in our name; in fact, action is demanded of us else we are complicit in the crimes perpetrated by the Bush Regime. It's bad enough we sat home after December 12, 2000; bad enough we didn't march into Washington to take We the People's House back in 2004. But the time for epochal change is now, action is required this day by everyone of us whether rallied by a Great Leader (where are the MLK's, JFK's and RFK's of this generation!) or by just our own hearts and conscience. Look at Cindy Sheehan: Housewife, divorcee, mother of a dead GI, and a symbol of the anti-war movement. She acted herself, led herself, to do what she needed to do. Imagine a nation with 10,000 Cindy Sheehans marching in front of the White House everyday! We can move mountains! Yes we CAN!! We need to just move!!