When the devil comes knocking
By Chris Floyd
Dec. 10 — When the devil comes knocking on your front door,
looking for a way to spread his evil inside, he won’t be sporting
horns and a tail. He’s going to come dressed as your sweetest dream,
clean as a whistle, pious, sincere. He’s going to speak your lingo,
ape your ways — and when he opens up his little box of poison,
it’s going to look like the heaven your mama sang about when she
rocked you to sleep in your cradle.
Then one day, when the mind-fog lifts, you see him sitting at the head
of the table, the walls of the room smeared with filth, dead bodies
swelling on the blood-mucked floor, the still-living victims hog-tied
and naked, screaming for mercy as the whipcords strike. He beckons you
forward with a welcoming smile. You pause for a moment. It seems so
strange: all this horror — it would have once made you sick, but
now it just feels like ... home. You shrug, you grin, you take your
place beside him at the feast.
In just this way, while people in the US were finishing their Thanksgiving
dinners and preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, a series
of stories exposed — once again — the torture chamber at the
heart of their feast: a government gone insane, embracing terror, atrocity
and tyranny. Yet there was no public outcry against these desecrations.
Few even noticed; fewer still cared.
Last week, the minions of George W. Bush announced, in open court, that
he has the power to seize anyone on earth — even “little old
ladies in Switzerland” — and imprison them forever if he so
chooses, the New York Times reports. The minions said that anyone Bush
declared “an enemy combatant” — even if they never took
up arms against the US, even if they didn’t know their actions
were related to terrorism in any way — could be abducted from any
nation, friend or foe, or in the Homeland itself, and held indefinitely,
“at the president’s discretion,” stripped of all rights
under the US Constitution or the Geneva Conventions.
Assistant Attorney General Brian Boyle said Bush’s captives were
entitled only to a single hearing, alone before a military tribunal,
without legal counsel or access to the evidence against them —
evidence which Boyle cheerfully admitted could be obtained by torture
in foreign countries, the Associated Press reports. Overturning centuries
of Anglo-American jurisprudence, Boyle said there were no restrictions
whatsoever on using torture evidence, as long as the president or his
military agents arbitrarily decide it is “credible.”
Days earlier, the Sunday Times tracked down the “private”
planes of CIA front companies that Bush uses to carry victims of his
lawless abductions to torture chambers in Jordan, Egypt, Libya, and
Uzbekistan, where “credible” evidence can be obtained with
fists, cattle prods, rape, drugs and starvation. For example, witnesses
told of hooded US agents grabbing captives in Sweden, stripping them,
jamming drugs up their rectums, putting them in diapers and chains,
and bundling them off to Egypt’s hellhole prisons — whose
tortures have already produced generations of violent extremists.
But outsourcing is only one aspect of Bush’s Torture, Incorporated;
he has plenty of domestic production as well. Last week, the Pentagon
released a report — completed long before the election — confessing
that the “aberrations” of Abu Ghraib were in fact part of
a broad system of state terror spread throughout Iraq, the Washington
Post reports. Elite squads of “Special Operations” officers
and CIA agents beat and abused prisoners across the country, the Pentagon
said, while regular troops committed “technically illegal acts”
by rounding up thousands of innocent people at random and holding them
for months in crowded prisons, where they were often turned over to
those same “elite” squads for “special handling.”
Some of this blood-soaked “intelligence” was “sent directly
to the White House,” interrogators noted. The report also admitted
that US forces had taken innocent people hostage — especially “female
family members” — in an effort to pressure wanted men to surrender:
a clear war crime, as if such things mattered anymore.
Meanwhile, the International Red Cross revealed that Bush has even perverted
the healing professions at his concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay,
using doctors and nurses to help “set the conditions for interrogation”
by withholding medical treatment and using their diagnostic skills to
determine captives’ “vulnerabilities” to various physical
and psychological torments — “a flagrant violation of medical
ethics,” said the Red Cross. Its investigators also found that
the Guantanamo regime — “an intentional system of cruel, unusual
and degrading treatment, and a form of torture” — was growing
worse over time, Salon.com reports.
In such a moral sink, it was hardly even news that more photos of prisoner
abuse — taken months before the Abu Ghraib atrocities — were
uncovered last weekend, Reuters reports. This time it was “elite”
teams of Navy SEALs mugging for the cameras with bloodied captives —
some with guns to their heads. Nor did anyone blink when Bush military
brass announced plans last week to create forced labor camps for all
male citizens in “liberated” Fallujah, the Boston Globe reports.
This Satan’s Rout of blood and abandon comes directly from the
White House, where Bush’s legal counsel, Al Gonzales, engineered
memos “justifying” torture and exalting unrestricted presidential
power, beyond the reach of any law, foreign or domestic. As a reward
for this violent outrage of US honor, Gonzales — sweet-talking,
pious and sincere, just like his boss — will soon become the chief
law officer of the land.
And the citizens of the US, what do they do about all the horror being
wrought in their name? They shrug. They grin. They sit down to the feast.
Source: The Moscow Times
