by darkbeforedawn » Sun Jan 15, 2006 11:38 am
It's Already Happened<br>Tue, 10 Jan 2006, 16:07 Email this article<br> Printer friendly page<br> <br><br>One of the advantages of being married to the lovely and intelligent Korrin (with whom I'm celebrating our ninth anniversary today) is that she can compensate for the debility that results from the increasingly frequent visits I receive from Senor Moment. <br><br>Case in point:<br><br>Yesterday I mentioned the December debate in which John Yoo, who helped devise the Bush regime's doctrine of totalitarian executive power, was asked a hypothetical question in which the child of a terrorist suspect was tortured in order to extract information from his father. The specific mode of torture under discussion involved (in the words of Yoo's interlocutor, human rights activist Doug Cassel), “crushing the testicles of the person's child.” Yoo agreed that under the doctrine he helped devise as a Justice Department attorney, there is “no law” and “no treaty” that would forbid such an atrocity, assuming that it was authorized by the almighty president: “I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.”<br><br><br><br><br>When I described that exchange to Korrin last night, she sagely commented: “I'll bet that's already happened,” and referred to the photographs and detailed accounts of torture conducted by military and intelligence personnel at Abu Ghraib.<br><br><br><br><br>(Insert sound of palm slapping my ever-expanding forehead here.)<br><br><br><br><br>Following the first wave of disclosures from Abu Ghraib, Seymour Hersh, the very capable investigative reporter who has scored a series of gut-wrenching scoops concerning the Bush administration's war crimes, told an audience at an ACLU conference (in the name of all that is holy, I never thought I would favorably cite that organization in any context, even, as in this case, by association) that the Pentagon has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib: "The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking... [There's] a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."<br><br><br>Hersh also referred to video recordings of women at Abu Ghraib who “were passing letters, communications out to their men.... The women were passing messages saying `Please come and kill me, because of what's happened.' Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking.... They are in total terror it's going to come out. It's impossible to say to yourself how do we get there? who are we? Who are these people that sent us there?”<br><br><br><br><br>One of the people who “sent us there” was John C. Yoo, and he admits that he regards the sexual torture of children to be a legal and justifiable tactic, if authorized by the president.<br><br>To Hersh's allegations, and Yoo's hypothetical endorsement of child torture, we should add Rumsfeld's admissions in congressional testimony.<br><br>In his book Attention Deficit Democracy, James Bovard recalls that Rumsfeld admitted to Congress the existence of Abu Ghraib photographs showing “acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman,” including the rape of young boys by Iraqi soldiers (our valiant allies). <br><br>Of course, Rumsfeld insisted, he and his cohorts should be numbered among the real victims: “If you could have seen the anguished expressions on the faces of those of us in the Defense Department upon seeing the photos, you would know how we feel today.” <br><br>To which the proper response is: "Gee, Rummy, if you and the other delicate souls in the Bush administration can't bear the spectacle of torture, you shouldn't have worked so ardently to promote and justify it" -- something Bovard, among others, has capably documented in detail.<br><br>Rummy was quick to indict the real criminals – namely “people [in Iraq] ... running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs, and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.”<br><br>One must have his priorities in order, after all. Rape, torture, and mutilation are grotesque (albeit permissible with presidential authorization) – but taking unauthorized photographs of war crimes and publicizing them before the Pentagon has a chance to cover up those acts? That's an atrocity!<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
