[News] Obama Puts Out a Contract Hit
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Thu Apr 8 11:29:44 EDT 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/swanson04082010.html
April 8, 2010
Obama Puts Out a Contract Hit
Murder is the New Torture
By DAVID SWANSON
I've been reading about the history of torture, including John T.
Parry's new book
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/047205077X/counterpunchmaga>Understanding
Torture: Law, Violence, and Political Identity." Parry gives a
history of torture in Europe and the United States through the
twentieth century, establishing its pervasiveness, and the
repetitiveness of the excuses and legalistic machinations used to
allow it. Parry sees torture as an absolutely normal activity in our
society, but an activity that at least until now was always treated
as an aberration, no matter how systemic. Parry even tries to suggest
at times that torture is required, necessary, or "essential" for
western democracies.
That torture has been pervasive I am persuaded of. That the bizarre
torture memos crafted by John Yoo and Jay Bybee and their gang differ
less than we might think from previous legal memos, laws, and
treaties I accept to some extent. That the US prison and immigration
systems fed into the new torture regime is beyond dispute. But Parry
could have picked out many times and places to describe that did not
use torture to the same extent. The racist and colonialist attitudes
that Parry sees as a major support for torture are not constant. The
fact that someone can make a twisted legalistic argument for torture
does not make it legal beyond serious dispute. The new public
acceptance and mainstreaming of torture in the United States has been
a dramatic change, at least in awareness; and a dramatic change in a
different direction, even as a reaction to this one, is possible.
As Parry notes, the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights bans both torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
If we need to clarify that this ban allows no exceptions based on
time or place or citizenship or any other factor, then let us clarify
that and put it into our Constitution, our treaties, and our
statutes, with a requirement to prosecute every act of conspiracy to
engage in any such behavior. The world order will not collapse, at
least not in a bad way.
But there is a more serious problem, I think. Namely, murder seems to
be advancing in the U.S. toolkit as a replacement for torture. Both
tools, murder and torture, produce exactly the same amount of useful
intelligence. Both tools scare the hell out of people abroad and at
home. Both tools serve to teach a domestic audience that certain
types of people are not fully people and cannot be dealt with
humanely. Both tools help to advance the further stripping away of
civil liberties through fear and terror. The goals of torture that
the CIA has advanced for decades of eliminating a person's entire
consciousness and identity, the mission of placing barbarians
completely under control of the empire, what accomplishes this better
than murder?
Look at all the hassle our government has been through trying to
legalize and justify torture, not to mention the kidnappings and
imprisonments necessary to engage in torture. We've seen CIA agents
indicted in Italy and prosecutions of high level Americans opened in
Spain. Former officials are facing civil suits in the United States
for damages. Who needs the headaches? The Director of National
Intelligence legalized the assassination of Americans abroad, and by
implication any non-Americans as well, by going to Congress in
February and announcing that such crimes would henceforth be legal.
Easy peasey. No fuss, no muss. And if you want some future al-Libi to
tell you that some future Iraq has scary scary weapons, don't torture
him; announce that he manages the stockpile and then put a bullet in his head.
President Obama has ordered the murder of American citizen Anwar
al-Awlaki. Like the innocent but tortured Abu Zubayda (innocent at
least of any of the crimes he was accused of), Awlaki is now the
mastermind terrorist of the universe. And once he's dead, who's to
say he wasn't? Who can demand a trail or access to documents? He'll
be dead. See the beauty of it?
If the top mastermind is in Yemen, what the hell are we doing
building a quagmire in Afghanistan? Don't ask. But notice this: we
have dramatically increased the use of missile strikes to assassinate
in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And we have increased the use of
murderous night-time raids to such an extent that we now kill more
civilians in that way than we do with drones. They're the "wrong
people," or neighbors who came to help, or family members clinging to
loved ones. Sometimes they're young students with their hands tied
behind their backs. Accidents will happen. But no U.S. officials'
future book tours are going to be interrupted by protesters, since
there's no torture involved. Civilization is on the march!
David Swanson is the author of
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583228888/counterpunchmaga>Daybreak:
Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by
Seven Stories Press. He can be reached at:
<mailto:david at davidswanson.org>david at davidswanson.org
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20100408/fc45b291/attachment.htm>
More information about the News
mailing list