[News] Obama Puts Out a Contract Hit

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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




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