THE HANDSTAND
august 2005
Dark Waters : The Shadow of Josef Mengele
By Chris Floyd
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9416.htm
07/08/05 "Moscow Times" - - Last Friday, the former physician of ex-President George H.W. Bush wrote a guest column for The Washington Post. Two days later, the attorney general appointed by current President George W. Bush made a surprise visit to Baghdad. These seemingly unrelated events are not only inextricably linked; together they form a portrait of a nation gone wretchedly astray, hurtling into a moral void from which there may be no return.
There was nothing unusual about the physician, Dr. Burton Lee III, doing a piece for the Post, of course; the paper is the house organ of the U.S. political elite, and a whole troop of loyal Bush Family retainers make regular appearances in its editorial pages, lauding the son who has now ascended the throne. What is remarkable is that Lee came not to praise the younger Bush, but to bury him -- with hard truths about the torture regime he has installed in his "terror war" gulag.
Lee, a former military doctor, denounced Bush's use of military medical personnel to help "set the conditions for interrogation": withholding treatment from tortured prisoners, breaking medical confidence to tell interrogators of prisoners' physical and psychological weak spots, and other heinous practices approved by the White House and codified in Pentagon directives for military medical staff.
The good doctor is right to be shocked: The shadow of Josef Mengele hovers over these deliberate perversions of medical ethics. Yet Bush has not only countenanced these crimes against humanity -- he has commanded that medical personnel commit them. This level of open, legalized barbarity has not been seen in the U.S. government since the days of slavery and the Indian wars.
Lee also shredded the big lie that the noble "terror war" had only been temporarily tainted by a few "bad apples," now removed from the wholesome barrel. In denouncing the "systematic, government-sanctioned torture and excessive abuse of prisoners in the war on terror," Lee noted the true extent of the criminality -- and those who bear the ultimate responsibility for it. He wrote:
"The widespread reports of torture and ill-treatment -- frequently based on military and government documents -- defy the claim that this abusive behavior is limited to a few noncommissioned officers at Abu Ghraib or isolated incidents at Guantanamo Bay. When it comes to torture, the military's traditional leadership and discipline have been severely compromised up and down the chain of command. Why? I fear it is because the military has bowed to errant civilian leadership."
Here Lee cited the literally thousands of pages of evidence produced by the Army's own investigators detailing systematic torture and murder throughout Bush's world-engulfing gulag. In a separate interview that followed his column, Lee pointed readers to the new report by Physicians for Human Rights, or PHR, titled "Break Them Down: The Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by U.S. Forces." As Lee explained, psychological torture can be even more damaging and long-lasting than a bout of physical abuse -- something he learned firsthand from treating the victims of French torture in Algeria.
The graphic horrors of physical torture, captured in the infamous pictures from Abu Ghraib, have understandably garnered most of the attention in the media's occasional glances at Bush's concentration camps. And here, under pressure, the White House has reluctantly made a few cosmetic changes, limiting to some extent the knuckle-work that interrogators can use -- although PHR notes that many of these ballyhooed "reforms" have never been implemented. In any case, these restrictions can be suspended in cases of "military necessity," as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld always notes carefully in his instructions to the cadres. And of course, none of the published restrictions on military interrogators apply in the super-secret CIA quadrants of the gulag, as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed Congress this year.
But while eighty-sixing the brass knucks -- in mixed company, at least -- Bush and Rumsfeld have continued to implement a range of mind-breaking psychological tortures, the official documents show. These are practices that PHR notes are "immoral and ... illegal under the Geneva Conventions, ... [U.S.] domestic law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice." These codified crimes are spread across the gulag's 42 prisons, where some 11,000 men are now caged -- many of them innocent of any wrongdoing, all of them held without charges in an endless legal limbo.
This nightmare machinery was set in motion by Gonzales, who, at Bush's order, led the White House legal team in drawing up official memos justifying the use of torture to the very point of death, and declaring that Bush was not bound by any laws in his role as "commander-in-chief." This monstrous perversion of justice was a virtual coup d'etat, establishing the president as a military autocrat and fostering an atmosphere of lawlessness and brutality "up and down the chain of command."
After Lee's article appeared, Gonzales was suddenly sent to Baghdad, The Associated Press reports: a headline-grabbing diversion that not only obscured Lee's hard truths but also buried the Observer's breaking stories about the torture and murder being dealt out by Bush's disciples in the new Iraqi government. There, Gonzales -- the ghostwriter of Bush's torture opus -- simply erased the mountains of evidence cited by Lee and PHR, reducing the ongoing, worldwide atrocity to a single aberrant episode: "From the best we can tell, it really related to the actions of the night shift at one cell block at Abu Ghraib."
This breathtaking lie, regurgitated in the face of undisputed fact, shows how far the Bush gang has fallen into the void of radical evil. Lost to honor, law and truth, unmoored from reality, they are sailing into madness -- with no end yet in sight.
Operation
Wake Up
"Where a little over
a decade ago many of us newly released from the Gulag
celebrated our freedom, and which was won by the millions
of former Soviet citizens who threw off the shackles of
tyrannical communist rule, we could have never imagined
that these shackles would be then taken by the American
peoples to put upon themselves. We could have never
imagined that where in Russia today every school child is
given a Bible, in America today their school children are
threatened with prison if they so much as even mention
the Bible,
God or Jesus."[from Russian newspaper]
by Frank Scott
Our murderous foreign policy led to the tragedy of 9/11,
and its ramifications continue. The taking of innocent
life in Iraq has caused the taking of innocent life in
Spain and England. But still, the impenetrable blobs that
lodge between the ears of our leaders send messages to
their lips to repeat incantations about war on terror,
mindless that they are responsible for terror's origin,
perpetuation and growth.
Many are suspicious at the timing of the London attacks,
not yet realizing that our governments do not need to
conspire at killing their own people in order to
rationalize killing foreigners. Their policy has been
killing foreigners for more than a generation now ; that
is why we were attacked on 9/11, and why Europe has been
attacked since then.
Arrogant support for the American destruction of Iraq, by
governments unconcerned about their people's wishes, is
why Madrid and London have suffered terror bombings.
Conjecture about which group of fanatics conducted one or
another bombing misses the point. The attacks are
retaliation, and no amount of frat-boy tough talk by the
draft evader in D.C., or whining from the lapdog in
London, will do anything but cause more suffering in the
west, as retaliation for much greater suffering inflicted
on the east.
Political propaganda cannot change reality, nor can
language abuse, like, calling what goes on in Palestine a
'peace process'. That's like watching a womans rape
and calling it a 'love process'. The theft of Palestine
can no longer be rationalized as the fair, humane
reaction to a tragedy in Europe. Blatant disregard for
the Palestinians has led to suffering, displacement and
vicious oppression for those who had nothing to do with
any European atrocities. Continued disregard for the role
the US and Europe play in perpetuating the degradation of
the Palestinian people can only mean further disregard
for life and limb in the US and Europe.
The slaughter of innocents in Afghanistan and Iraq only
adds to the grievances of people whose hatred for us
grows, as our total disregard for their humanity moves
them further into extreme groups whose beliefs are based
on the same patriarchal scriptures revered by
Judeo-Christians. The sanctioned hate speech and hate
politics directed towards Islamic and Middle Eastern
people will only add fuel to a fire which threatens to
engulf far more than one location. Serious and ever more
bloody social breakdown is threatened, and its cause is
not terrorism , but the political economics of empire .
The present Karl Rove sideshow will do nothing to stop
the occupation in Iraq or the suppression in Palestine.
It has given dismal Democrats an opportunity to come out
from under their beds and pretend boldness, but that only
proves the insignificance of this diversion. Those whose
politics are themselves weapons of mass destruction , who
support the policies in Iraq and Palestine, are calling
for the head of the hustler who advises Bush. They
believe that having created murderous chaos in Iraq, we
can somehow supervise its uncreation. They may also
believe that carriers of the HIV virus must somehow
uncreate AIDS . But even if Rove's lynching is successful
- unlikely - it will be meaningless as long as Democrats
maintain policies which threaten more lives at home, the
more lives we take abroad.
The struggle for global domination was supposed to have
ended when the Soviet Union succumbed to our ability to
spend far more money on weapons . But we were a creditor
nation then; now we are the world's biggest debtor, and
the situation is far more dangerous. While Japan, Europe
and
especially China, prop up the American economy by
purchasing our debt, enabling Americans to shop without
money, grinding strains have developed in the engine room
of our consumptive ship of state, threatening to sink it
into the enormous sea of debt on which it floats .
Nonsense about foreign threats are merely further
attempts to distort reality. China, and eventually
Europe, will overtake the USA, by sheer strength of
dollars and consumers . But that is hardly a threat for
most Americans, who should rejoice, or at least heave a
sigh of relief. The sooner this nation stops trying to
run the planet, the sooner it may create solutions to far
more serious problems. And terrorism ranks well below
several hundred others, especially when we consider that
it would vanish, in seconds, once we stopped infesting
the middle east with our ugly and bigoted form of
marketing .
It is complete delusion to claim, as one of our regime's
manic minions did, that the Iraqi resistance is in its
last throes. It could be merely wishful thinking to say
it is the Bush administration whose days are numbered.
But realization of either delusion or dream may depend on
others, more than it does on the U.S.
If we are not able to exercise democratic control over
our government, others will have to do it, and in ways
that may cause far more pain. The lessons that have not
been learned from 9/11, Madrid and London will lead to
further suffering if the global and US majorities which
have always opposed this policy do not act up, now.
There is hope in the growing demand for immediate
withdrawal from Iraq, as well as in calls for
impeachment. But we will not end terror or stop the
empire simply by impeaching Bush, since his loyal
opposition is almost as bad. And even those two desires
will need to be joined with a further, most important
demand: that policy towards Israel change radically, to
not only observe the rights of the Palestinians, but to
confront and end the power of the Israeli lobby over the
U.S. government. To some , that may seem a tall order,
but to those who truly want peace and social justice, it
is an absolute necessity.
Copyright (c) 2005 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.
frank scott
email: frank@marin.cc.ca.us
225 laurel place, san rafael ca. 94901
(415)457 2415 cell (415)847 4105
