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Torture, Is It Becoming An Accepted Part of the American Lifestyle?

Comment by Larry Ross, June 1, 2007

"The thunderous applause from the Republican audience to Guiliani's put-down of the only honest person present (US Representative Ron Paul) underlines that the Republican Party is incapable of leadership to end a futile and lost war that under international standards is a war crime, an unprovoked naked aggression based entirely on lies, deception and a secret agenda.

At other times, the Republican audience applauded in support of torture and greeted John McCain's protest against the practice with cold silence."

              Quote from Paul Craig Roberts - May 23, 2007

This shows that a significant section of the US leadership and people's representatives accept, and even applaud, Bush's unjustified illegal Iraq quagmire, as well as accept his anti-Constitutional torture techniques. After 4 years of Al Grahib and Guantanamo Bay revelations Americans have come to accept as normal, an institutionalised process that brutalises America and rejects many of it's most respected values. Of special interest is that torture does not produce reliable confessions, and that the tortured prisoner will admit to anything he thinks will satisfy the torturer, if it will stop the torture.

Of course Bush, his administration, his experts and advisors and his torturers are not all stupid psychopaths using the Iraq war and terrorism to indulge their criminal fantasies. They know the facts about torture techniques but continue this counterproductive and expensive practice along with other attacks on American civil liberties. Is it part of a grand plan to change American morality and values? Is it part of a master plan to convert American into a more controlled fascist military state? Certainly there are many evidences of this kind of development in America under Bushism as indicated under "Bush Empire" on our website.  

While the polls show that most Americans reject Bushism, there is little questioning, action against, or even awareness of the obvious fascist trends and what might follow.

This following article from the Village Voice gives more details.

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Dark Secrets at the Front

Prisoners and interrogators are both brutalized in a war that changes who we are.

by Nat Hentoff, May 30, 2007

In February 2006, then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that our wars against terrorism "could last for decades." Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, he said of the multiplying enemy: "Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs ."

With a seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers in Iraq, the enemy certainly hasn't changed its way of life. However—as the world has witnessed—there's plenty of evidence that we've changed ours—namely, in America's professed values about how we treat our prisoners, euphemistically marginalized as "detainees."

Colin Powell, after his many years of military service, said that American forces using torture on prisoners has been an "innovation." And on May 7 of this year, General David Petraeus—now commanding our "surge" in Iraq, emphasized: "It's time to adhere to American values. We must not sink to the level of our enemies." That reminded me of John McCain admonishing the president and Cheney about brutalizing our prisoners: "We are Americans; our values are not those of the terrorists." McCain finally got a law passed barring "cruel and inhuman treatment" of prisoners, but he later voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that barred those we hold as terrorism suspects from going into our courts to speak of their "conditions of confinement"—including "coercive interrogations" permitted by the Military Commissions Act.

What caused the new alarm by General Petraeus about sinking to the level of the enemy is a startling official report from the Office of the Surgeon General, United States Army Medical Command. Dated November 17, 2006, the report—encompassing several years of research in the field, including repeated surveys—has found that:

" Less than half of other soldiers and Marines (in Iraq) believed that non- combatants should be treated with dignity and respect and well over a third believed that torture should be allowed to save the life of a fellow team member.

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