American Exceptionalism: Torture Whitewash From The Dark Side

But the George W Bush torture memos released by the Barack Obama administration last week, written in legalese by Jay Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, are just a preview. Many will relish the newspeak. (“We conclude that – although sleep deprivation and use of the waterboard present more substantial questions in certain aspects under the statute and the use of tile waterboard raises the most substantial issue – none of these specific techniques, considered individually, would violate the prohibition in sections 134:0•2340A.”) As for the whole movie – a 21st century remix of a D W Griffith epic – it could be called Death of a Nation.

The US Senate report, also just released, reads like deja vu all over again: the US establishment under Bush was a replay of the Spanish Inquisition. And it all started even before a single “high-profile al-Qaeda detainee” was captured. What Bush, vice president Dick Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and assorted little inquisitors wanted was above all to prove the non-existent link between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaeda, the better to justify a pre-emptive, illegal war planned by the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s. The torture memos were just a cog in the imperial machine.

The New York Times, in a fit of decency, at least has already demanded that Congress impeach the lawyerly Bybee, who got his lifetime seat in a federal appeals court from … Bush.

Everyone knew about the torture. Former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who along with Karl “Machiavelli” Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby was one of the leakers of the identity of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent Valerie Plame in the infamous Niger yellowcake affair, admitted to al-Jazeera that “in hindsight”, “maybe” he should have resigned. Former executive director of the 9/11 Commission Philip Zelikow, very close to secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, also has joined the swelling crowd of “I was against it, too, but in the end I did not resign”.

More crucially, Armitage also told al-Jazeera why this may well end up being … just another whitewash. “I don’t think the members of the Senate particularly want to look into these things because they will have to look at themselves in the mirror. Where were they? … They were AWOL, absent without leave.” Nobody should expect madam speaker Nancy Pelosi to investigate herself. In Washington, torture seems to be a bipartisan sport.