The Gulag Revisited

[Daveparts]

The Gulag Revisited
By David Glenn Cox


We are living today with a rotting colossus, a corpse washed up on the beach we call America. Its stench and its putrid odors permeate our national life and even threaten our very existence. There is no escaping it or ignoring it; no matter how hard we try, its vileness finds its way under the door and pollutes our air.

This rotting corpse is the mortal shell of the Bush administration. Already considered by historians to be the worst Presidency of all time, more corrupt than Grant and more incompetent than Reagan, while the perpetrators have left office there is still the matter of the rotting corpse. So far the new Administration has chosen the tack of “Corpse, what corpse?” On Thursday White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, “It is time to look forward.”

But it cannot be done; one cannot ignore a festering, rotting corpse. The Obama Administration does not wish to upset the protocol of incoming administrations not prosecuting the crimes of the past administrations. LBJ stripped Air Force One of everything not bolted down, and a few things that were, and Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for crimes that seem almost laughable in comparison to the Bush administration.

We, in this country, have disdained the World Court but have gladly sent suspected war criminals of other nations there because it gets them off of our hands. We can wash ourselves and call ourselves upright citizens of the world. But when the suspect carries an American passport we cry out, “Wait! America has an honest and incorruptible judiciary; we shall settle the matter here!” Are you beginning to smell it now?

I have not written about torture because it all seemed so obvious; anyone with half a brain knows they will tell you anything to make the torture stop. I think the book “The Gulag Archipelago” explains it best. The author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, is arrested by Soviet authorities for writing a letter in which he says, “Things are bad here at the front, but we are all doing our best.” To make such a statement, even privately, implies defeatism; it was libelous to the official state position that everything was going swimmingly.

The author was then educated into what he called “the sewage system." His interrogators worked on a quota system. Their chances of advancement depended on the number and quality of confessions they extracted from the inmates each month. To confess to your interrogator too quickly meant that you were probably hiding a more serious crime. To not confess quickly enough meant that you were protecting others. Consequently the information gleaned was complete fantasy and of no use to anyone except the interrogators themselves. The system was predicated on results not rules. It became a game for the interrogators and a living hell for the prisoners.

We have seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib; we know for the most part what has been done. But now in dribs and drabs the information leaking out is more about their motive than their technique. It wasn’t an episode of "24" where Jack Bower must save the world; it was the Gulag revisited. It was torture used to obtain the information required in fulfilling political motives. The orders to commit these crimes came from the highest levels of the Executive Branch. And still, with waterboarding and enhanced interrogations, they were unable to make their case.

So the administration then fabricated a case out of thin air; anyone who stood in the way or questioned the administration was brought down. The attack on Joe Wilson simply for doing the job he was required to do is case in point. The outing of a CIA agent is a felony and yet the perpetrators threw Scooter Libby under the bus and skated away scott free. But the torture and Joe Wilson and Colin Powell at the UN are all just candles on the birthday cake. It was the goal of the past Administration, come hell or high water, to generate a case for war against Iraq, even if the case came out of thin air.

The reticence of the Obama Administration to move forward with an investigation threatens to snatch them by the ankle like an anchor chain and drag them to the bottom, making them accessories after the fact. These last eight years have obliterated the political landscape; they have destroyed the Republican Party and compromised the Democrats. All are dirty, save a very few. House Speaker Pelosi on Thursday said that the CIA had “Lied” to her. Them is fighting words, but Pelosi is fighting off the taint of the corpse. She claims that the CIA misled Congress in their briefings and intentionally said that they were not waterboarding when they were. I believe her, but more to the point, would it have made any difference?

Pelosi and Reid talk a good game, but in the end the Administration always got the authorization or the money it requested. The troops bled and died as the bombs dropped and children cried, but oh my, Congress didn’t know. "We were misled," they say. Yet strangely, a guy with little political experience with no connection to the intelligence community and far from the beltway in Washington knew. I knew in 2002 that the war was coming because a Marine told me so. He already knew he was being deployed to Kuwait long before Colin Powell entered the UN.

Yet the Congress were all misled; they didn’t know that the special interest groups would prosper during a war. They didn’t know that they could use patriotic zealotry to get reelected. They poured out love and undying admiration for the troops all while they voted down expanding their health care and helmet liners. They were shocked at the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Army hospital, but I wasn’t. It was all one big ongoing criminal conspiracy by the Congress and the Administration. A charade of get it while we can 'cause hell's a-poppin!

It was just easier to go along for the ride, but now there is a piper to be paid. The President and Congress do not want an investigation. An investigation will implicate Congressional culpability in the crime. It will become the centerpiece of a first Obama term and if not handled successfully the centerpiece of the only Obama term. The breakage and wreckage wrought by the clowns of the Ringling Brothers Cheney and Bush circus covers the globe. It would be foolish indeed to believe all’s well here at ground zero

It is unavoidable and it is necessary to prosecute these war criminals. It is a cathartic exercise to release the demons possessing our soul. We must look no matter how horrible, regardless of the terrors that we must face. There are too many pieces of the puzzle showing now to turn back. We know that the case for war in Iraq was a fraud. We now know that the Administration was willing to use torture and murder to fabricate that case. This in and of itself constitutes a war crime and a criminal conspiracy.

It dredges up the bottom, the true darkness of the human soul. If the war in Iraq was a fabrication then what of the war in Afghanistan? Who was Osama Bin Laden really and why couldn’t we capture him? Could he be a creation of the CIA? An operative? A dupe? A boogey man who always shows up on cue? The question of whether they have lied to us has been resolved, now we seek to know the extent of the lies.

It will not go away; it will fester as the maggots rifle through the corpse. Day by day as the sun bakes away, the American people lose faith in the Congress, their courts, and finally in their President and the remains will stink to high heaven, as the government, through inaction and carelessness, loses legitimacy and becomes, themselves, accessories.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, George W. Bush works towards funding his Presidential liebrary. Seeking an endowment of two hundred million dollars, despite a devastated economy the former President has already raised one hundred million dollars from his friends in just four months.