The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

seemslikeadream

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Thu Apr-23-09 12:14 PM
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The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1746-the-fatal-thread-torture-war-and-the-imperial-project.html

With the release of the U.S. Senate's report on the Bush Administration torture program, it is now incontrovertibly clear � and officially established by the highest, most respectable Establishment institutions � that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and a host of other top officials deliberately, willingly, and with malice aforethought, established a system of interrogation using brutal techniques that they knew were against the law. Hence the need for the torture memos that attempted to give retroactive legal cover for atrocities that were already taking place at the orders of the White House and the Pentagon. They were also told repeatedly that these tortures were ineffective at producing useful intelligence. (For more detail, see the excellent stories at Salon.com here and here.)

What's more, it is now undeniable that they began this program long before they had captured even one "high-profile al Qaeda detainee," and that they were using these heinous techniques not in a desperate bid to save the nation from further attacks � which has long been their preening, self-serving claim � but instead to produce spurious data about the non-existent link between Iraq and al Qaeda. In other words, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld ordered their minions to beat and torment captives in order to get them to say something a � anything � that could then be used to "justify" a war of aggression that these grand statesmen had been planning long before the September 11 attacks.

You cannot disentangle the torture program from the war of aggression in Iraq � nor from the illegal wiretapping program, the corrupt war profiteering, and all the other degradations of liberty and law that have been so accelerated in the past eight years. They are all of a piece, part and parcel of a plan to expand and entrench America's "unipolar domination" of world affairs with a thoroughly militarized state led by an unaccountable, authoritarian "Unitary Executive."

This is one reason why Barack Obama is so obviously reluctant to tug on the torture thread too hard. If you tear it out, with full-scale prosecutions and top officials locked up behind bars, the whole rotten skein would fall apart. Once you start genuinely subjecting government officials � including security apparatchiks and military brass � to the full extent of the law, there would be no end to the unraveling: senators, contractors, representatives, bureaucrats, generals, lobbyists, judges, corporate chiefs � the whole edifice of Establishment power would be shaken to the core as its leading lights went down, one after the other.

Thus the mere act of applying the ordinary, bourgeois laws of the land as they stand right now would constitute a world-shaking revolution, an overthrow of the existing order every bit as radical as any ideologue's dream of mass uprising. It would be, in effect, a re-founding of the Republic � and the end of the empire, which cannot survive without continual war, lawless rule and endless corruption.