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Torture From The Taproot: Why The Truth Matters

By Alexa

It is said that the taproot of violence is hatred of truth.

This supernatural soliciting
... cannot be good; ...
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man, that function
Is smothered in surmise; and nothing is
But what is not. -- William Shakespeare, MacBeth, Act Three.

The repercussions of two Abu Ghraib whistleblowers compared with Dick Cheney's legacy of deception speak to that hatred of truth, and to the barbaric  acts Cheney defends without a speck of verguenza. With regard to torture, he'd do it all over again. He has no regrets.
There's nothing new under the sun, verdad, and Cheney isn't the first (and won't be the last) unrepentant tyrant who believes the bloody ends justify the means.

When authority is confused, apathetic, fearful of performing its duty, then society falls into the hands of the most cunning and powerful who are usually organized and proceed to amalgamate ruthlessly communities into communes.

When authority is weak it often succumbs to blackmail, thus becoming a catalyst to fiercer attacks of the revolutionaries. For successful violence inevitably calls forth greater, bolder, more frequent violence. What civil and especially religious authorities must realize is that the apologists for organized violence know no loyalty, reverence, reality but their own selfish goals. (Catholic Review, likely not an unimpeachable source, but close enough for rock and roll, in this writer's humble opinion. I consider the Torture Administration "apologists for organized violence.")

President Bush has "joked" about wanting to torture whistleblowers, stating he would like to string them "up by their thumbs. The same way we do with prisoners in Guantanamo!" Considering the punishments meted out to Torin Nelson, Joseph Darby, John Kiriakou (naming just a few because we know there are unidentified others, Bush's attempt at humor misses the mark rather spectacularly.

If these individuals and more hadn't been penalized for reporting what they witnessed, doesn't it follow that others would have come forth? Army Specialist (Retired) Tony Lagouranis, truth-teller, author of Fear Up Harsh:

I think it's [abuse of detainees]systemic. And I say that because for instance, if you set up a prison like Abu Ghraib where you have maybe 10,000 Iraqi prisons there, and you have 18-year-old guards guarding them, you know that you're going to have abuse taking place. I mean, if you don't know that, you're an idiot. And that goes all the way up the chain of command. And so they did not create oversight. The Pentagon should have been on this and making sure that abuse wasn't happening.

Te lo juro. Former Army Sergeant and Guantanamo translator Eric Saar, author of Inside The Wire, couldn't (or wouldn't) tell all he had witnessed.

Newark, Del.: I saw Mr Saar on C-SPAN this weekend discussing his book before a signing. I found his arguments and conclusions quite compelling and I am in complete agreement. I definitely feel the same way as he does about Guantanamo and its current quasi-gulag state.

But one thing that was awkward was just how little he could discuss or that he claimed he actually knew. It was even asked a couple times by the audience. He explained that his security clearances prevented him from discussing some matters and that he was also a low man on the totem pole. But that begs the question, could it be that his lack of knowledge on certain issues could be clouding his conclusions on the treatment of prisoners?

(Editor) Viveca Novak: Erik's top-secret security clearance and his job, particularly in the second half of his stint at Gitmo, permitted him access to every detainee's file. That combined with what he saw personally and what he heard from other interrogators and linguists gave him an excellent picture of the situation at Guantanamo. If you look at our book in conjunction with the FBI e-mails released recently as part of the ACLU's lawsuit, you'll note that there probably was a lot he didn't know -- a lot of even worse treatment of detainees.

In summary, we've heard from a few witnesses, and we have heard partial accounts. Would our friends insistent upon war crimes prosecution include the truth-tellers like Tony Lagouranis and Erik Saar? The tens of thousands who saw and heard but have said nothing yet, perhaps waiting until the Torturocracy is out of office and they can speak of their experiences without swift and certain adverse repercussions?

Among the reasons for my opposition to petitions for immediate war crimes prosecutions, these witnesses, doomed to live out their own private Forever Wars, forced to live with shame and silence and fear of prosecution;  perdona, they have a right to be heard. They have an obligation that encompasses more than what's legal and what's moral, and unless we hate the truth . . . . and we don't, do we? then why wouldn't we want to listen to them?

There are, as I said, other reasons; Iraq, the ghost detainees, the children detainees, the indisputable fact that as living witnesses, we have our own obligation to inventory and record the history in painstaking, no pun intended, detail.

The Obama administration should candidly acknowledge past wrongs, thereby abandoning the Bush/Cheney demand for absolute secrecy. In legal cases filed by torture victims such as Maher Arar, Khaled el-Masri and Shafiq Rasul, the Bush administration has parried demands for acknowledgment or restitution with a sweeping constitutional theory of "state secrets." Rejecting this theory would be a significant step in dismantling the Bush/Cheney view of executive unilateralism. It would be the smallest measure of justice to abandon this theory as ill founded and also to offer profound apologies and restitution to victims. It would be a public acknowledgment that our fears are never an excuse for anyone's suffering.

Torture is only one aspect of a larger distortion of the Constitution. Changing the executive's operating definitions of the law will be critical to rolling back the Bush/Cheney vision. Now this vision is largely memorialized in Justice Department opinions, many still secret. Some of them directly address presidential prerogatives to override laws. Others deal with specific constitutional rights, such as Fourth Amendment privacy rights and the freedom from indefinite detention without trial.

An investigative commission could be less amenable to manipulation than trials. If it could carry out its work in a bipartisan spirit, while insisting on the investigative tools needed to cut through secrecy, such as subpoena power, it could establish a definitive historical record of Bush/Cheney's extraordinary power grab. Bringing to public scrutiny the imperial presidency's infractions will, I suspect, be as good a way as any of thoroughly discrediting that constitutional vision.

Certainly, we owe the victims of torture and rendition some truth. Their losses, their unending agony, their grief are the direct result of hatred for truth, a rush to act with disregard for facts or in self-serving denial of what was known (Iraq), the sick cycle of "tell me what I want to hear and maybe I won't hurt you again."

Let the truth be told, and let the voices of thousands more not be silenced in a similar narrow focus on Cheney as Cheney's obsession with Iraq. See where that path has led? The tree, as it were, is one tree in a very large and very dense woods. Can we find the strength of purpose and sorry, I'll just say it straight up, the impulse control, to see the forest behind the most obvious trees?  

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on January 02, 2009 (boomark / email).