The Will to Bend and Break: Dick Cheney and the Worship of Torture
February 10, 2015
The Will to Bend and Break
Dick Cheney and the Worship of Torture
by THOMAS LARSON
“I knew what I was doing,” Harry Truman said after the atomic bombs he ordered dropped not once but twice on Japanese cities—140,000 people dead in Hiroshima that night; 80,000 three days later in Nagasaki; many thousands more, slowly of radiation sickness. “I have no regrets,” Truman boasted. “Under the same circumstances, I would do it again.”
This, too, was Dick Cheney’s response to December’s Senate Torture Report. It’s “full of crap,” he said. About the program’s infamous twelve enhanced interrogation techniques, he said they were “authorized and approved.” He, like Truman, has “no regrets.” Given the chance, he’d “do it again.” And, he claimed, he hadn’t done anything that hadn’t already been done to the 3000 who died and the thousands who were terrorized on 9/11. (Of all the potential spokespeople for the Bush regime’s torture program—Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and others—only Cheney manned up for the interview rounds, framing the debate his way: the program worked.) Underneath his justifications we hear Orwell’s double-speak. Cheney’s certainly not the first to twist the language as an argumentative tool.
“Making all-out war saves Americans lives,” General Curtis LeMay said following the Tokyo saturation bombing of March 9/10, 1945, the firestorm incinerating more than 100,000 civilian lives. Much later, in a moment of clarity, he added, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” Americans have a genius for these prevarications. “The U.S. bomber is the most humane of all weapons.” “We must destroy the village in order to save it.” “Work on the dark side, if you will.” “Gitmo saves lives.” Down the marbled hallways of CIA headquarters in Langley, you hear echo, “The lawyers all signed off. So, too, the attorneys general. There’s no time for an ethical debate.”
It’s well to remember that the United States is a signatory of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Its definition begins “Torture is any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession.” Violations of these protocols should result in criminal prosecution.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/10/dick-cheney-and-the-worship-of-torture/
