Re: OT: Physicians for a National Health Program

["Robert L Bass" <RobertLBass@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> The only thing that bothers me about that sentence is the
> implication that you might be willing to give that power to some
> different president.
>
> Personally, I wouldn't trust any of 'em with it.

The following was actuually written by a *former* friend and
supporter of Bush:

"Bushâ??s torturers follow where the Nazis led" -- Andrew Sullivan

"I remember that my first response to the reports of abuse and
torture at Guantanamo Bay was to accuse the accusers of exaggeration
or deliberate deception. I didnâ??t believe America would ever do those
things. Iâ??d also supported George W Bush in 2000, believed it
necessary to give the president the benefit of the doubt in wartime,
and knew Donald Rumsfeld as a friend."

"It struck me as a no-brainer that this stuff was being invented by
the far left or was part of Al-Qaeda propaganda. After all, they
train captives to lie about this stuff, donâ??t they? Bottom line: I
trusted the president in a time of war to obey the rule of law that
we were and are defending. And then I was forced to confront the
evidence."

"From almost the beginning of the war, it is now indisputable, the
Bush administration made a strong and formative decision: in the
absence of good intelligence on the Islamist terror threat after
9/11, it would do what no American administration had done before. It
would torture detainees to get information."

"This decision was and is illegal, and violates Americaâ??s treaty
obligations, the military code of justice, the United Nations
convention against torture, and US law. Although America has allied
itself over the decades with some unsavoury regimes around the world
and has come close to acquiescing to torture, it has never itself
tortured. It has also, in liberating the world from the evils of
Nazism and communism, and in crafting the Geneva conventions, done
more than any other nation to banish torture from the world. George
Washington himself vowed that it would be a defining mark of the new
nation that such tactics, used by the British in his day, would be
anathema to Americans."

"But Bush decided that 9/11 changed all that. Islamists were
apparently more dangerous than the Nazis or the Soviets, whom
Americans fought and defeated without resorting to torture. The
decision to enter what Dick Cheney called â??the dark sideâ?? was made,
moreover, in secret; interrogators who had no idea how to do these
things were asked to replicate some of the methods US soldiers had
been trained to resist if captured by the Soviets or Vietcong."

"Classic torture techniques, such as waterboarding, hypothermia,
beatings, excruciating stress positions, days and days of sleep
deprivation, and threats to family members (even the children of
terror suspects), were approved by Bush and inflicted on an unknown
number of terror suspects by American officials, CIA agents and, in
the chaos of Iraq, incompetents and sadists at Abu Ghraib. And when
the horror came to light, they denied all of it and prosecuted a few
grunts at the lowest level. The official reports were barred from
investigating fully up the chain of command."

"Legally, the White House knew from the start that it was on
extremely shaky ground. And so officials told pliant in-house lawyers
to concoct memos to make what was illegal legal. Their irritation
with the rule of law, and their belief that the president had the
constitutional authority to waive it, became a hallmark of their
work."

"They redefined torture solely as something that would be equivalent
to the loss of major organs or leading to imminent death. Everything
else was what was first called 'coercive interrogation', subsequently
amended to 'enhanced interrogation'. These terms were deployed in
order for the president to be able to say that he didnâ??t support
'torture'. We were through the looking glass."

"After Abu Ghraib, some progress was made in restraining these
torture policies. The memo defining torture out of existence was
rescinded. The Military Commissions Act was crafted to prevent the
military itself from being forced to violate its own code of justice.
But the administration clung to its torture policies, and tried every
legal manoeuvre to keep it going and keep it secret. Much of this
stemmed from the vice-presidentâ??s office."

"Last week The New York Times revealed more. We now know that long
after Abu Ghraib was exposed, the administration issued internal
legal memos that asserted the legality of many of the techniques
exposed there. The memos not only gave legal cover to waterboarding,
hypothermia and beating but allowed them in combination to intensify
the effect."

"The argument was that stripping a chained detainee naked, pouring
water over him while keeping room temperatures cold enough to induce
repeated episodes of dangerous hypothermia, was not 'cruel, inhuman
or degrading'. We have a log of such a technique being used at
Guantanamo. The victim had to be rushed to hospital, brought back
from death, then submitted once again to 'enhanced interrogation'."

"George Orwell would have been impressed by the phrase 'enhanced
interrogation technique'. By relying on it, the White House spokesman
last week was able to say with a straight face that the
administration strongly opposed torture and that 'any procedures they
use are tough, safe, necessary and lawful'."

"So is 'enhanced interrogation' torture? One way to answer this
question is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Verschärfte
Verneh-mung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact
term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the
'third degree'. It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress
positions and long-time sleep deprivation."

"The United States prosecuted it as a war crime in Norway in 1948.
The victims were not in uniform â?? they were part of the Norwegian
insurgency against the German occupation â?? and the Nazis argued, just
as Cheney has done, that this put them outside base-line protections
(subsequently formalised by the Geneva conventions)."

"The Nazis even argued that 'the acts of torture in no case resulted
in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not
result in permanent disablement'. This argument is almost verbatim
that made by John Yoo, the Bush administrationâ??s house lawyer, who
now sits comfortably at the Washington think tank, the American
Enterprise Institute."

"The US-run court at the time clearly rejected Cheneyâ??s arguments.
Base-line protections against torture applied, the court argued, to
all detainees, including those out of uniform. They didnâ??t qualify
for full PoW status, but they couldnâ??t be abused either. The court
also relied on the plain meaning of torture as defined under US and
international law: 'The court found it decisive that the defendants
had inflicted serious physical and mental suffering on their victims,
and did not find sufficient reason for a mitigation of the punishment
. . .'"

"The definition of torture remains the infliction of 'severe mental
or physical pain or suffering' with the intent of procuring
intelligence. In 1948, in other words, America rejected the semantics
of the current president and his aides. The penalty for those who
were found guilty was death. This is how far weâ??ve come. And this
fateful, profound decision to change what America stands for was made
in secret. The president kept it from Congress and from many parts of
his own administration."

"Ever since, the United States has been struggling to figure out what
to do about this, if anything. So far Congress has been extremely
passive, although last weekâ??s leaks about the secret pro-torture
memos after Abu Ghraib forced Arlen Specter, a Republican senator, to
proclaim that the memos 'are more than surprising. I think they are
shocking'. Yet the public, by and large, remains indifferent; and all
the Republican candidates, bar John McCain and Ron Paul, endorse
continuing the use of torture."

"One day America will come backâ?? the America that defends human
rights, the America that would never torture detainees, the America
that leads the world in barring the inhuman and barbaric. But not
until this president leaves office. And maybe not even then."

-- www.timesonline.co.uk

--

Regards,
Robert L Bass

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