- Another day, another accomplice in the construction of
the Bush Regime's torture chambers revealed. Nothing new there; the perp
walk of top Bushists colluding in torture could stretch a mile. But the
remarkable thing about the latest case is that it exposes an even greater
depth of official criminality than hitherto suspected -- no mean feat,
given the rap sheet of this crew.
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- The new man on the hot seat is Judge Michael Chertoff,
nominated to head the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Chertoff was
hip-deep in creating -- and covering up -- the infamous White House "torture
memos": carefully detailed guidelines from the desk of President George
W. Bush that instigated a global system of documented torture, rape and
murder.
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- Before Bush elevated him to the federal bench, Chertoff
headed the Justice Department's criminal division, where he was frequently
consulted by the CIA and the White House on ways to weasel around the very
clear U.S. laws against torture, The New York Times reports. Bush and his
legal staff, then headed by Attorney General-designate Alberto Gonzales,
were openly concerned with "avoiding prosecution for war crimes"
under some future administration that might lack the Bushists' finely nuanced
view of ramming phosphorous lightsticks up a kidnapped detainee's rectum,
or other enlightened methods employed in the administration's crusade to
defend civilization from barbarity.
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- Throughout 2002 and 2003, the CIA sent Chertoff urgent
questions asking whether various "interrogation protocols" could
get their agents sent to the hoosegow. The questions themselves are revelatory
of the tainted mindset at CIA headquarters -- officially known as the George
H.W. Bush Center for Intelligence. Beyond methods we already know were
used -- such as "water-boarding" and "rendering" detainees
to foreign torturers -- the Bush Center boys sought legal cover for such
additional refinements as "death threats against family members"
and "mind-altering drugs or psychological procedures designed to profoundly
disrupt a detainee's personality."
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- However, the Justice Department could only offer advice;
final approval of interrogation techniques -- including the Bush Center's
requests -- rested solely with the Bush White House. As one senior intelligence
official told The New York Times: "Nothing that was done was not explicitly
authorized" by the Oval Office. Thus the chain of responsibility is
clearly established for the reams of evidence on torture, rape and murder
in the Bush gulag -- cases documented by the FBI and the Pentagon's own
investigators, as well as the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the Red
Crescent, Human Rights Watch and others.
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- Eventually, Chertoff referred all torture questions to
the authority of the "smoking gun" memo drawn up by Bush's office
in August 2002. In this, the White House essentially defined "torture"
out of existence; practically any interrogation method could be used, Bush
said, as long as it didn't cause "organ failure or imminent death."
But even here Bush left an escape hatch for atrocity, ruling that an interrogator
who killed or permanently maimed a prisoner could still be shielded from
prosecution, as long as he claimed he hadn't intended to murder or maim
when he commenced the beating.
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- But Chertoff's involvement in Bush's chamber of horrors
goes beyond an advisory capacity. He was also instrumental in the earliest
cover-up of Bush's torture system: the trial of John Walker Lindh, the
"American Taliban" captured in Afghanistan, the Nation reports.
In June 2002, Lindh was due to testify about the methods used to extract
his confession of terrorist collusion: days of beating, drugging, denial
of medical treatment, and other abuses. These were of course standard procedures
used -- by presidential order -- from the very beginning of the "war
on terror." To stop Lindh from exposing this wide-ranging criminal
regimen, Chertoff, overseeing the prosecution, suddenly offered Lindh a
deal: The feds would drop all the most serious charges in exchange for
a lighter sentence -- and a gag order preventing Lindh from telling anyone
about his brutal treatment. Lindh, facing life imprisonment or execution,
took the deal. Once again, Bush skirts were kept clean. And the torture
system was kept safe for its expansion into Iraq, where thousands of innocent
people fell into its maw.
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- The August 2002 torture authorization was in force until
January 2005, when it was ostentatiously replaced by a somewhat broader
definition of torture just before Gonzales' confirmation hearings in the
U.S. Senate. But another 2002 memo - detailing specific, Bush-approved
"coercive methods" - remains classified. Is it still in force?
Nobody knows.
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- In any event, the Bushists' PR shuffle on torture is
meaningless. Gonzales has already declared to the Senate that interrogators
in the CIA's secret gulag aren't bound by the new "restrictions"
anyway. What's more, he's also asserted -- again openly, to the Senate
-- that Bush has the right to break any law or restriction he pleases "while
acting in his capacity as commander-in-chief." Thus whatever the Leader
orders -- even torture and murder -- cannot be a crime.
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- This is no hypothetical case, as Gonzales pretended to
the Senate. In a series of executive orders beginning in October 2001,
Bush has declared his peremptory right to capture, imprison, indefinitely
detain or even assassinate anyone in the world whom he arbitrarily and
secretly designates an "enemy" -- without any legal process at
all, the Washington Post reports. Thousands of such "enemies"
have been plunged into the CIA's unrestricted prisons, The Guardian reports;
and as Bush himself bragged in his 2003 State of the Union speech, "many
others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer
a problem." They were simply killed, in secret, at Bush's order.
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- This is thug law, a death-cult of blood and domination
-- the true religion of the Bushists and their mirror-image crimelords
in al-Qaida.
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