The horrors really are your America, Mr Bush

‘This is not America.” Those words were President George W Bush’s attempt to explain the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison on the Arabic-language network Alhurra in 2004. He spoke the words as if they were an empirical matter, but a cognitive dissonance could be sensed through them. If the men and women who tortured and abused and murdered at Abu Ghraib did not represent America, what did they represent? They wore the uniforms of the United States military. They were under the command of the American military. In the grotesque, grinning photographs they clearly seemed to believe that what they were doing was routine and approved.

And we now know from the official record that Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, had personally authorised the use of unmuzzled dogs to terrify detainees long before Abu Ghraib occurred, exactly as we saw in those photos. Does the secretary of defence not represent America? Almost two years after the torture story broke Congress finally roused itself and passed an amendment to a defence appropriations bill by John McCain that forbade the use of any “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” of detainees by any American official anywhere in the world. It was passed by veto-proof margins and Bush signed it. But he appended a “signing statement” insisting that, as commander-in-chief, he retained the right to order torture if he saw fit.

And so on May 18 the nominee for CIA director, Michael Hayden, was asked directly by Senator Dianne Feinstein whether he regarded “waterboarding” as a legitimate interrogation technique. Hayden replied: “Let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy to discuss it in some detail.” Huh? Why a closed session? Isn’t the law crystal clear? Isn’t strapping a person to a board, tilting him so that his head is below his feet, and pouring water through a cloth into his mouth to simulate drowning a form of “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment? And isn’t that illegal? In America? Or is that not America either?

(snip)
What is so tragic about this presidency is that it has simultaneously proclaimed American goodness while dismantling the constitutional protections and laws that guard against American evil. The good intention has overwhelmed the fact of human fallibility. But reality — human reality — eventually intrudes. Denial breaks down. The physical evidence of torture, of murder, of atrocity, slowly overwhelms the will to disbelieve in it. I am sorry, Mr President. This is America. And you have helped make it so.

more
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,29449-2209636,00.html

America and if you want the atrocities to stop, maybe the best thing would be to pull out - but then you still support staying if I'm not mistaken.

NeoCons don't need no stinking Constitution...

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Right next to the killing fields.