Candace

Talmadge

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October 6, 2008

George W. Bush: Torturing Democracy in So Many Ways

If you need a reminder of the reasons to celebrate the approaching end of George W. Bush’s tenure as president of the United States, search no further than Torturing Democracy.

This powerful, damning documentary will air on selected PBS television stations this month, among them WNET-Channel 13 in New York City. The entire film also will be available online for viewing at www.torturingdemocracy.org starting Oct. 10.

This compelling example of video story-telling recounts in merciless detail the steps the Bush Administration took on a road to torture, beginning less than a month after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The compelling narrative outlines how Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their attorneys, among them White House counsel and later Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, shredded the U.S. Constitution and international, military and U.S. law all in the name of supposedly protecting this country. It’s like a train wreck: You cannot look away even though you are horrified and appalled.

This film will fill all but the most blindly partisan of Bush supporters with loathing and fear. The loathing is for how we jettisoned real American values because we were scared and wanted someone – anyone – to pay for our suffering. This desire for vengeance led us to the gulag at Guantanamo, the prison in Iraq called Abu Ghraib, secret CIA renditions and imprisonment without charges or trial or even, at the outset, access to legal counsel. Habeas corpus: RIP.

The fear is over how our actions will come back to haunt us. “We have recreated our enemies’ methodologies in Guantanamo,” says Malcolm Nance, one of those interviewed and chief of training for the U.S. Navy’s survival, evasion, resistance and escape (SERE) program between 1997 and 2001. “It will hurt us for decades. Our people will all be subject to these tactics because we have authorized them for the world now.”

Tactics like sexual humiliation, total sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, constant loud music and chaining in stress positions for hours on end. They are torture, despite the administration’s attempts to justify, equivocate and spin them into something else. Indeed, FBI agents who visited Guantanamo started keeping a “war crimes” file based on what they saw happening there.

Then there is waterboarding, which Nance says is not simulated but “controlled” drowning. “There is no question in my mind that this is torture,” says former deputy U.S. Secretary of State Richard Armitage, describing for the first time on camera how he was waterboarded during his military training. “I’m ashamed we’re even having this discussion.”

The true outrage in all the preceding – torture did not yield the intelligence that U.S. authorities presumably were seeking. Instead it resulted in broken men, broken laws and a broken national reputation.

“How we got to Guantanamo is a crime,” Nance says, “and somebody needs to figure out who did it, how they did it, who authorized them to do it, and shut it down.”

Torture of those arbitrarily imprisoned is just one of the many ways the Bush Administration has sullied this country, however. Gonzales ultimately had to resign as attorney general, and many of his top staff also left the Justice Department after the firings of nine U.S. attorneys became public, and serious questions arose about the motivations behind those actions and whether Gonzales and his aides lied under oath about the events to Congress.

Lost amid the Wall Street uproar was news that the current U.S. attorney general, Michael Mukasey, has named a special prosecutor to investigate the entire sordid mess.

The list of how the Bush Administration tortured our republic is too long to enumerate. But the partisan stain that it has left may never be fully washed away.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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