The Blowhard Of Chesapeake Cove

Donald is on the Rave Working out his Second Wave

Don't know who removed the muzzle from Donald H. Rumsfeld's lie-hole. But after several months of silence, the Secretary has returned to action, and he's hit the ground running. He's not merely in midseason form, he's running away with the pennant.

In the latest despatch to emerge form Rumsfeld's disgraceful brain, he argues that the Abu Ghraib shenanigans "are not on par with beheadings and other acts carried out be terrorists":

Has it been harmful to our country? Yes. Is it something that has to be corrected? Yes. Does it rank up there with chopping someone's head off on television? It doesn't. It doesn't. Was it done as a matter of policy? No.

While he does at least allow that the torture campaign has been "harmful to our country" (apparently not harmful, alas, to its victims) and is a problem that "has to be corrected" (because, presumably, it raises PR concerns); what is the point of comparing it to the beheadings, if not to minimise its perceived gravity and/or deflect criticism?

Setting aside Rumsfeld's sickening display of moral relativism, let's examine his claim.

In the abstract, does torturing one person "rank up there" with beheading one person? It's difficult to say, authoritatively, which is worse, from the victim's standpoint.

In a recent essay, historian Alfred McCoy explained that

Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, the CIA's "no touch" torture actually leaves deep, searing psychological scars on both victims and -- something seldom noted -- their interrogators. Victims often need long treatment to recover from a trauma many experts consider more crippling than physical pain. Perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to escalating acts of cruelty and lasting emotional disorders. When applied in actual operations, the CIA's psychological procedures have frequently led to unimaginable cruelties, physical and sexual, by individual perpetrators whose improvisations are often horrific and only occasionally effective.

This analysis would appear to be corroborated by the numerous suicide attempts (now termed "manipulative self-injurious behaviour") by Guantanamo "detainees": to a great many inhabitants of America's gulag system, death is preferable to the conditions under which they're being held. Additionally, many of the female survivors of the Iraqi division of the gulag "are believed to have disappeared; others have husbands who have...disowned them."

In other words, even in the abstract, Rumsfeld's claim is a lot less cut-and-dried that he makes it out to be. But is there something in the nature of execution by beheading that is particularly inhumane, as opposed to other forms of murder? Doesn't seem to this blogger any more inhumane than, say, electrocution. Or being killed from the effects of a bomb-blast. Or the slow, painful death resulting from exposure to Depleted Uranium. Or being tortured to death.

What if we begin to fill in our abstraction with concrete details?

Does the torture of so-called "insurgents", whose activities constitute a legitimate resistance to an illegitimate occupier, "rank up there" with the beheading of foreign war profiteers? What if a significant percentage of those you're "abusing" aren't even "insurgents", but civilians -- including women and children? What if you don't allow the Red Cross to visit your prisoners? What if you don't even account for all of your prisoners? What if many of your victims have died in your custody?

And do the motives matter? More hostages in Iraq have been released than have been beheaded, most of them after their countries or companies have agreed to cease their illegal activities within Iraq. But the American torture campaign not only doesn't have a legitimate political goal (no, gaining intelligence concerning the Iraqi Resistance is not legitimate), it's patently obvious that the purported goal of penetrating the Resistance is not achievable using these methods.

And does the scale matter? There have been about 100 hostages taken in Iraq -- about 30 beheaded, the rest released. On the other hand, the American military has taken thousands of prisoners, is releasing only slowly even those acknowledged to be civilians, refuses to even charge most of the Guantanamo "detainees" with any crime -- even after being ordered to do by the Supreme Court, and has killed many more than 30 of them. How many more isn't even really known. But to give one indication, three former Guantanamo detainees, interviewed by the Guardian after their release, estimate that upward of 30,000 perished during a forced march through Afghan mountains and desert. Supposing their estimate is off by a factor of ten? That would mean that this one march alone resulted in a casualty toll commensurate with that of the September 11 attacks.

And what if we compare not just the treatment of "detainees", but the violence of warfare generally? Here we find that the United States has killed tens of thousands of people, as well as poisoning both Afghanistan and Iraq with radioactivity while also leaving behind deadly cluster bomb-lets, failing to "rebuild" the infrastructure destroyed by its bombs and missiles (and, in the case of Iraq, its decade-long sanctions regime), and allowing large areas of both countries to be taken over by religious fundamentalists. On the other hand, the violence employed as a reaction to the American military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq -- deplorable as it may be -- would, by definition, not have been employed in the absence of a U.S. invasion. (Yes, both countries were menaced by violent, tyrannical regimes before being "liberated". But you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody -- certainly any citizen of either country -- who thinks that conditions are generally better than they were three years ago.)

The point here isn't to defend the methods or ideologies of the hostage-takers or the suicide bombers, or even the Resistance (though the methods of the Resistance are, at the least, considered legitimate by the standards of International Law). Rather, we're just trying to determine (in an act of "appeasement", if you will, of the Bush Administration's moral relativists) whether the methods of the "Coalition" and the "Multinational Force" "rank up there" with "chopping off someone's head".

Now let's turn to Donald H. Rumsfeld's bizarre plea that the torture campaign is not "a matter of policy".

Here's Pulitzer-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, the man who broke both the My Lai and Abu Ghraib stories, speaking Sunday morning on Meet The Press:

After I did a series of articles on this stuff for The New Yorker, people who worked inside the White House came to me and said, "Look, this is much more far-reaching than you think." We're talking about chain of command. Where did the impetus for mistreating prisoners begin? In the fall of 2002 we were getting nothing out of Guantanamo. There were 600 prisoners there. They'd been there since early in the year, being interrogated. Nothing was coming out of it. ... A very senior guy in the CIA...who knew Arabic fluently, went down, came back -- spent a few days there, talked to some of the people who were being detained there -- came back and wrote a blistering report. ... To her credit, Miss Rice had a series of meetings about the issue. It was discussed. They brought in Rumsfeld: "I'll look at it. I'll take care of it." He detailed it to a 31-year-old aide and it disappeared. ... I can tell you that at this meeting we had people from the vice president's office. We had the secretary of defense. Everybody was aware there was serious problems. It was brought forth by people inside -- I'm talking about the meeting in 2002 in Condoleezza Rice's office. There were problems brought forth in the fall of 2002. Nobody took any official steps to do anything to change it, and that's the issue you have.

The White House denies Hersh's account, of course. But who are you going to believe -- Seymour Hersh, or Donald H. Rumsfeld?

But then, high-placed Administration and military figures have done a fine job of themselves corroborating Hersh's claims.

• "If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job," according to "one official" quoted by the Washington Post in 2002, in reference to the goings-on at Guantanamo.

• "It's not that they don't have rights. They have fewer rights" than prisoners of war, said the now-famous Brig. General Janis Karpinski in 2003, in reference to "Security Detainees" in Iraq.

• The 2002 "Torture Memo" solicited by the Bush Administration advises that torture "may be justified" -- though the Pentagon refuses to make public the details of methods approved by Rumsfeld himself.

But we don't even need these admissions, really -- logic should suffice just fine. If the torture campaign was not undertaken "as a matter of policy", we would expect it to be an isolated incident.

Instead, it tracks with practices put into place in Guantanamo and Afghanistan, as well as methods employed by other countries supported by the United States (including Israel, from whom the American torturers apparently learnt some of their skillz).

It also tracks with practices put into place historically. Think Vietnam. Think the Iranaian Savak, and Saddam's Mukhbarat. Think the Afghan Mujahideen. Think the Latin American death squads -- taught their art at the School Of The Americas (first located in Panama, now in Fort Benning, Georgia).

If the American torture campaigns throughout the world and throughout history have not been acts of policy...well, we're talking about one hell of a coincidence.

Speaking of, that's a hell of a lot of words to devote to examining just one of Donald H. Rumsfeld's lies. Does anybody believe anything he says, anyway?