|
21 Май 2004 21:22
This article appears in the May 21, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Behind the Torture
Are the `Beast-Men''
Cheney and Rumsfeld
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), coming out of a closed-door Congressional screening of the Iraq torture photographs from Abu Ghraib prison, on May 12, summed up the reactions of a majority of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle: "It felt like you were descending into one of the rings of hell; and sadly, it was our own creation."
Sen. Durbin''s words echoed the LaRouche in 2004 mass-circulation campaign pamphlets, Children of Satan I and II, which exposed the outright fascist, and willfully bestial ideology and policies of Vice President Dick Cheney, and his fellow Straussian neo-conservatives in the Department of Defense civilian bureaucracy and other power centers in Washington. It is Cheney''s neo-con apparatus that bears top-down responsibility for the inhuman torture that took place at Abu Ghraib.
In a May 10 campaign statement, "The Mark of the Beast, " Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche emphasized that the actions by the accused prison guards and interrogators in Baghdad were not simply of their own doing, but were the consequence of a geometry of policy that permeated, top-down, every major action by the Bush-Cheney administration, particularly the entirety of the Iraq war policy.
The pamphlet Children of Satan II—The Beast-Men, warned readers about the murderous character of Cheney, in particular: "Dick Cheney is not a copy of Adolf Hitler, but he comes directly out of the same background as Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and their like, from the 1922-45 pages of modern history. He belongs to the same psychopathological stereotype which history traces back to the ancient Phrygian Dionysus from whom the models of the Spanish Grand Inquisitor and the French Jacobin Terror are traced by the leading intellectual founder of all modern fascist movements—the chief intellect of the modern fascist tradition, Joseph de Maistre. The Cheney-Strauss-Nazi connections to Maistre are clear, and crucial for understanding the Nazi-like global menace, which Cheney, as a sitting U.S. Vice President, typifies for the world today."
Joseph de Maistre, a leading participant in the Jacobin Terror and the later tyranny of the prototypical beast-man Napoleon Bonaparte, famously wrote about the vital role of the executioner in maintaining social order—through bestialization and terror. "All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner; he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment, order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears."
Did not these words of Maistre mirror Dick Cheney''s now infamous pronouncements about the danger to all civilization in allowing Saddam Hussein to successfully pursue his purported quest for the nuclear bomb—a quest that proved to be pure fiction? Does the "Cheney Doctrine" of preventive nuclear war against potential future adversaries rise to the standard of de Maestre''s executioner?
When Children of Satan II was first circulated in January, many in official Washington called this characterization—of Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, et al., as Maistre-like "Beast-Men"—"over the top, " "exaggerated, " and "propagandistic." Then the photographs emerged from inside Abu Ghraib, and the reality of the Cheney-led descent into hell became sensuously clear.
From the Top of the Chain of Command
The full story of Abu Ghraib is yet to be told. But a week of Congressional hearings has already confirmed that the torture techniques were fully known and sanctioned from the top.
In August 2003, with the U.S. occupation force in Iraq facing a growing asymmetrical warfare insurgency, and with the evidence out that Saddam Hussein did not possess the arsenals of "weapons of mass destruction" that Cheney cited as the reason for "preventive" war, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld dispatched Gen. Geoffrey Miller to Baghdad, to assess and modify the interrogation techniques being used on key Iraqi prisoners.
General Miller was the commander of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was already employing techniques specifically banned by the Geneva Convention covering treatment of prisoners of war. (In March 2004, Miller was transferred to Iraq and placed in charge of the entire prison system of the American occupation.)
In April 2003, Miller had requested permission to adopt 20 interrogation methods at Guantanamo, involving sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, forced nudity during interrogations, the use of dogs, and other forms of "sensory assault." The request had been approved at the highest levels of the Pentagon and the John Ashcroft-led Department of Justice.
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had personally paved the way for this use of torture when he publicly scoffed at the Geneva Convention, asserting that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were not protected by international law. Rumsfeld personally traveled to Iraq, in the midst of the Miller mission, and on Sept. 6, 2003, he visited the execution chamber at Abu Ghraib
|
=ПЕЧЕЛИШ ПРИЗА " ОЛИГОФРЕН на ТЕМАТА"