[Peace-discuss] Fwd: "Captain Courageous" by Chris Floyd

[John W.]

For what it's worth....



>   Captain Courageous
>   By Chris Floyd
>   September 30, 2005



>   Quietly, firmly, relentlessly, the good captain laid out the list of 
> atrocities committed at the order of the enemies of freedom: "Death 
> threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme 
> forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation 
> and degrading treatment." A catalogue of depravity, all of it designed -- 
> with diabolical sophistry -- by self-exalted men cloaking their violent 
> perversions with sham piety and righteous sputum. This was terrorism on a 
> grand scale, chewing up the innocent and guilty alike.
>
>   The good man is of course Captain Ian Fishback, the born-again U.S. 
> Army officer who has blown the whistle on the systematic abuse of 
> captives rounded up in President George W. Bush's War on Terror, The New 
> York Times reports. Fishback, frustrated after 17 months of trying to get 
> the atrocities investigated through official channels, finally turned to 
> Human Rights Watch -- and top Republican senators -- seeking redress for 
> the bloody dishonor that Bush has brought upon America.
>
>   In one sense, Fishback's revelations -- corroborated by other soldiers, 
> now lying low to ward off the inevitable reprisals by Bush minions -- are 
> not news. For example, this column has been detailing the use of torture 
> in Bush's global gulag since January 2002. It was no secret; at first, 
> the Bushists even bragged about it. "The gloves are coming off" was a 
> favorite phrase of the deskbound tough guys cracking foxy to an 
> enthralled media.
>
>   They also boasted of "unleashing" the CIA, which set up its own "shadow 
> army" of non-uniformed combatants operating outside the law -- i.e., 
> "terrorists," according to Bush's own definition -- while creating secret 
> prisons all over the world. As one CIA op enthused to The Boston Globe: 
> "'We are doing things I never believed we would do -- and I mean killing 
> people!" A senior Bush official proudly pointed to the ultimate authority 
> for this deadly system: "If the commander in chief didn't think it was 
> appropriate, we wouldn't be doing it."
>
>   We now know that in the very first weeks of the War on Terror, White 
> House legal lackeys began concocting weasel-worded "findings" to justify 
> a range of Torquemadan techniques while shielding Bush honchos from 
> prosecution for the clear breaches of U.S. and international law they 
> were already planning. Bush and his top officials signed off on very 
> specific torture parameters, including physical assault and psychological 
> torment; even beating a captive to death was countenanced, as long the 
> killer proclaimed that he had no murder in his heart when he commenced to 
> whupping, The New York Review of Books reports. Indeed, the lackeys went 
> so far as to establish a new principle of Executive Transcendence: The 
> president, they claimed, could not be constrained by any law whatsoever 
> in his conduct of the War on Terror.
>
>   Fishback saw the fruits of this vile labor in the vast Bushist holding 
> pens in Iraq, where thousands upon thousands of Iraqis were herded, 
> beaten and tortured -- even though 70 to 90 percent of them were innocent 
> of any crime, the International Red Cross reported in 2004. The incidents 
> he and the other soldiers detailed took place before, during -- and after 
> -- the photographic revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib. The mayhem 
> "happened every day," said the soldiers, and it was committed "under 
> orders from military intelligence personnel to soften up detainees."
>
>   "They wanted intel," said a sergeant, one of the ordinary, untrained 
> grunts pressed into duty as interrogation muscle. "As long as no 
> [captives] came up dead, it happened. We kept it to broken arms and legs" 
> -- sometimes with baseball bats, and occasionally augmented by scalding 
> naked prisoners with burning chemicals. The soldiers learned their 
> "stress techniques" from CIA interrogators, dropping into Iraq from their 
> "unleashed" torture centers in Afghanistan, Diego Garcia and points unknown.
>
>   But of course they didn't always "keep it" to broken arms and legs. 
> Fishback, who had been trying desperately to get his superiors to act on 
> the atrocities he'd witnessed himself, discovered that a captive had been 
> "interrogated" to death. From that point on, while still urging official 
> action, he also began gathering evidence and testimony from fellow 
> officers about the nightmarish regimen, the Los Angeles Times reports. 
> When at long last he began to realize "that the Army is deliberately 
> misleading the American people about detainee treatment within our 
> custody," he stepped out of the system -- and into the storm.
>
>   What will come of the good captain's moral courage? Nothing much. A 
> Pentagon investigation has been belatedly launched; no doubt a few more 
> bad eggs will be fried, just as the hapless Lynndie England, poster girl 
> for Abu Ghraib, was convicted this week for "aberrations" that, as 
> Fishback confirms, were countenanced and encouraged throughout Iraq. 
> Fishback himself will be certainly slimed in one of Karl Rove's patented 
> smear campaigns. By next week, the upright, Bible-believing West Point 
> grad -- a veteran of both the Afghan and Iraqi wars -- will be 
> transformed by Fox News and the war-porn bloggers into a cowardly, 
> anti-American terrorist sympathizer under the hypnotic control of Michael 
> Moore.
>
>   Meanwhile, one of the Republican senators Fishback approached, Senate 
> Majority Leader Bill Frist, has already put the kibosh on legislation 
> setting clear legal guidelines for prisoner treatment. Frist, a goonish 
> errand boy now under investigation for insider trading, killed the bill 
> after hearing Fishback's evidence. His White House masters don't want any 
> legal clarity for their dark deeds; they can only thrive in the murk of 
> moral chaos.
>
>   One thing is certain: The true architects of these atrocities will 
> never face justice. They'll go on to peaceful, prosperous retirements, 
> heedless of the broken bodies and broken nations -- including their own 
> -- left behind in their foul wake.