[Peace-discuss] Obama, torturer

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Seeking Shreds to Cover the Naked Truth of Power
	Written by Chris Floyd
	Wednesday, 12 May 2010 23:57

The fact that the Obama Administration is operating a secret prison in 
Afghanistan in which captives rounded up on the usual little or no evidence are 
being tortured even as we speak -- and even as the president was making his 
funny-haha jokes about predator drones -- does not come as any surprise. The 
horror of this reality is by now so routine that it almost defies comment. Or as 
Arthur Silber puts it in a powerful new essay:

     The concept of "depravity" has been rendered close to meaningless. When so 
much of what happens every day, here and abroad, is so unfathomably depraved, 
what does it signify to state that another 40 murders of innocent human beings 
represent still one more monstrous act, or that the torture of another dozen or 
three dozen or a hundred innocent human beings is unforgivably evil, or that the 
rape of another 10 or 30 or 50 girls and women constitutes a crime so immense in 
its magnitude that it makes all commentary completely beside the point, and even 
itself obscene?

     None of it is fully real. Most of it is never even noticed. None of it 
appears to matter, not in ways which cause a critical number of people to resist 
in ways which might momentarily slow down the machinery of cruelty and death.


So today I am not going to go through blood-soaked chapter and shit-smeared 
verse on this latest continuous atrocity, nor dissect the howling, puke-evoking 
hypocrisy of the Comedian-in-Chief of the War Machine. Instead, I just want to 
note one comment I ran across in reading about the story. It's from a leading 
progressive voice, Digby, who does, to her credit, go through chapter-and-verse 
on the gulag hell-hole.

Citing several sources, she notes that this week's Red Cross confirmation of the 
secret prison's existence was preceded by extensive reporting on the prison -- 
and the atrocities carried out there -- by well-known media outlets with 
impeccable Establishment credentials: the BBC, the New York Times and the 
Washington Post. None of these institutions can remotely be suspected of taking 
a radical -- or even skeptical -- line when it comes to the operations of state 
power. It takes a mountain of proof to move them to the slightest criticism of 
the operations of empire (as opposed to the petty machinations of our scheming 
courtiers). Thus when they do report extensively on a particular government 
depredation, citing eyewitness accounts and other evidence, you can be sure 
these Establishment paladins have already shaved away any taint of advocacy and 
triple-plated themselves with fact-checking to rebut assaults from their friends 
and contacts in the circles of power. Indeed, nine times out of ten, their 
revelations come from the circles of power, with one faction leaking damning 
facts to undermine a rival gang.

Yet after her admirable recitation of the facts, and their dire implications, 
Digby comes out with this surprising confession:

     I've held off on this issue because of the unequivocal denial by the 
military that the prison existed and I was willing to give the new 
administration the benefit of the doubt. Now that the Red Cross has confirmed 
that the prison does exist, we know for sure that the military was lying --- and 
the benefit of the doubt goes to the former prisoners.


She "held off" on the matter, which had been thoroughly reported by the BBC, 
NYT, WP ... because the Pentagon had denied it. And why would she do such a 
thing, given the ceaseless flow of lies that has issued forth from that 
many-sided militarist monument squatting out in the swamplands of Hell's Bottom? 
Because she wanted to "give the new administration the benefit of the doubt."

The benefit of what doubt? Did she really believe that the Pentagon had somehow 
been born again through the soul-cleansing election of Barack Obama? The man 
who, er, retained the leadership of the Pentagon that George W. Bush had put in 
place? The man who placed a master of black ops and dirty war in charge of the 
entire "Af-Pak" campaign? A man whose military machine has been caught lying 
over and over and over and over again about a ceaseless flow of atrocities it 
has committed -- under his command?

And what is this "new administration" she speaks of? Obama will soon have been 
in power for 17 months. (He had been in power for 16 months when the BBC issued 
its first report on the prison). When does an administration cease being "new," 
with its leaders and agents regarded as genial greenhorns, fumbling their way, 
learning as they go -- "ya really gotta cut 'em slack on this, they haven't hit 
their stride yet." In any case, Obama has been intensely involved in the 
Afghanistan war since the very beginning of his term. Indeed, he has already 
masterminded not one but two "surges" of the conflict, as well as greatly 
expanding the murderous campaign of assassinations in Pakistan, killing hundreds 
of people, terrorizing hundreds of thousands, and exacerbating hatred and 
extremism at every turn. Afghanistan is Obama's war -- he asked for it during 
the campaign, and he has willingly made it his own. He has his own hand-picked 
commander in charge (plucked from the pool of Bushist brass, of course), and he 
-- he alone -- made the decision not only to keep Bush's Pentagon warlord, but 
to make him one of his closest advisers.

So I ask again: why would anyone feel compelled to give the Obama Administration 
the "benefit of the doubt" when it comes to atrocities in Afghanistan -- 
especially those reported by "respectable," mainstream media institutions?

Digby goes on to make what is, in some ways, an even more surprising statement:

     I should have known better. Any administration which declares that it has 
the right to unilaterally order American citizens to be assassinated obviously 
isn't going to be squeamish about a little torture, is it?


Yes, exactly. How on earth could someone be cognizant of this universal murder 
program -- openly announced by Obama's security chief -- and still think that 
this "new administration" deserves the benefit of the doubt when mainstream 
media outlets release highly credible stories detailing the continuing 
atrocities of America's bipartisan gulag? As I wrote here last month:

     Let us hear no more excuses for Barack Obama. Let us hear no more defenses, 
no more special pleading, no more extenuations. Let us have no more reciting of 
the "pressures" he is under, of the "many obstacles" that balk him in his quest 
to do us good, of the "bad advisors" who are swaying him to unworthy acts 
against his will. Let us be done at last with all these wretched lies, these 
complicitous self-deceptions that are facilitating atrocity and tyranny on a 
monstrous scale.

     Barack Obama has ordered the murder of an American citizen, without trial, 
without due process, without the production of any evidence. All it takes to 
kill any American citizen in this way is Barack Obama's signature on a piece of 
paper, his arbitrary designation of the target as a "suspected terrorist." In 
precisely the same way -- precisely the same way -- Josef Stalin would place a 
mark by a name in a list of "suspected terrorists" or "counterrevolutionaries," 
and the bearer of that name would die. This is the system we have now, the same 
as the Soviets had then: a leader with the unchallengeable power to kill 
citizens without due process.

     That this power has not been used on the same scale in the American system 
as in the Stalinist state -- yet -- does not alter the equivalence of this 
governing principle. In both cases, the leader signs arbitrary death warrants; 
the security services carry out the task; and the 'great and good' of society 
accept this draconian power as necessary and right.

     This is what you support when you support Barack Obama. It does not matter 
if you think his opponents in the factional infighting to control a blood-soaked 
empire and its war machine are "worse" than he is in some measure. When you 
support him, when you defend him, when you excuse him, it is arbitrary murder 
that you are supporting. It is the absolute negation of every single principle 
of enlightenment and human rights professed by liberals, progressives -- indeed, 
by honorable people of every political stripe -- for centuries.


Yet still, after this, leading liberal voices can say, "Well, the Pentagon says 
that the BBC, the NYT and WP are all wrong about this nasty secret prison thing. 
And this new administration -- which I know full well is committed to killing 
people, even my fellow citizens, without the slightest pretense of due process, 
and which I know full well still has the proven liars of the Bush War Machine in 
charge of its operation -- deserves the benefit of the doubt." It boggles, as 
they say, the mind.

This is not a personal slam at Digby, whose diligent work in continuing to 
expose the creeping "taserization" of American society I find particularly 
valuable. Nor am I entirely without understanding of the way that tribal 
political loyalties can pull strongly on one's reasoning, like the moon working 
its power on the tides. But at this late date, for this in-no-way new 
administration, which has laid out its true corporatist-militarist-imperial 
nature with glaring, painful clarity, it is still striking, even shocking, to 
see the contortions of accommodation that so many are still willing to put 
themselves through, in the hope of keeping at least a scrap of obscuring cloth 
over at least a portion of the naked horror that confronts us.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/1968-sympathy-for-the-oval-seeking-shreds-to-cover-the-naked-truth-of-power.html

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