The Torture Pimps

WalkingWithPerversion
BushVille


We're the Nazis in this game, and I don't like it. I'm embarrassed and I'm pissed off. Yeah. I mean to say something and I think a lot of people in this country agree with me.'

Hunter S. Thompson, January 2003

"The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example."

George W. Bush, June 26, 2003

"We're functioning (in a -- ) with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a war-time situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."

Donald Rumsfeld, May 6th, 2004.

Of course, everybody, and that apparently includes Tim Russert and even Judy Miller, is now copping to the fact that the Rovian Invaders built their case for war in Iraq on a fetid, stinking mountain of garbage and ginned-up anti-evidence.

But what is less clear is whether their 'commitment to the worldwide elimination of torture' has also been perceived as a demonstrable falsehood based on the stack of digital images that documents their systemic and systematic use of, well, torture.

After all, based on the mainstream media's self-induced, evils of access-driven amnesia that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for them to remember what happened the day before the passing of Anna Nicole Smith, one might surmise that the cloak of elimination rhetoric that hides the real real thing is still intact.

But if you did you would be wrong.

Because, as it turns out, there are still some things that are stronger than the pixels, P.R. and the pompous propaganda of the torture pimps.

And those are things like real memory, real experience and, yes - real nightmares:


An Iraq Interrogator's Nightmare

By Eric Fair

Friday, February 9, 2007; Washington Post, Page A19

A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I'm afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.

That dream, along with a host of other nightmares, has plagued me since my return from Iraq in the summer of 2004. Though the man in this particular nightmare has no face, I know who he is. I assisted in his interrogation at a detention facility in Fallujah. I was one of two civilian interrogators assigned to the division interrogation facility (DIF) of the 82nd Airborne Division. The man, whose name I've long since forgotten, was a suspected associate of Khamis Sirhan al-Muhammad, the Baath Party leader in Anbar province who had been captured two months earlier.

The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.......

Which only goes to show, once again, that the Geneva Conventions were put in place to protect both the tortured and the torturer.

Which is something that will never change.

Not in a million years or a billion digicams.

How quaint.

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