Bush's true barbarity

The Bush administration has gone far beyond just its efforts to create an omnipotent "King George" in defiance of the U.S. Constitution. In foreign affairs Bush, Cheney and the CIA have practiced torture on a scale no modern American administration has ever even considered. Glen Greenwald provides a description.

Mr. Arar was sent by American intelligence officials in October 2002 to Syria, where he was tortured and jailed for a almost a year. Last September, an extensive Canadian inquiry concluded that the terrorism accusations against him were groundless.

[Snip]

The newly released sections indicate that neither the Syrian government nor the Federal Bureau of Investigation were convinced that Mr. Arar was a significant security threat. They also suggest that the investigation of Mr. Arar was prompted by the coerced confession of Ahmad Abou el-Maati, a Kuwaiti-born Canadian who was also imprisoned and tortured in Syria.

And despite claims by the United States government that Mr. Arar's removal to Syria was mainly an immigration matter, the new material suggests that the Central Intelligence Agency led the action.

But this is only the torture which was outsourced. Look at the torture program operated by the CIA itself in its black sites outside the United States:

"The C.I.A.'s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. 'It's one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,' an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. 'At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you've heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling'" . . . .
[Underlining mine - Editor WTF-o]

This is not a rogue operation like the one alleged to have occurred in Abu Ghraib with no knowledge of the chain of command.

...the treatment of high-value detainees has been directly, and repeatedly, approved by President Bush.

The program is monitored closely by C.I.A. lawyers, and supervised by the agency's director and his subordinates at the Counterterrorism Center. While Mohammed was being held by the agency, detailed dossiers on the treatment of detainees were regularly available to the former C.I.A. director George Tenet, according to informed sources inside and outside the agency. Through a spokesperson, Tenet denied making day-to-day decisions about the treatment of individual detainees. But, according to a former agency official, "Every single plan is drawn up by interrogators, and then submitted for approval to the highest possible level -- meaning the director of the C.I.A. Any change in the plan -- even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added -- was signed off by the C.I.A. director."

We are learning more about what George Tenet did to earn his "Medal of Freedom." Besides telling Bush what he wanted to hear to justify the invasion of Iraq and then shifting the blame to the CIA he also operated this massively detailed torture program and kept day-by-day, tortured-prisoner-by-tortured-prisoner control of the torture process. Meanwhile Bush has been thoroughly informed and has personally approved of the requirement to torture individuals detained by the CIA.

Glenn Greenwald points out

As always, it is vital to underscore that there is much of what we have done -- likely the most extreme and criminal aspects -- which remain undisclosed. But based solely on what we do know, we have become a country that not merely in isolation, but as overarching policy, embraces some of the most grotesque human rights abuses in the world. That is a difficult fact to acknowledge, but documented reports of our conduct make it inescapably true.

This is not a rogue operator or someone acting desperately because they feel there is some specific "ticking bomb that must be defused." This has been carefully planned, researched, choreographed and practiced as a matter of government policy. And that's just the elements of the torture program that we know about!

Glenn ends up making this point:

While American citizens inside of the U.S. still enjoy robust civil liberties as compared to most other countries around the world -- certainly nobody rational would compare the tyranny of a country like Libya to the state of domestic political affairs inside the U.S. -- one cannot say the same for our behavior as a world actor. In that regard, such comparisons are not only plausible but indisputably valid.

Could the Bush administration have possibly done any more to inflame public opinion - especially in the Middle East - against the rogue state, America?

This is far beyond stupidity. It is utter depraved intentional viciousness clothed as a set of government programs. It is worthy of Argentina's Gen. Galtieri and Chile's President Augusto Pinochet.

Bush has done bin Laden's work for him. Can anyone honestly stand up now and ask "Why do they hate us so?"