Closing the gap between torturer and victim
John Pilger reports on new revelations that torturers in
America's 'war on terror' were directed personally by the US
secretary of defence. He argues that the historical antedote to
such barbarity is the new exuberant democracy movement in Latin
America.
By John Pilger
03/14/07 "ICH" --- - In Andrew Cockburn’s new book, Rumsfeld,
the gap between rampant power and its faraway victims is closed.
Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defence until last year and a
designer of the Iraq bloodbath, is revealed as personally
directing from his office in the Pentagon the torture of fellow
human beings, exploiting “individual phobias, such as fear of
dogs, to induce stress” and use of “a wet towel and dripping
water to induce the misperception of suffocation”. Cockburn’s
documented evidence shows that other Bush mafiosi, such as Paul
Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, “had already agreed
that Rumsfeld should approve all but
the most severe options, such as the wet towel, without
restriction”.
In Washington, I asked Ray McGovern, formerly a senior CIA
officer, what he made of Norman Mailer’s remark that America had
entered a pre-fascist state. “I hope he’s right,” he replied,
“because there are others saying we are already in a fascist
mode. When you see who is controlling the means of production
here, when you see who is controlling the newspapers and
periodicals, and the TV stations, from which most Americans take
their news, and when you see how the so-called war on terror is
being conducted, you begin to understand where we are headed ...
It’s quite something that the nuclear threat today should be
seen first and foremost as coming from the United States of
America and Great Britain.”
McGovern was the author of the president’s daily CIA
intelligence brief. I interviewed him more than three years ago,
and his prescient words are as striking today as Cockburn’s
revelation of Rumsfeld’s secret life is illuminating. His
description of fascism within a nominally free society recalls
George Orwell’s warning that totalitarianism does not require a
totalitarian state.
The lies that have caused this extremely dangerous time are
understood and rejected by the majority of humanity. This was
illustrated vividly on 15-16 February 2003 when some 30 million
people took to the streets of cities around the world, including
the greatest demonstration in British history. It was
illustrated again the other day in Latin America, which George W
Bush on tour sought to reclaim for America’s lost “backyard”.
“The distinguished visitor,” noted one commentator in Caracas,
“was received with fear and loathing.”
There are many connections in Latin America to the suffering in
the Middle East. The crushing of popular, reformist governments
by the US and the setting up of torture regimes, from Guatemala
to Chile, have echoes from Iran to Afghanistan. The current
attacks on the Chávez government in Venezuela by the media,
which Ray McGovern describes as being “domesticated by their
wish to serve”, are essential in disclaiming the right of the
poor to find another way.
Elected last December with a record landslide of votes cast by
three-quarters of the eligible population – his 11th major
election victory – Hugo Chávez expresses the kind of genuine
exuberant democracy long ago abandoned in Britain, where the
political class offers instead the arthritic pirouetting of Tony
Blair, a criminal, and treasurer Gordon Brown, the paymaster of
imperial adventures fought by 18-year-old soldiers who, on their
return home, are so ill treated that there is no one to change
their colostomy bag.
Chávez, having all but got rid of the deadly IMF from Latin
America, dares to use the wealth from Venezuela’s oil to unite
the Latin peoples and to expel a foreign economic system that
calls itself liberal and is the source of historic suffering. He
is supported by governments and by millions across South America
from whom he derives his mandate.
You would not know this on either side of the Atlantic unless
you studied carefully. The propaganda that converts a lively,
open democracy to an “authoritarian” dictatorship is written on
the rusted crosses of Salvador Allende’s comrades, of whom the
same was said. It is disseminated by the embittered effete whose
liberal hero was Blair, until he made an embarrassing mess, and
who now claim the respectability of “the left” in order to
disguise their mentoring by the likes of Wolfowitz, their
promotion of Dick Cheney’s ludicrous “world Islamic empire” and,
above all, their passion for wars whose spilt blood is never
theirs.
“Rumsfeld:
his rise, fall and catastrophic legacy
” by Andrew Cockburn is published in the United
States by Scribner
This article was first published in the New StatesmanClick here
to comment on this and other articles
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
