HAIL TO THE TORTURER-IN-CHIEF!

Outgoing US President George W. Bush gave a rare interview this week to a non-American, non-deferential, non-fawning interviewer, the BBC’s Matt Frei.

The main focus of the interview was (predictably, depressingly) the President’s preference for torturing his way to victory in the so-called ‘War on Terror’. These are some of the main (outrageous) points which the BBC interview highlighted:

• Bush believes that the London bombings – among other things – justifies the American use of torture (sorry, ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’!)
  
  
• Bush believes America still supports human rights and occupies the international moral high ground (!!)
  
  
• Bush will veto any attempt by the Senate to ban waterboarding
  
  
• Bush does not consider waterboarding to be a form of torture
  

Yet, as the Guardian noted, on the very same day, one of the Bush administration’s very own Justice Department officials – Steven Bradbury, head of the Office of Legal Counsel – pointed out in congressional testimony,

“Let me be clear, though: There has been no determination by the justice department that the use of waterboarding, under any circumstances, would be lawful under current law.”

Outside of the delusional corridors of the White House and the right-wing thinktanks of the neocrazy neocons, there are few sane souls who would dispute that waterboarding is indeed wholly, totally, undeniably, unquestionaly, indisputably and self-evidently an immoral, inhumane and brutal act of torture.

Former POW, Iraq war supporter and Republican Party presidential-candidate-to-be, Senator John McCain, is opposed to waterboarding, which he considers to be torture. Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage – who happens to have been second-in-command at Bush’s State Department during the invasion of Iraq, and also happens to be a former US naval commando – also has a dim view of waterboarding:

“Of course water-boarding is torture. I can't believe we're even debating it. We shouldn't be doing that kind of stuff."

What precisely is “that kind of stuff”? Former US military psychologist Bruce Lefever, who underwent a diluted form of ‘waterboarding’ during his training, said it was “terrifying”, and that “you're strapped to an inclined gurney and you're in four-point restraint, your head is almost immobilized, and they pour water between your nose and your mouth, so if you're likely to breathe, you're going to get a lot of water. You go into an oxygen panic." It is not waterboarding – it is, put simply, water torture.

You can watch a mocked-up, diluted version of a waterboarding below, courtesy of MSNBC:


The reality is that waterboarding has long been a weapon not simply of Mr Bush’s heroic and hallowed counter-terrorism operatives, but of torturers and tyrants throughout history. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge were amongst the 20th century’s most infamous practioners of waterboarding, as you can see below in a photo of one of the actual ‘waterboards’ used by the torturers of the Khymer Rouge.

And, most damning of all, the United States itself prosecuted Japanese officers in the wake of World War II, for waterboarding American prisoners of war – including an officer named Yukio Asano. As Senator Edward Kennedy has pointed out:

“Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II.”

How ironic! The US president declares in 2005, “We don’t do torture”, and then admits to, and defends, the use of waterboarding against terror suspects; while almost half a century earlier, the US government prosecuted Japanese officers for carrying out the very same practice against Americans. Hypocrisy? Double standards? Short-sightedness? All of the above. And all in the name of justifying, defending, and apologizing for torture, carried out by the supposed leader of the ‘free’ world, the United States of America. Waterboarding joins Abu Ghraib, Guatanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition in the long list of ignominious (and unAmerican!) legacies left to America, and to the world, by George Bush and his pathetic and immoral ‘War on Terror’.