{"id":143470,"date":"2015-02-10T17:32:08","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T17:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=143470"},"modified":"2015-02-10T17:32:08","modified_gmt":"2015-02-10T17:32:08","slug":"dick-cheney-worship-torture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/dick-cheney-worship-torture\/","title":{"rendered":"Dick Cheney and the Worship of Torture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI knew what I was doing,\u201d Harry Truman said after the atomic bombs he ordered dropped not once but twice on Japanese cities\u2013140,000 people dead in Hiroshima <em>that night<\/em>; 80,000 three days later in Nagasaki; many thousands more, slowly of radiation sickness. \u201cI have no regrets,\u201d Truman boasted. \u201cUnder the same circumstances, I would do it again.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This, too, was Dick Cheney\u2019s response to December\u2019s Senate Torture Report. It\u2019s \u201cfull of crap,\u201d he said. About the program\u2019s infamous twelve enhanced interrogation techniques, he said they were \u201cauthorized and approved.\u201d He, like Truman, has \u201cno regrets.\u201d Given the chance, he\u2019d \u201cdo it again.\u201d And, he claimed, he hadn\u2019t done anything that hadn\u2019t already been done to the 3000 who died and the thousands who were terrorized on 9\/11. (Of all the potential spokespeople for the Bush regime\u2019s torture program\u2013Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and others\u2013only Cheney manned up for the interview rounds, framing the debate <em>his<\/em> way: the program worked.) Underneath his justifications we hear Orwell\u2019s double-speak. Cheney\u2019s certainly not the first to twist the language as an argumentative tool.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMaking all-out war saves Americans lives,\u201d General Curtis LeMay said following the Tokyo saturation bombing of March 9\/10, 1945, the firestorm incinerating more than 100,000 civilian lives. Much later, in a moment of clarity, he added, \u201cIf we\u2019d lost the war, we\u2019d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.\u201d Americans have a genius for these prevarications. \u201cThe U.S. bomber is the most humane of all weapons.\u201d \u201cWe must destroy the village in order to save it.\u201d \u201cWork on the dark side, if you will.\u201d \u201cGitmo saves lives.\u201d Down the marbled hallways of CIA headquarters in Langley, you hear echo, \u201cThe lawyers all signed off. So, too, the attorneys general. There\u2019s no time for an ethical debate.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s well to remember that the United States is a signatory of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Its definition begins \u201cTorture is any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession.\u201d Violations of these protocols <em>should<\/em> result in criminal prosecution.<\/p>\n<p>For the torturer, the practice is as much physical as psychological. You promise an agonizing death and deliver blows that fall just short of that finality. Impending attack at Antietam or on the beaches of Normandy is torturous. But the actual ensuing warfare ends with your death or your survival and, mercifully, the terror is over. The threat and the act of torture is true enslavement, as though you\u2019ve signed an irrevocable contract. The horror is that it\u2019s never over, that you are indefinitely detained and cannot leave the killing field.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/02\/10\/dick-cheney-and-the-worship-of-torture\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI knew what I was doing,\u201d Harry Truman said after the atomic bombs he ordered dropped not once but twice on Japanese cities\u2013140,000 people dead in Hiroshima that night; 80,000 three days later in Nagasaki; many thousands more, slowly of radiation sickness. \u201cI have no regrets,\u201d Truman boasted. \u201cUnder the same circumstances, I would do [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-143470","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}