Republican Torture Laws Will Live in History

By Larisa Alexandrovna, AlterNet. Posted October 2, 2006.

If we learned anything from the Nuremberg trials it is that citizens are responsible for what their government does in their name. The right wing of Congress, which has shed any last vestige of being anything remotely conservative in substance or American in spirit, has, like a deranged peacock, proudly shown the world that it can and did "happen here." The passing of the pro-torture bill is a full handover of everything democratic into the arms of fascism.

Before Bush has even signed his pro-torture, anti-humanity bill into law, his legal framer and torture apologist Alberto Gonzales is already cautioning the judiciary:

"Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is defending President Bush's anti-terrorism tactics in multiple court battles, said Friday that federal judges should not substitute their personal views for the president's judgments in wartime."

Instead of continuing with this farce called checks and balances, why not simply declare the "It has happened here" amendment for the Congress to rubber stamp and the president to tack on to the Constitution as a preemptive measure against dictatorial power?

Something along the lines of:

Congress shall, immediately upon our inauguration, initiate amendments to the Constitution providing (a), that the President shall have the authority to institute and execute all necessary measures for the conduct of the government during this critical epoch; (b), that Congress shall serve only in an advisory capacity, calling to the attention of the President and his aides and Cabinet any needed legislation, but not acting upon same until authorized by the President so to act; and (c), that the Supreme Court shall immediately have removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them to be unconstitutional or by any other judicial action, any or all acts of the President, his duly appointed aides, or Congress.

Our founding fathers are spinning in their graves at the thought of how Bush -- the deranged man-child; Cheney -- the most criminally corrupt government official to have ever been put into office; and Rummy -- a war criminal even before the war in Iraq have together burned the Constitution while the nation watched "Survivor."

Quite simply put, if there were a moment's doubt that this nation was heading for a fascist takeover, then watching the United States Congress make legal that which in WWII the United States heroically fought to make immoral should be the final proof.

The expediency with which the fascists have taken apart democracy in America can only be ascribed to years of practice; from Nixon to Iran Contra, these madmen should have been imprisoned, not pardoned. But as they attacked and abused the nation anew and pushed the envelope further, they were always pardoned. Now what is there to stop this madness, after no one is left standing in the way of the criminal gang running the country like the Mafia?

So, while rushing to give unprecedented power to a man who has already abused the limited power that he had, the latest indignity is an international incident; and its victims are not only Iraqis, but every citizen of every nation being held or who will be held in detainment facilities across the globe, tortured, raped, and even murdered at the pleasure of a criminally insane executive and his henchmen, whom he bought or threatened into selling their souls.

The Last Nail by the Numbers:

Speaking in abstractions and using politically loaded terms like "terrorist" does this country little service and shields the truth from the hard facts of actual bodies.

I reported last November that since the start of U.S. aggressions in Afghanistan and Iraq, roughly 70 thousand men, women, and children had been detained and in many cases tortured. Of the 35,000 detained in Iraq, only 638, or roughly 2 percent, were ever tried for any crime. The rest were either quietly let go or died in custody.

A document leaked to me a year ago from sources with a conscience at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) indicated that this total of 35,000 does not even represent the full count of people detained, nor does it address every single U.S. facility around the world or the additional extraordinary renditions we have engaged in.

Does anyone actually think that any Republican who voted for the pro-torture, pro-rape, pro-mutilation bill has actually looked at the numbers, or better still, talked to the living victims? Somehow I think that the closest these dilettantes got to the horror of it all was the lemon chicken lunch they sat down to while visiting the "public" area of Gitmo.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said recently, "Well, Alan, I think it really does reflect that we are in an age and an era post-9/11, where we're talking about a new sort of opponent, a new sort of the war criminal, somebody who right now we call then enemy combatants, but the sort of people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who's down in Guantanamo Bay now, who allegedly and likely did mastermind the plot that killed 3,000 Americans."

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