POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JANET DALEY IN THE TELEGRAPH
"David Cameron's repudiation of George Bush's policy on waterboarding is logically flawed, argues Janet Daley. "
Pure logic does not apply to such matters, rather they intimately involve democratic and human values and just plain human decency.
Western society has struggled for centuries to reach the point where we even question such acts. We endured inquisitions and terrors and the rack and countless other ingenious and malevolent engines of human cruelty to reach our enlightened state. Overcoming our nasty chimpanzee origins and creating societies of just laws have been no small feats and represent our greatest achievements.
Crude people like George Bush or sophists like Janet Daley willingly cast aside this advance of immense importance for no good reason.
I remind readers of just a few details Bush’s background. He happily sent scores of prisoners to their deaths by execution in Texas, including a woman whom he mocked in public over her plea for mercy. He said in Chicago, shortly after 9/11, that he had “won the trifecta,” knowing how polls soared for his administration which had been quite unpopular. A boyhood friend told us of one of young George’s great pleasures in life: stuffing lighted firecrackers into frogs and watching them blow up.
George Bush demonstrated in countless ways his lack of genuine regard for ethics, from his drunken abuse of family to his disappearing from his obligations in the Air National Guard, the institution which was his ticket in avoiding Vietnam, a ticket paid for through family influence.
Bush was in the driver's seat for Abu Ghraib, and readers may not know that the worst excesses there have been suppressed. One of the world's foremost investigative reporters, Seymour Hersh, told us that events included the raping of children and killing. Bush also gave us Guantanamo and the entire CIA international torture gulag which includes God-knows–what to this day in places like the secret facilities at Bagram Air Base and the unapproachable Diego Garcia.
Bush thought nothing of the Northern Alliance’s General Dostum taking 3,000 Taleban prisoners in the early days of the conflict in batches out to the dessert in sealed trucks to suffocate while American soldiers stood around picking their noses. He thought nothing of a child soldier of fifteen, who had been shot twice in the back by Americans, being sent to Guantanamo, contrary to all international agreements, to be tortured and kept out of contact with family or lawyers for years.
I remind readers too that George Bush gained office by vote fraud in Florida. He is a man of about as poor a set of ethics as you will find on the planet outside of some police states or prisons.
No, Janet Daley, you support what no decent person can support, an example of almost unparalleled creepiness in the leader of a modern democratic state.
Shame on you: there can never be a defense for torture.
