The Torture Presidency. posted by Richard Seymour

If you ask me, it has become less okay to speak of the United States government embarking on 'humanitarianism' overseas this past year. In particular, it has become an acute embarrassment as well as a downright affront to hear anyone from the present US administration refer to another regime's use of torture, or military aggression: the outrage registers distinctly hollow. It would take a little less than genius and more than Bush to collate the various instances where the US President has perorated in his ham actor way on how Saddam tortured his own people. Such declamations have usually been punctuated by lengthy pauses, which are either for dramatic effect or to allow some unseen prompt-artist to feed Bush his next line.

After Abu Ghraib, these displays grew inflamed, indignant, then slowly petered out. Best not to raise the topic at all. Indeed, why bother when it is becoming ludicrously apparent that torture is being used as a matter of policy by the Bush administration? Not just in Iraq, but also in Guantanamo ? Yes, yes, I know - all the people we have in Guantanamo Bay are awful foreign types with beards and such. Moazzam Begg can scream about torture and murder, but he is one of Them after all.

Torture is not a new tool of the American state. CIA training manuals released in the 1980s revealed a history of the use of various kinds of torture, from severe physical torture to more subtle methods - the point being in all cases to break the subject's sense of identity, remove all aspects of self that would maintain resistance. Often, these methods were used by CIA employees like the Contras in Nicaragua; one has to assume they were used by the CIA themselves. Indeed, of the crimes one can accuse the US government of historically, torture might be the least among them. Terrorism, bombings, assassination - every trick in the armoury of political gangsters has been deployed, killing millions. So, why should it be that the Bush presidency is the first to get notoriety for the use of torture under its command?

Obviously, in large part because of the very poor, derisory attempts at concealment, probably reflecting the neoconservatives' contemptuous attitude toward such "quaint" relics as the Geneva convention. In the past, torture was the dark underside of the pristine defense of 'democracy' that the US projected to the world. Since 9/11, it has been openly discussed by liberal commentators as a reasonable option (the Dershowitz gambit: let's legalise it so at least no one tortures excessively), and promoted by some right-wing shock jocks. Further, there is plenty of evidence that the American right consider concerns for 'human rights' to be supplanted by 'security' demands. They feel they have carte blanche to torture 'terrorists', although they must never say so in public. (Indeed, the American people must be stuffed so full of mythology about defending democracy and freedom that they feel like Thanksgiving never stops. Leo Strauss is alive, if not quite breathing).

However, since they have allowed some asshole to take pictures of their torture of prisoners in Iraq, the cat is firmly out of the bag. The news have been able to, and rather obliged to, cover these allegations where they would have paused to even glance at previous such claims. For those anxious to believe in the redeeming qualities of US imperial power, the torture accusations have left a murky stain on the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention. It has become so infected and contaminated that future administrations will be obliged to handle it with care and trepidation. The Bush Presidency will go down as the era in which it became a mainstream perception to view US Presidents as criminals, racketeers and torturers.

Question: why does an American human rights organisation have to seek the help of Germany to place Rumsfeld in the dock?