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Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Counterpunch
Tuesday, Dec 09, 2008
The US government does not have a monopoly on hypocrisy,
but no other government can match the hypocrisy of the US government.
It is now well documented and known all over the world that the
US government tortured detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo
and that the US government has had people kidnaped and “renditioned,”
that is, transported to third world countries, such as Egypt,
to be tortured.
Also documented and well known is the fact that the US Department
of Justice provided written memos justifying the torture of detainees.
One torture advocate who wrote the DOJ memos that gave the green
light to the Bush regime’s use of torture is John Yoo, a
South Korean immigrant who secured a US Justice Department appointment
and a tenured professorship at the University of California, Berkeley,
Boalt Hall School of Law.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
Members of Berkeley’s city council believe that Yoo should
be charged with war crimes. The US government has charged lesser
offenders than Yoo with war crimes. Yoo helped the DOJ achieve
the Bush regime’s goal of finding a way around the torture
prohibitions of both US statutory law and the Geneva Conventions.
The way around the law that Yoo provided for the sadistic Bush
regime was closed down by the US Supreme Court, which voided Yoo’s
arguments, and Yoo’s torture memo was rescinded by the Department
of Justice. Nevertheless, Yoo’s obvious constitutional incompetence,
which in Yoo’s case is total, has not affected his position
as professor of constitutional law at Berkeley. Can you imagine
the harm Yoo is doing by teaching future cadres of lawyers and
government officials that torture is consistent with the Constitution
and the law of the land? How many of us will suffer from this
ignorant man’s teachings?
Even as the US government was torturing people, the US government
was prosecuting the son of Charles Taylor, the former ruler of
Liberia, for torturing political opponents of his father’s
government. The US government did not employ the Yoo torture memo
to justify Liberia’s use of torture against those who wished
to overthrow the Liberian government or commit terror against
it. The US government’s position is that Liberia’s
government had no right to use torture to defend itself. Only
an “indispensable nation” such as the US has the right
to torture people who are imagined to threaten it.
I use the word “imagined” because approximately 99
percent of the detainees tortured by America were totally innocent
people picked up at random or sold to the Americans by warlords
as “terrorists.” (The US government offered rewards
for terrorists, like the bounty offered for outlaws in the “wild
west.” The result was that warlords in Afghanistan and Pakistan
grabbed whoever was not one of them and sold their captives to
Americans as “terrorists.”)
According to Carrie Johnson, a Washington Post staff writer,
on October 30, 2008, a federal jury in Miami convicted Charles
Taylor’s son, Chuckie, of torture. Chuckie will be sentenced
by the indispensable Americans in January for torture, conspiracy
and firearms violations. He may spend the rest of his life in
an American prison.
While Chuckie’s trial was underway, the Bush regime was
torturing people.
The Washington Post writes that Chuckie’s conviction is
“the first test of an American law that gives prosecutors
the power to bring charges for acts of torture committed in foreign
lands.” In other words, US law against torture applies to
the entire world, to every other country except the United States.
The hubris is unimaginable--no country can torture except the
US.
Anyone else who tortures gets life, or in the case of Saddam
Hussein gets hanged by the neck until dead.
Isn’t it great to be an American! Our laws don’t
apply to us, only to every other nation. This is what it means
to be the moral light of the world, the unipower, the salt of
the earth.
Neither Carrie Johnson nor her editors at the Washington post
see the irony or the paradox. Johnson writes in the Washington
Post that the US prosecutors “accused Taylor of taking part
in atrocities and directing subordinates to torture victims using
. . . electrical devices from 1999 to 2002.” That charge
practically overlaps in time with Bush’s, or Cheney’s,
or Yoo’s, or the DOJ’s, or Rumfeld’s, or whoever’s
direction to subordinates to torture people detained by Americans
at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and in various CIA rendition sites.
By now everyone in the world has seen the photograph of the hooded
Iraqi with electrical wires attached standing on that box in Abu
Ghraib.
If only American laws applied to the American government. Then
the criminals who have been in charge for 8 years could be prosecuted
for their extreme violation of United States laws. But, of course,
the great moral American government is far above the law. American
law only applies to dispensable nations. America is not answerable
to law, not to its own law and not to international law. US attorney
general Michael Mukasey affirmed that the US government is above
all law when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that there
would be no investigation or prosecution of those Bush regime
officials who authorized torture and those who carried out the
sadistic acts.
The American government, the government of the great indispensable
nation, has a free pass. The strong do what they will. The weak
suffer what they must.
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