A Change Ain't Gonna Come: Democrats Openly Embrace Aggression and Torture

Chris Floyd , Empire Burlesque
Friday, 30 November 2007
(UPDATED BELOW.)
It was a remarkable display even by the hideous standards that the Democrats have already set for themselves. Over the past week, the party's leaders have put forward not one but two architects of Bush Regime war crimes as standard-bearers for Democratic policies and principles. In so doing, they have aligned themselves as completely and publicly as possible with the Hitlerian war crime of military aggression in Iraq and the Stalinist filth of deliberate, calculated and brutal torture, as exemplified by (but in no way limited to) the sickening atrocities at Abu Ghraib.
First, the party leadership picked retired General Ricardo Sanchez to give the Democratic response to the president's weekly radio address last Saturday. Then, just three days later, frontrunning presidential candidate Hillary Clinton singled out Colin Powell as one of the personal emissaries she would send out to tell the world that "bipartisan foreign policy is back."
But as these incidents display so nakedly, "bipartisan foreign policy" has never gone away. It has continued to operate smoothly at the highest levels throughout the Bush imperium, greased by the blood money flowing to both parties from the spoils of war (H. Clinton now receives more legalized bribery from military-related industries than any of the Republican candidates), and by their shared vision of armed American hegemony over world affairs. (The latter is well-limned by Arthur Silber here.)
As Amy Goodman notes at Alternet, Sanchez was neck-deep in the blood-flecked slime where Pentagon brass and White House officials devised the torture regimens that were briefly exposed at Abu Ghraib. In addition to urging his troops to "go to the outer limits" in extracting information from the thousands of Iraqis they were sweeping up at random, and ordering prison officials to violate the Geneva Conventions by hiding designated prisoners from the Red Cross, Sanchez gave "detailed orders" for the infliction of carefully calibrated tortures used by CIA-trained, Reagan-backed Latin American tyrannies and death squads in the 1980s. As Alfred McCoy told Goodman:
In September of 2003, General Sanchez issued orders, detailed orders, for expanded interrogation techniques beyond those allowed in the US Army Field Manual 3452, and if you look at those techniques, what he's ordering, in essence, is a combination of self-inflicted pain, stress positions and sensory disorientation. And if you look at the 1963 CIA KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, you look at the 1983 CIA Interrogation Training Manual that they used in Honduras for training Honduran officers in torture and interrogation, and then twenty years later, you look at General Sanchez's 2003 orders, there's a striking continuity across this forty-year span in both the general principles: this total assault on the existential platforms of human identity and existence, OK, and the specific techniques, the way of achieving that, through the attack on these sensory receptors.
There is much more in Goodman's excellent piece, which should be read in full.
LinkHere