Chris Floyd - Home Cooking (Bush is outsourcing torture)

[Dover]

Global Eye

Home Cooking

By Chris Floyd
Published: December 10, 2004

When the devil comes knocking on your front door, looking for a way to spread his evil inside, he won't be sporting horns and a tail. He's going to come dressed as your sweetest dream, clean as a whistle, pious, sincere. He's going to speak your lingo, ape your ways -- and when he opens up his little box of poison, it's going to look like the heaven your mama sang about when she rocked you to sleep in your cradle.

Then one day, when the mind-fog lifts, you see him sitting at the head of the table, the walls of the room smeared with filth, dead bodies swelling on the blood-mucked floor, the still-living victims hog-tied and naked, screaming for mercy as the whipcords strike. He beckons you forward with a welcoming smile. You pause for a moment. It seems so strange: All this horror -- it would have once made you sick, but now it just feels like ... home. You shrug, you grin, you take your place beside him at the feast.


In just this way, while Americans were finishing their Thanksgiving dinners and preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, a series of stories exposed -- once again -- the torture chamber at the heart of their feast: a government gone insane, embracing terror, atrocity and tyranny. Yet there was no public outcry against these desecrations. Few even noticed; fewer still cared.

Last week, the minions of George W. Bush announced, in open court, that he has the power to seize anyone on earth -- even "little old ladies in Switzerland" -- and imprison them forever if he so chooses, The New York Times reports. The minions said that anyone Bush declared "an enemy combatant" -- even if they never took up arms against America, even if they didn't know their actions were related to terrorism in any way -- could be abducted from any nation, friend or foe, or in the Homeland itself, and held indefinitely, "at the president's discretion," stripped of all rights under the U.S. Constitution or the Geneva Conventions.
Assistant Attorney General Brian Boyle said Bush's captives were entitled only to a single hearing, alone before a military tribunal, without legal counsel or access to the evidence against them -- evidence which Boyle cheerfully admitted could be obtained by torture in foreign countries, The Associated Press reports. Overturning centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence, Boyle said there were no restrictions whatsoever on using torture evidence, as long as the president or his military agents arbitrarily decide it is "credible."

Days earlier, The Sunday Times tracked down the "private" planes of CIA front companies that Bush uses to carry victims of his lawless abductions to torture chambers in Jordan, Egypt, Libya and Uzbekistan, where "credible" evidence can be obtained with fists, cattle prods, rape, drugs and starvation....cont'd

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/12/10/120.html

[gumby]

1. Sure do like Floyd's writing.

It's totally gut-wrenching to actually absorb what this country has become. The horror is almost beyond recognition.